Contextualizing a Crackdown: Voegelin on China’s Falun Gong

Abstract

While most analyses of China’s campaign against the Falun Gong religious movement focus on the institutional reasons underpinning the July 1999 crackdown, we explore the moral reasoning behind the state’s actions. Applying a framework initially developed by Austrian thinker Eric Voegelin, we argue that Falun Gong invoked the ire of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on account of its theistic philosophy, which focused on transcendence of the secular world as the ultimate and highest purpose of human existence, and which is inherently in tension with the “gnosticism” of the CCP. We then employ this notion of binary moral systems to explore in greater detail two rival understandings of social progress, as well as the Party’s responses to the moral basis of Falun Gong.