Falun Gong and the future of China / David Ownby

"On 25 April 1999, ten thousand Falun Gong practitioners gathered outside Zhongnanhai, the guarded compound where China's highest leaders live and work, in a day-long peaceful protest of police brutality against fellow practitioners in the neighboring city of Tianjin. Stunned and surprised, China's leaders launched a campaign of brutal suppression against the group which continues to this day. This book, written by a leading scholar of the history of this Chinese popular religion, is the first to offer a full explanation of what Falun Gong is and where it came from, placing the group in the broader context of the modern history of Chinese religion as well as the particular context of post-Mao China."

"Falun Gong founder Li Hongzhi started his own school of qigong in 1992, claiming that the larger movement had become corrupted. Li quickly built a nationwide following of several million practitioners but ran afoul of China's authorities and relocated to the United States in 1995. In his absence, followers in China organized peaceful protests of perceived media slights of Falun Gong, which increased from the mid-90s onward as China's leaders began to realize that they had created, in the qigong boom, a mass movement with religious and nationalistic undertones, a potential threat to their legitimacy and control."--BOOK JACKET.