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Sect Is Dividing China's Leadership

As Crackdown Intensifies, Beijing Cites Arrests of 111 in Falun Gong

More than 1,000 other adherents have been detained in Beijing for protesting the crackdown against the sect, according to the spokesman, Li Bing, speaking for the State Council, China's cabinet. Those followers were subjected to government lectures about the evils of Falun Gong, and most were then sent to their home provinces. But most were from nearby provinces, he said, and as many as 60 percent returned to Beijing even after being sent home.

Mr. Li also said that there had been deaths of Falun Gong practitioners while they were under official supervision, but asserted that they had not died at the hands of the authorities.

Meanwhile, a human rights group, the Information Center of Human Rights and Democratic Movement in China, says that in one Chinese province alone - Hebei, a northern province bordering Beijing - at least 500 people have been sent without trial to labor camps for being members of Falun Gong.

The stark numbers illustrate that the crackdown against Falun Gong is by far the biggest in China since soldiers crushed student-led democracy demonstrations in Beijing in June 1989. The government has branded Falun Gong ''dangerous'' and ''evil'' and has mobilized thousands of security personnel and the state-run press to smash the group. Officials have called the movement the gravest threat to stability in the 50 years of Communist China's history.

The crackdown was undertaken to demonstrate and solidify the power of the Chinese leadership. But the longer the campaign goes on, and the more difficulty China's authorities have in corralling Falun Gong practitioners, the more China's rulers are exposing their own weaknesses, insecurities and Byzantine machinations to audiences in China and abroad.

The campaign has revealed dissent at the top echelons of power, poking holes in the image of China's leadership as united and pragmatic. Communist Party sources said that the standing committee of the Politburo did not unanimously endorse the crackdown and that President Jiang Zemin alone decided that Falun Gong must be eliminated.

In China's Internet chat rooms and on the streets, Mr. Jiang has been subject to intense criticism for weak leadership. He is viewed as being soft on Taiwan and the United States.

Some observers say they believe Mr. Jiang picked what he thought was an easy target - Falun Gong and its U.S.-based leader, Li Hongzhi - to get tough, and his resolve was only strengthened when he learned that people close to him were following the group's practices. It was Mr. Jiang who ordered that Falun Gong be branded a ''cult,'' and then demanded that a law be passed banning cults, a party source said.

''This obviously is very personal for Jiang,'' one party official said. ''He wants this organization crushed.''

Mr. Jiang's concern over Falun Gong runs so deep that during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in New Zealand in September, he handed out a book attacking the group to many of the participants at the meeting, including President Bill Clinton. The move stunned diplomats, reinforcing concerns that party leaders have become fundamentally divorced from everyday reality and that Mr. Jiang is either unwilling or unable to engage in substantive discussions with Western leaders.

''This guy actually thought we needed to know about this stuff,'' said one Western diplomat.

The crackdown has also revealed splits within China's security services. On April 25, more than 10,000 Falun Gong followers surrounded the Communist Party headquarters in Beijing to demand that their organization be granted legal status. Many of the protesters came from Tianjin, 140 kilometers (90 miles) to the east, where they had demonstrated against a magazine that had published an article critical of Falun Gong.

The Beijing demonstration was initially portrayed as a major lapse in China's security web, and it has been used by the party as a primary justification for the crackdown. The Chinese press revealed that Li Hongzhi was in Beijing around the time of the demonstration and accused him of organizing it.

But in recent interviews, Falun Gong participants have said that the police in Tianjin actively encouraged the group to take its protest to Beijing.

''They didn't go so far as to provide buses, but they advised us that Beijing was the place to make our voices heard,'' said an organizer.

The government's initial response to the April protest was measured, but in July the group was banned and its materials confiscated and burned. The government has steadily increased its rhetoric, publishing frequent editorials against Falun Gong in the state-run media and announcing arrests of group members.

The Communist Party was founded on the idea that China is surrounded by enemies on all sides who are plotting to destroy it. Only the party can save China from a continuous series of crises, its logic goes. In order to justify this sense of unending crisis, the party needs to keep China in a ''constant fire drill,'' according to one Western diplomat. That is Falun Gong's purpose now.

The problem is that Falun Gong does not fit the model of an enemy of the state. For one, the crackdown has ''succeeded in elevating Li Hongzhi to a very high position,'' said Sima Nan, a documentary filmmaker and longtime critic of China's varied religious sects. ''Average people look at him now and say, 'Wow, this guy must really be important.' This not the right way to get rid of this problem.''

The campaign has also hastened the sense among ordinary citizens that the Communist Party is increasingly alienated from mainstream China.

''What are these people doing?'' said a Chinese reporter who has been forced to cover the crackdown for a mainstream newspaper. ''It just shows you that the main source of instability in China is the Communist Party.''

For the average Chinese, there is a growing sense of sympathy for the Falun Gong practitioners who for the last month have engaged in surreal but peaceful protests.

Western scholars and Chinese analysts have spent weeks pontificating about the significance of the campaign. Falun Gong grew to its estimated membership of 10 million people, they said, because many Chinese, including party members, are currently living in a moral vacuum. The party decided to crush Falun Gong because it cannot tolerate an organization separate from the party's control.

But all of these explanations avoid the core paradox of the crackdown. And that is the fact that the Communist Party of China has mobilized thousands of security personnel to go after an organization with little political program, comprised mostly of laid-off workers and retired Communists. It has staked its prestige on its ability to cart elderly women off in police vans.