WULAI, TAIWAN

Issue cover-dated December 26, 2002

[Clearwisdom editor's note: It is not confirmed who intercepted the satellite's signals and whether that was Falun Gong practitioners.]

WHEN BEIJING CHARGED in September that Falun Gong followers had launched an audacious act of satellite sabotage from a spot near this popular holiday town just south of Taipei, police searched the nearby verdant, craggy peaks for evidence.

Mainland China, which banned the Falun Gong in 1999 [...], said followers on Taiwan hacked into the Chinese state-owned satellite, known as Sinosat, by beaming signals at it. Beijing government broadcasts to millions of rural residents were disrupted and, in some cases, were replaced by pro-Falun Gong messages and images.

Taiwan's government said the charge that the signals came from the island was far-fetched. But investigators from the Directorate General of Telecommunications and police swept the hills around Wulai with signal-finding equipment anyway. The coordinates given by Beijing as the source of the signals lay near the top of a steeply rising summit, unreachable by car. The search came up empty. "We looked for days, but we didn't find anything," says a local policeman.

Whether that means there was nothing to China's allegations may never be known. Taiwan government investigators made fruitless searches in other areas--some lasting days--after China made similar accusations in June and July. Satellite engineers say it would be nearly impossible to carry the necessary transmission equipment on a difficult mountain hike, but China's coordinates could easily be off by dozens of kilometres. Falun Gong practitioners in China have disrupted cable TV signals there. While followers in Taiwan say they know nothing about the sabotage, they don't rule out that some of their fellow supporters could be behind it.

A UNION OF BEIJING'S PET HATES

The affair highlights the deep gulf between Beijing's hostile view of Falun Gong and the group's far more mundane existence in Taiwan. And, by extension, it underscores the stark differences that still separate the two societies on either side of the Taiwan Strait--one where religion and spirituality are co-opted or quashed by suspicious rulers and the other home to a flourishing religious plurality embraced, and even encouraged, by the government. "In Taiwan, Falun Gong is just one of many religious and spiritual groups. They get the protection of the government," says Cheng Chih-ming, a religion professor at Fu Jen Catholic University who has researched Falun Gong's history in China and Taiwan.

[...] But contrary to its [persecuted status in Mainland China], Falun Gong isn't known for agitating in Taiwan. Instead, in what is the last part of greater China where it can function completely unhindered, Falun Gong thrives visibly but quietly--raising the unanswerable question of whether it might have done so in China, too, had it been ignored by the authorities from the start. "As far as I can tell there is no political aspect to them in Taiwan, and I've been looking," says one Western diplomat.

Started in 1992 [...], The group maintains it is apolitical, but its rapidly growing popularity unnerved the Chinese government, and an April 1999 protest in Beijing against official criticism prompted authorities to ban the group three months later.

The mainland has since featured an unstinting campaign of arrests and propaganda that portrays Falun Gong as a malicious group that coerces members to commit illegal acts. In Hong Kong and Macau, some practitioners have been detained or prevented from demonstrating, though Falun Gong is not banned. Followers responded to moves against them with bold protests that gained a worldwide reputation.

Such defiance is hard to reconcile with Falun Gong's peaceful life in Taiwan. Even before the end of martial law in 1987, religious and quasi-religious groups abounded--though the then-ruling Nationalist Party banned some, according to Cheng. Since then, such groups have multiplied. The Ministry of Interior lists 395 religious groups, plus scores of exercise and spiritual movements--which is how Falun Gong is classified.

While other religious and spiritual groups in Taiwan raise large sums of money and engage in political and social movements, Falun Gong is low-key. Taiwan [practitioners] do, however, vehemently oppose China's crackdown on their group, and have received vocal support from government officials, including Vice-President Annette Lu. A representative of the group recently thanked Justice Minister Chen Ding-nan for punishing a government investigator who was found to have passed a dossier on Falun Gong activities in Taiwan to Beijing. But there is no evidence that the government's contact with Falun Gong goes beyond its broader embrace of Taiwan's religious diversity and its sympathy for groups it believes are victims of human-rights violations by Beijing.

Falun Gong's unofficial leader [Note: it should be representative, as Falun Gong has no hierarchy] in Taiwan is Chang Ching-hsi, a United States-trained labor economist at National Taiwan University who heads the Taiwan Falun Dafa Society. The rumpled, soft-spoken scholar, whose research focuses critically on China's economic reforms, says practitioners in Taiwan have largely avoided crossing the strait to fight China's crackdown. That's partly because they lack legal protections in China that most foreigners have, he says, and partly because of orders from founder Li Hongzhi. "We are prohibited from [going to China] by Mr. Li," he says. "He doesn't want to create tension between the two governments."

There is no reliable precise figure for the size of Falun Gong in Taiwan, though most experts agree it has grown significantly in recent years. The U.S. State Department estimates the number of practitioners at as many as 100,000. Chang says the number is at least two times that. Even the U.S. estimate means Falun Gong's share of Taiwan's 23 million population is only slightly smaller than the group's size in mainland China before it was repressed.

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