The Falungong triggered a relentless Chinese government crackdown against the movement when thousands of its members protested around Communist Party headquarters in Beijing 20 years ago.

The government outlawed the group following the April 25, 1999 demonstration.

Now deemed an evil cult by Chinese authorities, the group has gone underground in China while its followers abroad can be seen in public parks doing slow meditative exercises and espousing the values of "truthfulness, compassion and forbearance".

On the 20th anniversary of the protest, here are four key questions about Falungong and how it became one of the Chinese government's biggest taboos:

- What is Falungong?

The spiritual movement was founded in 1992 by Li Hongzhi, a former employee of a state-owned grain company from northeast China. Within years he had amassed tens of millions of followers.

Falungong espouses a set of exercises based on Qigong, an ancient system of exercises involving controlled breathing that practitioners believe enhances overall health by promoting the circulation of vital energy within the human body.

Though it insists is is not a religion, Falungong also emphasises moral teachings mixing Buddhist and Taoist philosophies.

The Chinese government once supported the movement and encouraged the practice to ease the burden on a creaky health system.

- What happened 20 years ago?

A major turning point came on April 25, 1999, when over 10,000 Falungong followers encircled Zhongnanhai, the Communist Party's headquarters in Beijing -- the largest demonstration in Beijing since the Chinese army crushed the Tiananmen Square student protests a decade earlier.

Participants in the silent rally protested against official harassment and demanded freedom to study the teachings of its leader and follow its beliefs.

They peacefully dispersed later that day after government leaders agreed to hold talks with the group.

However, Falungong's ability to mobilise large numbers of followers caught the government off guard and alarmed leaders.

- What was China's response?

Several months later, China banned Falungong, declaring it an illegal organisation and accusing it of "spreading fallacies, hoodwinking people, inciting and creating disturbances and jeopardising social stability."

It rounded up leaders and launched a major propaganda campaign painting the group as a cult that cheats its followers.

State media called Li a fake, blaming him for causing the deaths of adherents by teaching followers to refuse medical treatment and leading them to commit suicide.

Li -- who had already emigrated to the US -- denied all the charges from Beijing.

Tens of thousands of followers were detained in the months following the ban, according to official figures.

Falungong accuses China of torturing adherents and holding many in prison and labour camps, as well as harvesting the organs of detained followers, which Beijing denies.

It estimates that over 4,000 practitioners have died as a result of torture in custody and other forms of persecution in the two decades that followed.

- Where is Falungong now?

Though the government's campaign against the group continues, NGO Freedom House estimated in a 2017 report that millions in China continue to practice Falungong, including many who took it up after the government ban.

Though actual membership numbers are unknown, Falungong has continued to get its message out through its practitioners abroad.

From Washington to Hong Kong, followers gather under banners opposing the Communist government and hand out flyers to passersby.

Falungong practitioners also founded the television network New Tang Dynasty, which broadcasts around the clock and has reporters stationed across the globe, as well as a newspaper, The Epoch Times, which is printed in eight languages and publishes in 21 languages online.

20 years on, Falungong survives underground in China
Beijing (AFP) April 25, 2019 - Sitting lotus-style on an apartment floor, two women quietly rotate their arms in front of them -- a rare sight in China where public displays of Falungong meditation have all but disappeared.

It is a shadow of the spiritual movement's heyday in China, where the group once boasted more than 70 million followers before it was outlawed in 1999, giving police carte blanche to persecute members.

But 20 years on, the group has remained stubbornly persistent, even as practitioners in mainland China continue to face arrests and torture, according to rights groups.

Before the crackdown, Falungong members would congregate in parks in large numbers to practise "qigong" meditation. Now they do their slow movement exercises behind closed doors.

"It doesn't matter how the Communist Party suppresses (Falungong), I don't think about it too much," one of the women, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the topic, told AFP.

"I just do what I want to do," she said.

Falungong, which emphasises moral teachings, was once encouraged by Chinese authorities to ease the burden on a creaky health system after it was unveiled in 1992 by Li Hongzhi, who emigrated to the US four years later.

But after over 10,000 Falungong members surrounded Communist Party headquarters in central Beijing on April 25, 1999, to protest the detention of some of their members, the government leapt into action.

Then-president Jiang Zemin issued orders to eliminate the group, which was later declared an "evil cult" -- a tactic to justify the repression, scholars say.

Top officials "see Falungong, first and foremost, as an ideological and political threat", Maria Cheung, a University of Manitoba professor who has researched the movement, told AFP.

The demonstration had been the biggest protest in Beijing since the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy sit-in in 1989.

- 'Flesh and blood' -

Following the protest, Chinese authorities launched a special security bureau known as the "610 office" to suppress and monitor Falungong followers.

Practitioners and rights groups have also reported death, torture, and abuse at labour camps.

One woman from northern China recounted a traumatic period when her father was pressured by local authorities to beat his younger sister, who was a "very resolute practitioner of Falungong".

He was "forced to break his own flesh and blood, resulting in my aunt hating her own brother for many years," she told AFP, shuddering with tears.

David Ownby, a history professor at the University of Montreal who has studied Falungong, said cults emerge in China because the officially atheist state has successfully kept traditional religions weak.

"That means that part of the market is open to groups that are not sanctioned," he said. "That is the basic paradox at the heart of the religion policy."

A Falungong follower in China, who joined in 2010, told AFP that her dissatisfaction with society and family life turned her towards the spiritual movement.

"I thought that maybe a bit of (religious) faith would make me better," she said, adding that she had also been exposed to Buddhism.

While Falungong survives underground in mainland China, it has swelled among the Chinese diaspora, as followers have fled overseas in search of asylum.

Falungong is practised in over 70 countries, according to Falun Dafa Info Centre, the group's press office.

The movement has also turned "hard-edged" over the years, said Ownby, with some academics reporting harassment for calling Falungong a sect or cult.

Levi Browde, the centre's executive director, said he believes if harassment has occurred, it is simply an effort by Falungong practitioners "to provide more information to the scholars".

- More political stance -

It is about "making sure we're not adding momentum to the wave of violence and death that engulfs the lives of Falungong practitioners throughout China", he said.

The spiritual movement has also adopted a more political stance in some parts of the world.

In Hong Kong, where Falungong activists hand out flyers and try to talk to people -- especially mainland tourists -- the movement has taken on a stridently anti-communist tone.

One key slogan, seen on banners and blared through loudspeakers is: "The heavens will destroy the Chinese Communist Party".

Zhang Yucheng, a 76-year-old Falungong member who distributes the anti-communism newspaper The Epoch Times to passers-by in Hong Kong, said he did not join the spiritual movement to be a dissident.

"I was a Chinese Communist Party member," he said. But when the party decided to "fight against Falungong and started to tell lies", he felt he was left with no choice.

"If one continues to tell the truth, they will end up like me, expelled from the party," Zhang added.

Beijing's efforts to eliminate Falungong and other groups it deems heretical show no sign of abating, with dedicated "cult prevention and handling" departments active around the country.

More than 900 Falungong followers were sentenced to prison between January 2013 and June 2016, according to a 2017 report by US-based Freedom House.

This year, posters appeared on public walls in Beijing warning people against cults, with the message: "wipe your eyes and stay awake".

The government is "calm on the surface but controlling underneath" said the Falungong follower from northern China. "I don't think they have loosened up."

"Whether it's wire-tapping or contacting you time and again," she said, "they still want to control".

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