During my time in Falun Gong I was involved in some of Falun Gong’s public outreach projects, with my biggest contribution being to The Epoch Times newspaper. Falun Gong practitioners have launched a range of media companies as part of what they see as their spiritual mission, including New Tang Dynasty Television, Sound of Hope Radio, and the Vision China Times. Their purpose is purely evangelical, although perhaps not in the way evangelical Christians might understand. Converting people to Falun Gong is not a priority right now — that will happen in the future, according to Master Li’s teachings — after an apocalyptic “weeding out” takes place where anyone who holds bad thoughts towards Falun Gong, or good thoughts towards the Chinese Communist Party, will come to a grisly end.

(Clearwisdom has published some very graphic descriptions of this day where practitioners describe visions that Master Li has given them of people being weeded out. “People were screaming in terror,” reads one [Last accessed 23/10/2017). “Mangled, dead bodies were everywhere. Next, the ground split open. Monsters were attacking people.” It goes on to describe the survivors being grateful to Dafa for sparing them.)

So the spiritual mission of all of Falun Gong’s projects is a kind of giant PR campaign to warm people to Falun Gong but not necessarily to convert them, and turn people away from the Communist Party — a representation in the human world of all that is truly evil in the cosmos. This intention is clear in any article in these media that is related to these topics, whether it be the satirical banter of Chris Chappell’s China Uncensored or the more stiff-collared serious journalism of The Epoch Times.

The Epoch Times Australia, English edition, began in the small Summer Hill living room of a Falun Gong couple, where a bunch of followers pieced it together with laptops while sitting on the floor. Somehow our ragtag army, with hardly any media experience among us, managed to put out a weekly newspaper that way. Later the English version joined the more successful Chinese-language paper in an upstairs office by the train tracks in Hurstville — a Chinese-dominated suburb of Southern Sydney. Some of the first editions had some laughable errors. But others weren’t that bad, considering the scant resources. I have no idea where the money came from to print thousands of newspapers a week, or to pay for the Reuters and AAP articles that filled them. Even less to pay for another media company, New Tang Dynasty Television — a satellite TV station. This was understandably kept a secret, since the Chinese Embassy was particularly active at that time in seeking out and pressuring any public supporters of Falun Gong. I was told it was a few wealthy benefactors. Some Falun Gong critics believe it came from the US government. I honestly don’t know, although I do know the editorial guidelines of The Epoch Times were very clear about being sympathetic to the US government.

It was hard work, with many late nights and red-eyed arguments as disagreements emerged over how the paper should be run. But there was warmth and camaraderie as well, particularly in the kitchen where volunteers would cook dinner and make tea for the team.

The prestigious editor position was a dubious promotion. It basically involved giving up your entire life for The Epoch Times, such was the time commitment. Without time to work, have a relationship or raise a family, the editor was typically a single person living off his or her own savings. One editor was a warm-natured and gentle guy who became a good friend of mine. He managed to hold this position for several years and I saw directly what a toll it took on his life, he was just tired all the time. At one point the then heads of The Epoch Times Australia decided to start paying him a very basic wage to meet his living expenses. Later Master Li directly intervened and ruled that it wasn’t OK for Epoch Times staff to be paid with the money that other practitioners had volunteered. My friend was suddenly in debt, and had to pay back the money he had been paid which totalled a significant sum that he didn’t have. Somehow his belief survived, despite this slap in the face after all the sweat and blood he had put into the paper. A few years later it became OK again for workers in Falun Gong media companies to receive a basic payment to allow them to do their work. Unilateral decisions like this were unquestionable, unchallengeable. Heaven had spoken. Continuing to follow Falun Gong involved a kind of slow murder-by-a-thousand-cuts of my free will, my independent logic. They were like tests from Master Li, sifting out the moderates and solidifying the zealots.

Master Li’s fingerprints were, in fact, all over the paper. There was one time when Master Li directly sacked a large number of Falun Gong media workers and appointed new people to take their place. But most of his influence was through a select few close followers who would then transmit his directives through the broader Falun Gong network. It was rarely made clear what, exactly, he had said, and whether it was, in fact, a Master Li directive or rather simply a decision of The Epoch Times board in New York. It was usually just described as a decision from New York.

There were so many examples of this, where any sense of the public’s right to know was trumped by Falun Gong dogma. In the early days of The Epoch Times Australia, we formulated the editorial code after a conference call with the head office in New York. It specified that we should report positively on public figures who had spoken positively of Falun Gong, and avoid negative coverage of these people if they were involved in scandals. We also should avoid positive coverage of people who had spoken badly of Falun Gong or were seen as too close to the Chinese government. Later when the Iraq War broke out we weren’t to question the United States’ involvement. We were to completely avoid coverage of anything to do with homosexuality. There were also some specific people who we absolutely weren’t to cover. One was Hillary Clinton, who was seen as having sold herself out to the Chinese government. Another was Kofi Annan, then head of the United Nations, which had something to do with him being a ghost or devil in another dimension. Jackie Chan and movie director Zhang Yimou were similarly seen as having sold out to the Communist Party. Due to the highly changeable nature of these kinds of directives, and my distance from the group now, I can’t say whether they are still in place today.

One email circular in particular made my blood boil. It dictated to all global Epoch Times staff how they should describe The Epoch Times, be it to the general public or their friends or family. We were not to reveal we were volunteers, as this would project an unprofessional image of the paper. And we were not to draw any association between The Epoch Times and Falun Gong. Rather, we should describe ourselves as staff, and there were suggestions about how we should answer the question about whether or not we were paid, while still adhering to Falun Gong’s teaching of “Truth”. I wrote an angry email over this and ignited something of an email controversy — not my first and not my last. How dare they tell me how I should describe something I was involved in to my own friends and family? And why was it necessary to deny a connection between Falun Gong and its media organisations? The Christian Science Monitor, for example, has shown it’s possible for a sometimes controversial religious group to openly run a respected media publication. Society is surprisingly open minded about this kind of thing if you have nothing to hide.

Later another circular demanded that every single Epoch Times staff member put themselves through an exhaustive grammar and writing course developed by the head office. It was weeks of work for an already highly over-worked (and mostly unpaid) team. And it taught a level of grammar that was technical to the point of being mostly superfluous for most media professionals, except perhaps sub-editors. It was irrelevant how much media experience you already had or how much time you had. It was a “one body” exercise, which is Falun Gong parlance for every believer being on the same page in thought and action. Practical outcomes (or the lack of them) took a back seat to the changes in other dimensions that we were bringing about through these kinds of actions.

One argument I never made in response to these directives might have been: How dare you give me orders when I’m giving you so much of my time for free and asking for nothing in return? But I knew that would have fallen on deaf ears. We were all being paid in “virtue” — a white substance in another dimension that you gain when you do good things and that leads to blessings in this life and the next. We would all later be paid with glorious futures. We all believed that, deeply.

Over time the control over content became increasingly detailed and iron-clad. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the reportage of dance group Shen Yun, which tours the world and performs in some high-class venues like New York’s Lincoln Centre for the Performing Arts and London’s Royal Festival Hall. In terms of racking up blessings for your eternal existence, participating in the Shen Yun reporting team was about as good as it got. Every Shen Yun performance was viewed by Falun Gong practitioners as a monumental battle between good and evil in other dimensions, with the manifestation in this physical dimension being a little more mundane. A media team would assemble in a hotel room or apartment somewhere nearby the venue, ready to work through the night. Several reporters would go to the venue and do short interviews with audience members as they came out during intermission and after the show. Positive comments were taken down or recorded on video and then quickly written into articles and broadcast on various Falun Gong media outlets. Each outlet had its own set of standards which had presumedly come straight from Master Li. The Epoch Times had to get one article published online within half an hour of each show finishing, otherwise the battle in other dimensions had basically been lost for the night, and Shen Yun’s entire tour of that country was jeopardised. There was also a quota of articles that had to be written each night, which rose every year. High priority people were written up first — people who were well-known or esteemed in society — with the remainder written up through the night.

Whenever Shen Yun came to town, another team was devoted solely to taking care of the cosmic battle side of things. This team would sit in a room somewhere nearby with crossed legs and right hand held erect in front of their chests, “sending righteous thoughts” non-stop, day and night, to clear away the evil in other dimensions. People with full-time jobs would drop in for an hour or two after work, others would stay much longer, coming in day after day for hours on end. The local “assistant centre”, which was basically the satellite office for the central Falun Gong organisation in each city, would also stipulate that all that city’s Falun Gong practitioners should send righteous thoughts for 15 minutes at certain set times — typically three times each evening. This was in addition to the four global times that had been in place for years, corresponding to Beijing times of 6am, noon, 6pm and midnight.

I would dread the arrival of Shen Yun in Australia every year, because of the expectation that all practitioners there would basically put their lives on hold for the weeks or even months leading up to it to meet all these demands. I became increasingly angry that Falun Gong practitioners, who were already putting in so much of their time, were spending so much additional time sitting in rooms sending righteous thoughts rather than activities with more practical outcomes. I hoped Master Li might eventually inject some reason here in one of his talks, and sure enough in a July 2011 lecture in Washington DC he did address this issue. The problem, according to Master Li, was people like me:

Another thing is, there was a portion of students who sent righteous thoughts as a group [to help the situation]…Clearing out evil is a good thing, of course. Could it not have an impact when so many people were sending righteous thoughts? It did have an impact. However, we need to look at what some people were sending out when sending righteous thoughts. They would be sitting there, palm erect, but their thoughts would not be righteous, “How come we’re taking this approach this year? I did a great job selling tickets last year. Why are they making me send righteous thoughts here when I could be out selling tickets? Why do we have to target society’s cultural mainstream? These tickets are so expensive — who’s going to buy them?!” (Laughter) While it sounds funny to hear this now, that was in fact an extremely widespread phenomenon. Do you realize that with all that being sent out, all around the world it formed into a sticky, glue-like substance, and it took just a very few evil beings to be able to interfere with you. It was not something that you could clear out, and it directly blocked our Dafa disciples’ ticket sales and blocked the Dafa disciples who were sending out true righteous thoughts.

In other words, people who thought it was a waste of time and were resentful while doing it were the problem. Another little piece of my faith died that day. We were talking about a cumulative 100 minutes every 24 hours that we were expected to do this, in addition to the hours of scripture reading and meditation that were crucial for anyone who considered him- or herself a true Falun Gong practitioner. And then on top of this the various projects that every Falun Gong practitioner had a cosmic responsibility to be part of. It was already impossible to get a good night’s sleep, and was getting harder and harder to maintain normal relations with society. This nagging voice deep in my mind became a little stronger — Master Li just wants to keep us all busy and tired.

It became increasingly clear to me as I worked on these media projects how hamstrung they were in achieving any real traction in society. Unable to trust non-believers with the spiritual mission of saving people, and unwilling to allow outsiders an inside view into the machinations of Falun Gong, these media could do nothing but continually draw from a very small pool of Falun Gong practitioners, typically with little or no media experience. And whatever good content they produced (I still feel the Shen Yun dances are beautiful to watch and the original orchestral music is lovely) it was overshadowed by the genuine weirdness of the Falun Gong propaganda inserted throughout, and the eccentricities of the practitioners themselves who had very few societal relations outside the Falun Gong community. In group sharings, for example, groups of Shen Yun ticket sellers would describe sneaking into office buildings without authorisation and working their way through floor-by-floor, desk-by-desk, handing out Shen Yun flyers and pressing people to buy tickets while ignoring requests from security to leave.

I don’t mean to represent Falun Gong as a rigid dictatorship. Some decisions like the above were made in assistant meetings that anyone could attend, although attending them meant giving up additional hours of my already scarce time each week and enduring the guilt trips that often pervaded them about how practitioners weren’t doing well enough and so many of the world’s people were doomed.

But a lot of them came from higher up, and the restrictions and time demands became more and more iron clad. Master Li’s authority was always there — elusive, ever-changing, unchallengeable.