Country Driving [103]
Her changes were different from Wei Ziqi’s. His shifts were more calculated; he wore new clothes and smoked cigarettes not strictly out of shame, but rather because it helped him do business. At some level, he was comfortable with being from the countryside—after all, that was the appeal of his restaurant. But Cao Chunmei had never felt entirely at home in Sancha, and now she realized that even a successful business wouldn’t expand her world beyond the village.
For years she had been searching for some more meaningful connection with the outside. Young people in Sancha often felt that way; it was hard to live in a place where neighbors and friends had departed. Back in the mid-1990s, the village hit a low point: the population was dropping fast, and the people who remained had a tendency to gossip about the affairs and scandals of their neighbors. But something changed when a few villagers began to practice the breathing exercises and simple calisthenics known as Falun Gong. At that time, Falun Gong had the appeal of feeling both new and old: it was invented by a contemporary, a man in the northeast named Li Hongzhi, and he drew on familiar traditions of Daoism, Buddhism, and tai chi. Falun Gong was hard to define—in some ways it felt like a religion or a philosophy, but it was also a basic exercise routine. All of these elements combined to create something enormously popular, and this was especially true in the economically troubled parts of northern China. In Sancha, practitioners liked having a new structure to their lives, and soon others began to join them. By the late 1990s it seemed that most villagers met every morning in the lot at the top of the dead-end road. Cao Chunmei and Wei Ziqi became part of the faithful, and years later she described that period fondly. “It was good for our health,” she told me. “Wei Ziqi didn’t drink or smoke in those days, because Falun Gong says you shouldn’t do that. And he wasn’t so angry then. It seemed that people in the village were happy; we all spent time together in the mornings.”
Falun Gong’s range of influences appealed to average people, but the lack of definition was a political liability. In China, the Communist Party allows only five official religions: Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism. All faiths are monitored by government agencies, and there’s no tolerance for independent leadership; for example, Chinese Catholics aren’t allowed to recognize the pope. From this perspective, Li Hongzhi represented a problem, especially after he emigrated to the United States. And as Falun Gong became more popular, it attracted critics as well as adherents. Chinese journalists sometimes attacked the practice in print, claiming that it was nothing more than superstition. In April of 1999, a critical article inspired more than ten thousand believers to assemble in downtown Beijing. They peacefully surrounded the central government compound, hoping to receive some sort of recognition. Sure enough, they got noticed—this represented the biggest protest in the capital since the Tiananmen Square student demonstrations of 1989. Within months the Party banned Falun Gong, and soon the organizers of the protest were being sent to labor camps for reeducation.
Nobody in Sancha had attended the Beijing protest, but the village quickly felt the crackdown. Local Party members, some of whom had been avid practitioners, held meetings to criticize Falun Gong, and the morning rituals in the empty lot came to an abrupt end. In China, the coordination of such nationwide campaigns is a strength of the Communist Party. As a source of new ideas, the Party might be bankrupt, but it’s still incredibly well organized and coordinated. And the Party understands the significance of local power in a nation that’s mostly rural. A command