I joined members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement at Chatter Park in Hong Kong on May 13, 2000, as they celebrated World Falun Dafa Day. The annual event commemorates the anniversary of the day the group claims its leader, Li Hongzhi, first made Falun Gong practices public.

Under the hot midday sun, surrounded by police and camera-clicking journalists, we performed the five main Falun Gong body exercises.

Falun Gong, which translates as “Practice of the Law Wheel,” is also known as Falun Dafa, which means “The Great Law of the Law Wheel.” It is a spiritual movement that combines bodily exercises with lessons to help practitioners endure hardship and act ethically in what its teachings consider a spiritually polluted world.

In my conversations with the Hong Kong group’s organizers, they explained that their choice of a well-known, centrally located park for the exercises – and their invitation to journalists to cover the event – was intended to signal to Hong Kong residents and the wider world that the movement remained active despite the ban on its practice in mainland China.

As an anthropologist of Chinese religion, I conducted field research among Falun Gong practitioners in the early 2000s. My research explored why the group continued to attract and retain followers worldwide in spite of Chinese government attempts to suppress and discredit it.

Falun Gong and the qigong boom

In 1992, Li, a charismatic teacher with no known prior background in religion or health, founded Falun Gong in China’s northeast province of Jilin. Li claimed to have developed abilities and insights that put him in tune with the “law” of the universe – a principle, he said, that, when followed, could enable all people to be healthy and virtuous.

Li’s claims came at a time of heightened interest in qigong, a practice of cultivating positive bodily energies with roots in Chinese medical and martial arts traditions. In the 1960s and 1970s, during a period of radical social reform known as the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese government dismissed nearly all aspects of China’s past culture as backward and feudal, and citizens were prohibited from learning about them.

In the 1980s and 1990s, however, during a period known as Reform and Opening Up, the government reversed course. At the same time, health care costs were increasing due to the loosening of the government’s social welfare net. Curious about practices that had been........

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