If New York is the cultural capital of America, and Brooklyn is the cultural capital of New York, then Brooklyn is the cultural capital of America. Such is a high bar to reach, but as I walked in Brooklyn for the first time, it did feel somewhat accurate: the bars, cafes, restaurants, elegant townhouses with a chic but scruffy vibe, fashionably looking men and women walking five dogs simultaneously with a cigar in hand, and cute football fields for small kids to play after school and parents to socialize with other parents. For one second, I was almost verging to move here.
I have Ian Johnson to thank for the serendipitous visits to Brooklyn. He was renting a friend’s place, a magnificent multi-story brownstone house that looks a hundred years old on the outside and five hundred on the inside. Walking up the creaky wooden staircase, we chatted on the second floor where the gigantic room with high ceilings stretched between a grand piano room, a drawing room and a small living room, where we sat. As mid-afternoon light shone through the window, I couldn’t help but think back to my Oxford days when my dons used to sit in a room like this to talk about subjects like ours. Except this is in New York, and Ian is infinitely more engaging in his prose than Oxford dons.
You may already know of Ian, but here’s a quick bio nonetheless. Ian Johnson is a Pulitzer-winning journalist and writer. He is the author of several major books on Chinese civil society and religion, including “Wild Grass”, “Souls of China” and “Sparks”. He has written for Wall Street Journal, New York Times, New York Review of Books and other renowned publications, and won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting of the Falun Gong movement between 2000 and 2001. And as if this is not impressive already, he is also a Neiman Fellow, founded the China Unofficial Archives, a digital effort to preserve banned books, films, magazines, and documents in China, and is writing a new book on religion in China.
Today, I bring you an excerpt from my oral history conversations with Ian. The 80s and 90s saw China’s spiritual revival as the society recovered from the ruins of Maoism. Temples, churches, and mosques were rebuilt, and old religions rejuvenated into new forms. This was also the period of Falun Gong, a remarkable phenomenon of belief, organisation, vitality, creativity, manipulation, repression and brutality. Falun Gong has been in the news lately, though for all the wrong reasons. Still, lucky for us, Ian is here to guide our sneak-peek of history, travel on the time machine to the spiritual revival of China, and the rise (and fall) of Falun Gong as he saw it.
Hope you will enjoy!
Leo
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China’s qigong fever
You’ve written a lot about religion in China, including your book “The Souls of China.” When you returned to China as a reporter in the mid-‘90s, what was your impression of religious life back then?
This was a time when Chinese people were really searching for something. The problem for China was that the Mao era was a failure, obviously. It had not brought prosperity and China was as poor in the late 1970s as it had been 30 years earlier. Maoism was discredited. The Great Leap Forward didn’t lead to great industrial output and just led to famine. Mao had died. All of these magical things didn’t happen. Anybody who experienced that period, I think, would have been let down.
And the overall ideal of communism was discredited because the party had flip-flopped. Mao was the great guy, and then they did a 180-degree turn on economic policies and embraced a no-holds-barred form of capitalism that was harsh on a lot of people.
It wasn’t socialism, because socialism would have some safety net for the industrial workers who were losing their jobs in the 1990s, or for farmers. Later the party put money into rural areas, but back then there was nothing, and almost no rural clinics. A lot of the stuff that, though rudimentary, had existed in the Mao era, all collapsed in the ‘80s and ‘90s with the communes and the infrastructure around it. So people felt that they weren’t part of the beneficiaries but sufferers of this new era. That probably drove them to religious feelings and religiosity.
I was probably sympathetic to Falun Gong because I thought,
“No matter how nutty they are, they’re not that unusual in Chinese history and they certainly don’t deserve to be attacked by the police.”
It was an interesting free-for-all time in China because the party’s credibility had suffered and it was trying to rebuild itself. One of these constant themes the party said over and over again is party-building — jiandang. Back then they really had to rebuild the party because the party had been destroyed by the Mao era. So it wasn’t offering much. It was not very present.
And people were doing a lot of interesting-slash-crazy things, like qigong. I think it was a time — even though Tiananmen had happened, and it was clear there was going to be no political reform — many things in society were tolerated by the government.
You’re well-known for your reporting on Falun Gong. How did you first become interested in Chinese religion?
I’ve always been interested in religion. In the 1990s, I thought I was going to write a book on Daoism in China. Daoism is the only indigenous religion in China, and I had these mistaken ideas — for example, I thought of Daoism like the Rosetta Stone for Chinese culture, because things like the five elements, the taiji, and the yin yang all come from Daoism. But that actually is not exactly accurate.
I knew many religious scholars. In the 1990s, I was a member of the Association of Asian Studies. They would have this big conference every year and I would get a catalog of the panels sent to me in Beijing. I would go through it, see what people had presented and I’d email them, “Can I have a copy of your paper?” Then I would interview them on the phone. I was talking to people like David Ownby — he wrote a book on Chinese folk religion — and Barend Ter Haar, a professor at Leiden at the time. So I had knowledge of the cutting edge academic work on religion.
When Falun Gong came along, many people, frankly, bought the government description of it as a cult. I knew from religious studies that cult itself is just a derogatory term. It doesn’t mean anything. You can’t define a cult in any meaningful way. The government was just using this as a way to attack Falun Gong. When you look at Falun Gong, it’s a very typical Chinese folk religion that takes elements of Buddhism and Daoism and other stuff and mixes it all together into this mishmash.
I was sympathetic to Falun Gong. I thought, “No matter how nutty they are, they’re not that unusual in Chinese history and they certainly don’t deserve to be attacked by the police.”
I did a story for the Baltimore Sun on qigong practitioners. I met these people who would take a book and said, “I’m going to read the book with my ear.” Or they would stick their finger in an electrical socket and conduct electricity. Really crazy stuff.
Falun Gong came up during a period of spiritual revival in China. Daoist temples, Buddhist temples, Christianity and Islam all came back from the ruins of Chinese communism. Did you notice changes to people’s spiritual life?
In the 1980s, Beijing had one Daoist temple, two Buddhist temples, two Protestant churches, a couple of mosques — official ones. This is all you could see. They seemed like museums to these dead religions. I didn’t realise there was this religious revival already taking place at that time, and that the government had actually given it a blessing by issuing this document in 1982, called Document 19, which explicitly allowed unofficial religious sites and practitioners to thrive.
What also wasn’t apparent then was the big qigong movement that was taking off. But by the 1990s, it was hard to miss. I did a story for the Baltimore Sun on qigong practitioners. I met these people who would take a book and said, “I’m going to read the book with my ear.” Or they would stick their finger in an electrical socket and conduct electricity. Really crazy stuff. I met this woman at this temple in Beijing. She could do all kinds of stuff. She had a big following. So it was clear that there were people searching for things.
Then I encountered Brock Silvers, a business person in China at the time and still a friend of mine. He started this U.S.-registered charity called the Daoist Restoration Society. When I was traveling around China for the Baltimore Sun or the Wall Street Journal, he had me do some reconnaissance work for him. He wanted to find worthy temples to help rebuild. Daoism is China’s indigenous religion, but it’s also the weakest, and the temples were the most destroyed in the Mao era.
Senior leaders and very influential people like Qian Xueseng, the father of China’s rocket program, were big supporters of qigong. This was considered a kind of Chinese science.
I saw that many of these temples were being rebuilt already. The amount of money that Brock had at his disposal was tens of thousands of dollars, which initially seemed like a lot of money in China. But by the end of the ‘90s that’s like nothing. Chinese entrepreneurs had so much money and were pumping it into temples. That showed there was a spiritual revival going on in China.
And the spiritual revival was not just grassroots but also official. The Communist Party seemed to embrace it as part of their patriotic education campaign. I think you interviewed this fortune teller who was doing qigong therapy for top Chinese communist cadres.
This is something people nowadays forget. Senior leaders and very influential people like Qian Xueseng, the father of China’s rocket program, were big supporters of qigong. This was considered a kind of Chinese science.
In China, under the CCP, there has often been this search for shortcuts to modernization. In some ways the Great Leap Forward was like that. “If we all just do this crazy thing, we’ll catch up with England and the United States in 20 years and we won’t have to do the hard work of modernizing the way other countries have done.”
Qigong was a similar thing. It was studied at Tsinghua University. They had research projects, trying to find out if qi could be emitted and shot across the room out of your hand.
In some ways they were much more impressive than Tiananmen, because Tiananmen was crushed in just a couple months. But these guys continued on for more than a year. Not with hundreds of thousands of people, but they kept coming back.
Chasing the Falun Gong beat in Beijing and around China
Do you remember when you first encountered qigong and Falun Gong?
That must have been around ‘95. Falun Gong were one of these qigong groups in parks. When I did that article for the Baltimore Sun, they weren’t that big.
I was interested in the group. When they took off, I was already working at the Wall Street Journal and they had a correspondent, Craig Smith, who had interviewed [Falun Gong founder and leader] Li Hongzhi when the protests started and was planning a cover story. Then, Craig left for The New York Times. I immediately said, “I really want to work on the story.”
The story actually seemed over at that time — they had their protests, which had been crushed. Falun Gong had been banned, and there wouldn’t be too much more to it. But the protests just continued for month after month, day after day.
In some ways they were much more impressive than Tiananmen, because Tiananmen was crushed in just a couple months. But these guys continued on for more than a year. Not with hundreds of thousands of people, but they kept coming back. So I wrote about that, began to investigate what had happened and then looked at the history of qigong and how Falun Gong had grown out of that.
And I should probably mention that I had a research assistant at the Wall Street Journal, Peter Hessler, who later became the foremost narrative nonfiction writer on China.
One thing I noticed about your stories of Falun Gong, not just in “Wild Grass” but also your reporting for the Wall Street Journal, is how much the articles put the reader right in the middle of the action. You’re following this intermediary, Brother Li, who’s connecting all the other Falun Gong members from around China when they come to Beijing. Was it difficult to get access to the group for your reporting?
Working at the Wall Street Journal back then was a huge part of my journalistic training. At the time, the Wall Street Journal had this unusual format where they ran two long pieces on the front page every day. They had a page-one editing staff of five or six people and they were rigorous. They would never put anything on the front page that had run anywhere else.
And they also insisted that you have live action in the story. You had to follow the best practices of narrative nonfiction — it’s all 100 percent factual, but you use some of the techniques of fiction in the sense of scenes, characters, and things like that. They even had training sessions on how to do this. They got rid of all that after Murdoch took over in the late 2000s.
And I should probably mention that I had a research assistant at the Wall Street Journal, Peter Hessler, who later became the foremost narrative nonfiction writer on China. He was a student of John McPhee, at Princeton, who is the guru of narrative nonfiction writing. Through Peter, I got to know about McPhee and read his books. We talked a lot about how to write and structure articles.
One day, just before I was setting off back to the United States on a trip, he said, “I’ve written a memoir about being in China.” And I’m like, “Oh God, everybody’s writing books on China. Even my news assistant has written a book on China.” I took the manuscript with me on the airplane. This is “River Town,” which is probably the best-selling nonfiction book on China. I’m reading it like, “Holy shit, this is really good.”
And he became my best editor, and probably my most important mentor for writing along with my editor at the Wall Street Journal, Marcus Broccoli, who was a charismatic, inspiring editor.
When the whole Falun Gong thing hit — especially in 2000, when I found the story of the woman whose mother had been killed in police custody — the foreign editor at the time, John Bussey, said, “Don’t worry about anything else, just focus on doing this, and think of other stories you want to write.”
I structured a series of five or six long articles that I wrote throughout the year. Those became the main articles that we submitted for the Pulitzer. I tried to think thematically about what Falun Gong meant.
And what did it mean?
I think it showed a few different things. One is that civil society structures in China were not properly developed. There were many people who were critical of and objected to Falun Gong, but they were not allowed to talk about it. Falun Gong was banned because it was too sensitive. The necessary public discussion never took place in China.
The government did what it does with sensitive issues: it just bans the discussion of it. Only when something explodes does the party deal with it. This is something the CCP has done consistently in its history. And I think Falun Gong is a good case study. That’s why I did that one article profiling the atheist scientists and the Buddhists who both objected to Falun Gong but were not allowed to talk about it.
And the Falun Gong movement shows how police violence can happen in China through this method of pushing responsibility down to the lower level. The official government line is to stop the protests. Then they basically get all the people in a room and they just tell everybody, “Your province is sending too many protesters, fix it.” And then they get back to, say, Shandong Province, and in Jinan they have a meeting of all the county chiefs: “Why are so many people coming from your counties?” And then their solution is to set up these black jails where they beat people.
And it’s not just, “Fix it.” It’s, “You fix it or your salary gets deducted for every single Falun Gong member that goes to Beijing.”
Right, it’s a clearly destructive system that doesn’t look at why the people might have objected or find some solution.
In hindsight, I could have been harder on Falun Gong, especially on Li Hongzhi. I didn’t really emphasize Li Hongzhi’s culpability in not discouraging the people from protesting. On the one hand, you could say, it’s not his responsibility. At the end of the day, it’s the Communist Party that is beating people to death.
But I think, in that situation, he could have told his followers: “You don’t need to go protest. You can stay at home. It’s okay. Don’t get yourself in trouble. Don’t feel the obligation to go to Tiananmen Square.” But he never issued anything like that. So that’s something, when I reflect on it later, I didn’t write about.
Many Falun Gong adherents — I’m generalizing — had the profile of a poorly educated older person who had lost their job because of the economic reforms and who needed something to cling on to, and maybe also because of this situation didn’t have good medical coverage. They saw in Falun Gong a variety of things: Maybe free medical care, but also a sense of camaraderie that they had lost when they left their danwei job. Other people saw moral certitude.
Did you ever meet Li Hongzhi in person?
No. He never agreed to an interview. Even though at the time I was writing a lot about Falun Gong victims and the Falun Gong people were saying, “He’ll definitely meet you.” And they kept saying stuff like, “Go to New Jersey and he’ll have an event maybe in New York or in Boston.” I was supposed to follow this guy around North America and maybe one day he’ll meet me. So I was like, “Forget it.”
Could you take us through the process of writing one of your Falun Gong stories?
Initially, I wanted to find Falun Gong victims, people who were being arrested. We didn’t know much about people beaten to death. There was this Falun Gong information center and some people who were active in Hong Kong and elsewhere. Through them I got a hold of people back in China who could put me in touch.
There was one guy at Tsinghua University, Yu Chao — it’s okay to say his name because he’s now living in the United States. He later went to jail for nearly 10 years for his activism. He set up an encrypted email program that we used called PGP, Pretty Good Privacy.
That’s how you could find out about people in different provinces. There was this report of a woman who got beaten to death that I got from one of the practitioners, a very detailed letter that had been written about the case. I was able to independently talk to other people who’d been in the prison cell with her, knew her directly, or had heard about her.
That’s Ms. Zhang’s mother, right? Chen Zixiu.
Yeah. Many Falun Gong adherents — I’m generalizing — had the profile of a poorly educated older person who had lost their job because of the economic reforms and who needed something to cling on to, and maybe also because of this situation didn’t have good medical coverage. They saw in Falun Gong a variety of things: Maybe free medical care, but also a sense of camaraderie that they had lost when they left their danwei job. Other people saw moral certitude.
Falun Gong might come across as a little crazy if you’re not familiar with Chinese religious life. But throughout Chinese history most folk religion — which is certainly what most people practiced in traditional China — was an amalgam of Buddhism, Daoism, and local practices.
And spiritual orientation. “After communism is dead, what are we supposed to believe in?”
I was able to talk to people familiar with the case and didn’t know each other. I feel pretty confident that these reports were accurate and were independently verified, but without the police reports and seeing inside the government files, we will probably never know 100 percent sure what exactly happened. I talked to the daughter. She had a lot of details. Then I was able to recount what had happened.
And what was the writing process like? How did you turn it into a feature story?
You want to keep a focus on the person. Usually you want to start out with her, and then back off a little bit and give the background to why it matters.
I think the bigger context was, this is a surprisingly sustained protest movement that was supposed to die out, but somehow has continued. Are they all fanatical brainwashed zombies like the government says, or is there some reason why they’re going there? I was empathetic to them because other religious groups have similar histories of protesting and persecution.
The government kept trying to say Falun Gong was an evil cult. But there was no evidence that it was a cult, except for the fact that Li Hongzhi was still alive. Perhaps that made it a cult in the sense that he was a quasi-religious figure who still existed, as opposed to a religious figure who was dead, like Jesus or Muhammad. But I didn’t think that made it any worse. He wasn’t telling people to commit suicide. What they were doing was peacefully protesting. They were a quasi-religious group that was trying to exercise its rights. It wasn’t anything crazy.
I was somewhat empathetic to Falun Gong because I was familiar with Daoism and folk religion and folk religious practices, I could see in Falun Gong clear parallels to religious movements in China in the past. Falun Gong might come across as a little crazy if you’re not familiar with Chinese religious life. But throughout Chinese history most folk religion — which is certainly what most people practiced in traditional China — was an amalgam of Buddhism, Daoism, and local practices. That’s the way a lot of new religions happen. They steal stuff from other religions.
In the Mao era, qigong existed for a little while, but then became discredited as a ‘feudal superstition’ and was banned. It came back in the 1980s. And as you said, because it was not a religion, they could practice in a park. They could hand out flyers and video cassettes of Master Li teaching.
One thing that I find quite interesting about Falun Gong is how either they themselves or the party was trying to pivot their position from a religion into saying qigong was just a form of science. And Falun Gong was tolerated not as one of the major religions, but as a scientific practice. They could hold gatherings in huge stadiums in a way that official religions couldn’t.
Exactly. The situation with religions in China was that there were only five official religions: Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, and then Christianity for administrative purposes is considered two religions, Catholic and Protestant. Anything else is illegal. Even Judaism or Hinduism is not legally allowed to be practiced in China.
The mentality of Falun Gong followers growing up in China was that they probably never even conceived of starting a new religion, because it was so impossible. Instead, when they started qigong, which is a type of martial art. Qigong was approved as a type of Chinese medicine along with acupuncture, tuina, herbal medicine. Qigong, the term itself, was a neologism that was started in the 1940s by Party people who had seen the ability of qigong to cure soldiers at the war front. This is all well recounted by David Palmer in his book, “Qigong Fever.”
In the Mao era, qigong existed for a little while, but then became discredited as a ‘feudal superstition’ and was banned. It came back in the 1980s. And as you said, because it was not a religion, they could practice in a park. They could hand out flyers and video cassettes of Master Li teaching. It would be impossible for a Buddhist to go to a park and say, “Hey, do Buddhist meditation.” You can’t proselytize.
There were many qigong groups. Falun Gong was just the best organized. It was something that the government had actually tolerated for years. And you could see why Falun Gong did what it did. It thought like the Communist Party. It realized it was potentially in a life-and-death struggle. The reason they protested was because, in their understanding, once you’re criticized in the media, you are dead. There was a criticism of them by Beijing Television, so they protested outside of BTV. And then BTV editors came out and apologized: “Sorry, we’ll never show that thing again. And here’s some boxed lunches for everybody. Please go home.” Any criticism you have to fight to the death. So it then launched this protest movement.
Do you have any regrets about your reporting on Falun Gong?
I think at that time, my reporting wasn’t that sophisticated. When I was reporting on Falun Gong, I was doing what a newspaper journalist is supposed to do and report on grave violations of human rights that I was able to document. Journalists can’t also become ethnographers. You can’t expect a commercial newspaper to make money if it prints a 5,000-word ethnographic article on the rise of Daoism in Shanxi Province.
Winning the Pulitzer
For a second I had this weird epiphany as you spoke, that it seems you, a veteran journalist for a bunch of other renowned publications, seem to be in agreement with the Chinese Communist Party that Western media reports on China are biased.
Listen, I like newspapers. They have a certain role in society. It does what it does, but it can’t do other things. And this is why I quit daily journalism in 2010. As much I liked it and learned from it, there are limitations. It doesn’t help your writing, doesn’t help your ability to conceive of stories, to conceive of books, to be stuck in the media all the time.
The media do some pretty good stuff for sure, especially when they’re motivated like in the case of Falun Gong. Let’s face it: The Wall Street Journal gave me so much space because they could smell a Pulitzer. In April I wrote the story on Chen Zixiu. They know how the Pulitzer game is played. They could say, “Ah, this is enough time in the calendar year. We’ve still got eight months left for Ian to do a bunch of stories.”
They poured resources by allowing me to do what I wanted to do for the rest of the year, just focusing on that story. When the media have those big prize packages, they’ll pour a ton of resources into something, but a lot of the time they don’t.
And how did the Pulitzer work? How did you get it?
The Pulitzer is a prize which is in some ways totally overrated. The Pulitzer is the best article in U.S. media. Somehow it’s got this outsized role as if it’s an international award, but it’s not.
There are only a few newspapers that cover the world seriously. So if you’re working overseas, there’s only a few newspapers that are going to win Pulitzers every year in international reporting. And I was at one of them, the Wall Street Journal. Even back when these regional newspapers had foreign bureaus, you only had a few that could put the resources into a big story. Even nowadays, the L.A. Times and Washington Post don’t have the resources anymore to really compete.
What they want to see is an article that was organically researched, not a sort of project like, “Let’s do a story on water in China” and then you have five big articles that appear throughout the year. You can win a Pulitzer like that. Joe Kahn and Jim Yardley did a series every year on rule of law in China, and the environment in China, and something else in China, until they finally won a Pulitzer Prize in ‘06. Clearly the Times was just gunning for a Pulitzer with that.
They don’t like to see stories that all appear in the second half of December. Because that’s when they know, “Oh, we’re crashing all this stuff out before the end of the year so we can get to the Pulitzer.” So that was the luck of this appearing in April.
And then what the Pulitzer also wants to see — not so much for international reporting, but still ideally — is some impact. You wrote the article and then something changed. Then they want to see great daily news reporting, but they also want to see some step-back features. Mine had that. I had people dying, daily news articles, and then these five big articles that analyzed the broader trends.
That’s how that worked and mine fit right into that. Probably it was also — I have to say — lucky because there was no big story of the year. Fortunate for me, 2000 was not a big news year. If I had done my thing in 2001 I would never have won. Because, of course, the Pulitzer of that year went to something related to 9/11.
It was a nice recognition for work that I’m still proud and happy of, but you have to be realistic about why you won and what it means.
I would never have thought I would win a Pulitzer Prize because I was never interested in covering wars and conflict, and I thought China would never be that hot of a topic. But the following decade, China became super hot. And that was when a couple of Pulitzers were won — one by the Times, one by the Wall Street Journal — simply based on the fact that China was the hottest story in the 2000s.
It’s ironic because I missed it, I missed the China fever years. I left in 2001 even before I won the Pulitzer. People thought I was expelled because of my Falun Gong coverage. It’s not true, I was going to leave anyway.
Recommended Readings
Ian Johnson, 2004, Wild Grass, Pantheon
Ian Johnson, 2017, Souls of China, Knopf Doubleday
Ian Johnson, 2023, Sparks, Oxford University Press
David Ownby, 1996, Brotherhoods and Secret Societies in Early and Mid-Qing China, Standford Universit
David Ownby, 2008, Falun Gong and the Future of China, Oxford University Press
David A. Palmer, 2007, Qigong Fever, Columbia University Press
About us
The Peking Hotel podcast and newsletter are digital publications in which Liu He interviews China specialists about their first-hand experiences and observations from decades past. The project grew out of Liu’s research at Hoover Institution collecting oral history of China experts living in the U.S. Their stories are a reminder of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming.
We also have a Chinese-language Substack. We hope to publish more conversations like this one, so stay tuned!
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