Talk:Falun Gong - Misplaced Pages

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Tiananmen Square Incident needs to be properly referenced

Under the media campaign section, in the final paragraph, there's a line which reads "much the same rhetoric employed by the party during Tiananmen in 1989". Since this is referencing the Tiananmen Square protests, please refer to it as such so as not to confuse the incident with the name of the square itself. Please change this line to "much the same rhetoric employed by the party during Tiananmen Protests of 1989". — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sheikh25 (talk • contribs) 10:48, October 1, 2020 (UTC)

Extended-confirmed-protected edit request on 17 July 2023

This edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request.

Please change, "Deerpark, NY" to "Deer Park, NY". In the first paragraph of this Misplaced Pages page, the headquarters for Falun Gong is incorrectly written as, "Deerpark, NY". In fact, the town is "Deer Park, NY". I am the source for this as I grew up in Dix Hills, NY, which borders Deer Park. Both towns are in Suffolk County, on Long Island, NY, just outside of NYC. Lostinnh (talk) 23:58, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

Not done: please provide reliable sources that support the change you want to be made. @Lostinnh: Please provide reliable sources that Falun Gong has moved from Orange County to Suffolk County. —C.Fred (talk) 00:10, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

I guess I can get the URL of a map to show where Deer Park is and what its correct spelling is. I was simply correcting the spelling of the name of the town. I considered this a minor edit/detail so did not think a reference other then my own knowledge of 12 years living there would matter.

As far as Falun Gong having its HDQRs in Deer Park, NY, that was already on that Wiki page and, again, I was simply correcting the spelling, not stating a location. I guess I can use Wikis own page on Deer Park, NY, as a reference for its correct spelling. 2601:19D:C080:3D20:38DA:8AF0:7A70:B63D (talk) 05:55, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

Yes, please disregard my previous effort. My apologies. I just did a lot of reading on both Falun Gong and Deerpark, NY. I was very surprised to learn that there are two towns in NY state with that name, just with different spellings. There is Deerpark, NY, in Orange County, NY, where Falun Gong is and Deer Park, NY, in Suffolk County, NY, near where I grew up. I was amazed. In my defense, I just read a good part of a long piece on ex-Falun Gong members and they kept spelling the town as, "Deer Park", which is incorrect. Lostinnh (talk) 07:48, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

That is just probably because they were not actual ex-Falun Gong members but dummies or such or people paid for that story by the CCP. Just guessing. But why else would they not spell properly the place where they lived...? Marieke77 (talk) 19:33, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

LOL, if that were the only error in this Misplaced Pages piece. Anne Linstatter (talk) 01:36, 13 August 2023 (UTC)

File:610 Office.jpg graph

File:610 Office.jpg from "Faluninfo.net" is included under the "Persecution" section, and it includes some interesting content, but it is captioned only as "610 Office's organization in China", which I feel is a bit lacking in context or commentary that might be necessary for such a chart. Combining this with its relatively poor quality (absolutely chock full of JPEG artifacts and is unreadable at thumbnail sizes), I am wondering if the caption could in any way be improved to help the reader understand its context and its encyclopedic relevance, or if it could be removed? If I weren't subject to the blue lock, I probably would have just done the latter. Bakutosz (talk) 17:49, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

inappropriate citation

The practice emphasizes morality and the cultivation of virtue, and identifies as a practice of the Buddhist school, though its teachings also incorporate elements drawn from Taoist traditions.

Has 2 citations. 1 is relevant to this sentence, the second is a hit piece targeting the Epoch Times. Marieke77 (talk) 19:30, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

Sources from 2000 and 2003 presented as current need to go

Right now a significant amount of this article's discussion about the contemporary Falun Gong is cited to material from 2000 and 2003. A lot of this seems to be intended to claim that Falun Gong is some kind of decentralized spiritual movement rather than a full-blown new religious movement centered around whatever Li Hongzhi says. it also makes no mention of the entire org's hierarchy based out of Dragon Springs, which did not exist at the time. These sources need to be removed and replaced with contemporary sources. :bloodofox: (talk) 23:56, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

The sections can be updated, but massive removal may be inappropriate, as the academically-cited parts removed shall remain true unless proven false, such as not charging fees, no system of membership, no rituals, no hierarchy to enforce orthodoxy, and the fact the Li doesn't intervene in practitioners' lives, among other things deleted. Li Hongzhi has been living in the New York area (not far from the current Dragon Springs) since 1999 or prior according to this WaPo article and U.S News & World Report article in 1999. Authors of sources published in the early 2000s (removed in recent edits) were unlikely to be unaware of this fact, as it was widely reported in 1999 that Li lived in NY at that time. Thus it would be inaccurate to say that these sources are outdated in terms of how Li influences the Falun Gong movement.

Dragon Spring is the campus of Fei Tian College, Fei Tian Academy of the Arts, and Shen Yun Performing Arts . Having a physical campus for its performing arts troupe and affiliated schools doesn't necessarily change Falun Gong's organizational structure and the fact that Li communicates with his followers mainly through his teachings published on online. The decentralized structure of regional Falun Dafa Associations in the US and worldwide, as well as the voluntary nature of these organizations and their lack of hierarchy should remain true today, unless proved otherwise by reliable sources. Thomas Meng (talk) 02:19, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

I just got around to reading Andrew Junker's book, Becoming Activists in Global China, which was published in 2019. It reignited an interest in the topic for me, and I think it is a good reference on this issue. bloodofox has a point about the old sources, but the content that was removed wasn't incorrect in my opinion and the new sources don't refute them. In cases like this, I think it's best to improve, not just remove (maybe a new slogan for me, haha). As a note, Junker doesn't focus on Dragon Springs in discussing the groups operations. The book takes a global look at how a diaspora community coordinates with each other, which I think provides good context. Li Hongzhi and the Falun Gong leadership (if that's the right term for anyone except Li Hongzhi in their group) have always been in New York, even before Dragon Springs, and I haven't seen any references to a significant shift in the group's dynamics after they moved there. Summary: this section needs some updates, but I don't think the new sources put forward anything contradictory to what was there before. —Zujine|talk 14:11, 17 October 2023 (UTC)

Reality check: Thomas Meng is an adherent who haunts these articles and pushes the group's preferred narrative. He knows that coverage of Falun Gong has shifted to being extremely critical of the new religious movement over the past several years, and his edits are just more of a long line of adherents attempting to sculpt and obfuscate this page to echo the group's preferred narrative (scholars of this topic have even written about Falun Gong's repeated attempts at changing this page to exactly that). In reality, it's indisputable that Falun Gong is centralized around Li Hongzhi at their compouned at Dragon Springs. Pre-Dragon Springs sources are not acceptable on this topic. All these older sources in this article need to be purged as out of date. :bloodofox: (talk) 02:34, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

Andrew Junker's book Becoming Activists in Global China (Cambridge University Press, 2019), which is probably the latest academic book on Falun Gong, mentioned Dragon Springs 15 times, and Junker even went to Dragon Springs himself for field research. But nowhere in his book did he say Dragon Springs changed Falun Gong's decentralized organizational structure. To the contrary, he said (p.186):

"Practitioners learned how to execute a petition, march through a major city, conduct lawsuits to protect rights, produce a newspaper, lobby elected ofﬁcials, get motions through the US Congress, hand out leaﬂets on street corners, use local and national laws to protect rights, register a 501c3 nonproﬁt organization in the USA, issue press releases, coordinate transnational information and telephone campaigning, and so forth. All of this mobilization, especially because it was so decentralized and emphasized individual initiative, facilitated skill development and politically consequential forms of agency." (emphasis added)

In a 2019 book review, social science scholar Chengpang Lee summarized Junker's book in this way:

"First and the foremost, it is the decentralised organisational structure of Falun Gong’s mobilisation that is key to its success ." (emphasis added)

According to Junker (p. 99), Dragon Springs was established in 2002. Though the media only started reporting on it in the recent few years, it has been there for over 20 years. Media spotlight doesn't necessarily change its role in Falun Gong's organizational structure. Please be aware of WP:RECENTISM.

@Bloodofox: If you can specify which quote from which academic source published between 2000 and 2003 is refuted by which recent reporting, that would be more helpful (than WP:PAs). Then we can discuss either removing or updating it. Thomas Meng (talk) 09:44, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

The organization can be decentralized and still have a headquarters and a supreme leader. Those aren't contradictory as much as you'd like them to be, one certainly does not refute the other. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 14:05, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

The recent improvements should stay in the article. Too much WP:WEIGHT is assigned to outdated reports. The outdated stuff is shown to be wrong by Heather Kavan and James R. Lewis, especially the sentence "Students are free to participate in the practice and follow its teachings as much or as little as they like, and practitioners do not instruct others on what to believe or how to behave." More recent accounts show that practitioners are subject to intense peer pressure; not "free" to leave. Binksternet (talk) 14:56, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

I've only seen an opinion article (not reliable for fact) that mentioned a few anecdotal accounts of family members trying to persuade their youngsters who had stopped practicing Falun Gong. But I haven't seen any WP:RS regarding "peer pressure" beyond familial contexts.

As for the work of Heather Kaven and James Lewis, can you specify which publication of theirs contradicts which removed sentence?

Additionally, please note that the late James Lewis was a faculty member at the Chinese government-funded Wuhan University. Such affiliations raise questions about conflicts of interest.Thomas Meng (talk) 11:58, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

There is no non-family pressure? Can you explain this then ? Specifically the lines which follow "But as soon as he loses the Fa, do you know what he faces?" Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:25, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

That COI argument has been rejected again and again. You just cited Andrew Junker and Chengpang Lee yourself, and they're currently at institutions funded by the Chinese government - unlike Lewis, who was working somewhere else when the source in question was written. MrOllie (talk) 15:29, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

Just came across this blatant instance of personal attack by Bloodofox against Thomas Meng. Bloodofox, lately I have seen editors for lesser instance of WP:PA than the one you are committing and I warn you not to engage in such WP:PA again.

The two disputed paragraphs in this talk discussion has been stable for at least the past several months before it was deleted by Bloodofox on Sep 27 in two edits 1 and 2. When other editor restored to the previous stable version, Bloodofox reverted this restoration and restored his deletion of substantial stable content.

The alleged reason for this large scale deletion is that the content being deleted is outdated because as "being from 2000 to 2003". Without contesting this argument, in reality, some of the sources being deleted are as recent as 2019. One example is Andrew Junker's Become Activist in Global China 2019, which is a full blown scholarship published by the Cambridge University Press.

Ironically, I note the same 2019 Junker source was cited extensively in other parts of this article, bearing on a certain "secretive", New York compound. These editors have no issue with this source in those parts. The same editors, however, began to have issues with this source, when it speaks to decentralization of this religious movement.

In my respective view, we are witnessing a vandalization and clear POV-pushing on this page, committed by Bloodofox and Binksternet, and a few others. The previously stable content should be restored without delay. HollerithPunchCard (talk) 21:37, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

Complaining about personal attacks while making personal attacks yourself in the same message is a strange tactic. MrOllie (talk) 21:43, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

Agreed, it appears to be a willfully ignorant argument. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 00:48, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

On hindsight, vandalism is probably a strong allegation to make in the circumstances. But there's definitely a serious personal attack and POV-pushing by the editors that you support, and it's telling that you did not deny in your comment above.

And no - calling someone out for POV-pushing or vandalism is nowhere the same as accusing another editor for being a Falun Gong "adherent", who "haunts this article" and "pushes the group's preferred narrative", which is a clear instance of WP:PA, against an editor's perceived religious affiliation or belief.

You should not be defending such behaviour, regardless of whether you agree with the infringing editor's POV. HollerithPunchCard (talk) 02:50, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

Hasn't Thomas Meng disclosed a COI? I believe they are a self described adherent, I agree that "haunts this article" isn't ideal but I will note that it was written during spooky season. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 03:09, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

He has indeed and everything I said was absolutely true. This article has and continues to have a serious problem with adherents attempting to sanitize the article and present the organization's preferred version. This is not and has never been a secret here. As for "vandalism", lol. :bloodofox: (talk) 08:51, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

I have a question @HollerithPunchCard:, why is it POV pushing and vandalism when Bloodofox calls someone out for POV-pushing or vandalism but its not when you do it? How does that math work exactly? Thomas Meng engaged in POV-pushing/vandalism... Bloodofox called them out... You then called Bloodofox out for calling them out. Why aren't you calling out Thomas Meng's behavior? To quote a wise wikipedian "You should not be defending such behaviour, regardless of whether you agree with the infringing editor's POV." Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:47, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

I'm bad at detecting sarcasm so thanks for calling me wise.

Why did I call Bloodofox out but not Thomas Meng? Because Bloodofox was the one who committed blatant WP:PA, twice: 1 2, against Thomas Meng, not the other way round.

As for POV-pushing and vandalization, the issue here between Thomas Meng and Bloodofox is that Bloodofox deleted swaths of content, which has been stable on this article for the past several months, as far as I can see. What Thomas Meng did was to restore that content, and restore the article to its last stable version. That's not vandalism.

Concerns of impropriety aside, it is not even obvious to me that Bloodofox and his supporters have the better argument, in terms of content.

As I mentioned, Bloodofox's alleged argument for "purging" the article is that the sources were from 2000 to 2002 which were "outdated". In reality, the sources he deleted were not all old sources. The Andrew Junker source that he deleted was published as recently as 2019, and was a serious academic scholarship no less.

What was more incredulous to me, was that while this source was deleted for its discussion that Falun Gong was "decentralized", Bloodofox and his/her supports took no issue with this source in other parts of this same article, that addresses that aspects of this religious movement.

Then it occurred to me that the sources deleted by Bloodofox were not so much common in being "outdated", as they were common in portraying Falun Gong as a decentralized, non-totalitarian religious movement.

This is why I believe that Bloodofox and his supporters are POV-pushing behind their edits in issue. Has Thomas Meng engaged in POV-pushing before? Maybe. I don't know. But in the case at hand, what he did was to restore stable content of the article, and reverting an edit that I agree was unmeritorious, for the reasons stated above.

Is Falun Gong decentralized or totalitarian? It doesn't matter what Bloodofox or Thomas Meng thinks. What matters is what the RS says. Respectfully, you can't delete a RS simply because it doesn't agree with your viewpoint. HollerithPunchCard (talk) 01:11, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Write all the essays you like, accuse me of "vandalism", claim the Falun Gong members here are being mistreated, whatever, but you're going to have hard time convincing anyone here that isn't a Falun Gong member that articles from the early 2000s should be presented as if they were contemporary reports or that Falun Gong isn't centered around Li Hongzhi's every whim. :bloodofox: (talk)

Seems to me that you have no argument to defend your deletion of numerous sources in your impugned edit that are not from the early 2000s, which is what I mainly take issue with. Sometimes a person's argument is revealing, not so much for what they say, but for what they omit to address.HollerithPunchCard (talk) 14:10, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

A convincing argument was made with the opening of this thread. Sometimes a person's argument is revealing - indeed. For example one might pile up personal attacks, incivility, and straw man arguments (POV-pushing and vandalization, alleged argument, This is why I believe that Bloodofox and his supporters are POV-pushing behind their edits in issue., you can't delete a RS simply because it doesn't agree with your viewpoint) - but that isn't going to convince anyone to come around to your point of view. MrOllie (talk) 14:17, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

A convincing argument was made with the opening of this thread - you mean this argument by Bloodofox above?

That totally explains Bloodofox's removal of sources from 2007, 2008 and 2019 (which is a scholarship published by the Cambridge University Press). HollerithPunchCard (talk) 15:21, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

As with most things the ideal version of the page probably exists somewhere between the two extremes. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 01:01, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

I agree and I think all relevant RS should be incorporated, not because it supports one view point or the other, but because it's a RS that's relevant to the topic at hand. HollerithPunchCard (talk) HollerithPunchCard (talk) 01:14, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Below is a proposed edit of the first paragraph in the Organization section. Some relevant information about FG that academics have been consistent about for the past twenty+ years was lost in the removal of old content. In my opinion, it needed to be more clearly written with updated sources, and the one sentence that seemed to inflame people the most didn't actually offer enough details. It did feel editorial to some degree. I think the revised paragraph below gets close to what @Horse Eye's Back was talking about. It gives a more concise and clear description of the facts that @Thomas Meng was worried about losing, and it adds new sources (specifically Junker) to address the original concerns of @bloodofox. I'll leave it here for a little bit to see if anyone has additional improvements, but I think it is better than the original and better than what is there now.

Spiritual authority is vested exclusively in the teachings of founder Li Hongzhi , but organizationally Falun Gong is decentralized . Local branches and assistants are afforded no special privileges or authority. Volunteer "assistants" or "contact persons" do not hold authority over other practitioners, regardless of how long they have practiced Falun Gong. Practitioners of Falun Gong cannot collect money or charge fees, conduct healings, or teach or interpret doctrine for others. There are no administrators or officials within the practice, no hierarchy to enforce orthodoxy, no rituals of worship, and no system of membership. —Zujine|talk 11:06, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Lol. This reminds me a lot of back in 2015, when you suddenly appeared to attempt to scrub this article's extremely well-sourced designation of new religious movement for () to instead reflect the group's preference of "spiritual movement" (this makes it much easier for the group to downplay the centrality of Li Hongzhi and claim it is instead somehow traditional to hang on to whatever Li Hongzhi has come up with lately).

For those of you who haven't followed Falun Gong's long-term strategy of attempting to manipulate this page, Falun Gong's attempts at manipulating this page has received scholastic attention, as discussed on this talk page several times. The fact is that on this article we constantly have to defelect attempts by a group of encamped Falun Gong adherents who appear in waves and attempt to manipulate the article. Their goal is often to downplay Li Hongzhi as the group's center, to try to claim Falun Gong as somehow 'traditional', and to try to avoid discussion of Dragon Springs and/or outright get coverage of it entirely removed from the article. This has so far failed, but they'll obviously keep at it until we see more serious attention to this issue.

But in short: no, obviously not (as you are well aware), this wording is outrageously misleading and not reflective of what these sources are actually saying. It also very conveniently attempts to ignore Dragon Springs, which just so happens to be exactly what the group desires.

In reality, any source that discusses the group also discusses how the entire org is based out of the group's Dragon Springs compound, where Li Hongzhi lives and where arms of the org like Shen Yun are based. Li Hongzhi commands the new religious movement, his word is law, and there's nothing 'decentralized' about that. Any source manipulation to portray 'decentralization' while ignoring or sidestepping the mountains of coverage of Dragon Springs as the group's compound headquarters simply isn't happening here. Literally just type in 'dragon springs falun gong' into any search engine and you'll find a tremendous amount of discussion about this as the group's headquarters and Li Hongzhi.

For those of you actually interested in an RS-compliant, accurate article that actually reflects what reliable sources say: Expect more Falun Gong-aligned accounts to suddenly pop out of the woodwork to attempt to ensure that the article reflects the group's preferences over RS, whether be manipulating sources or attempting to invalidate them by way of this or that. :bloodofox: (talk) 23:18, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Despite all of your comments in this discussion @bloodofox, you still haven't cited one source yourself or responded to questions of content, which is what this conversation is about. I tried to steer it back to edits. I suggest that edits are what we discuss. I can put together a list of direct quotes in the coming days. There is an entire section on the Dragon Springs complex, and the paragraph in question isn't in that section. I'm curious to hear what others think as the opinions of @bloodofox have been made abundantly clear and do not speak to the content itself. —Zujine|talk 01:39, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

The late James R. Lewis wrote in 2016 that he had been innocently ignorant of Falun Gong's dark side for 15 years, spending those years assuming that Falun Gong's own literature described the truth. He found it did not. In his 2018 book Spiritual Warfare and Martyrdom, Lewis says that Hongzhi stands as the central autocratic authority of Falun Gong, despite its flexible organizational structure.(p. 92) In The Cambridge Companion to Religion and Terrorism, page 239, Lewis writes that "The assertion of having no leaders seems to be based on the fact that the group has a non-traditional organizational structure." He notes that Hongzhi is in fact the spiritual leader, and that Falun Gong has working leaders at every level. Lewis says that Hongzhi is able to mobilize his followers into single-purpose action at any time, as he did in China prior to the group getting banned.

Lewis describes Falun Gong as espousing contradictory beliefs and practices. Hongzhi is described by Lewis as telling his practitioners to advance a simplistic story to hide the complexity from outsiders. Practitioners are observed "blatantly ignoring, downplaying, or whitewashing the most controversial of LHZ's teachings." Part of this contradiction is the story told by practitioners that the group is structureless and leaderless, which is demonstrably false. Binksternet (talk) 04:13, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

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