Falun Gong, also called Falun Dafa, became instantly well-known all over the world in 1999, when it was banned by the Chinese government. Founded by the flamboyant Li Hongzhi, Falun Gong is a mish-mash of traditional Chinese belief systems, spiced up with a few New Age-style modifications (although the followrs emphatically deny the New Age connection). ‘Falun’ means ‘the wheel of the law (or dharma)’, and this wheel is supposed to be located in the lower abdomen. One of the more gullible followers in southern China actually died after trying to extract the wheel of the law by cutting up his stomach. Do not try this at home.
Falun Gong has gained support largely because it is disliked and even vehemently opposed by the government (although many of the officials in the higher echelons are said to be hard-core devotees). In China, Falun Gong invites comparisons with anti-authoritarian religious movements that have traditionally risen to oppose the ruling dynasty. Examples include the Taiping rebellion in the mid-19th century, a pseudo-Christian movement whose devotees thought themselves to be invisible, and whose uprising threw the country into turmoil, and the White Lotus rebellion against the Qing dynasty, led by a ‘master of martial arts and medicine’, Wang Lun, in 1770.
Although Falun Gong may be politically correct, at least to Western eyes, its teachings are kooky indeed. There is a system of ‘levels’ that practitioners may attain if they perform the exercises advocated by Master Li, like ‘Penetrating the Two Cosmic Extremes’, ‘Falun Heavenly Circulation’ and ‘Strengthening Supernormal Powers’. Reaching level 4, for instance, the Falun buff’s vision and hearing will become supremely enhanced, and latter levels bring skills like levitation and the opening of the Third Eye. The benefits are immense; just witness this testimony from a 12-year-old devotee in Toronto: "I used to like to boss around the other kids at school, but I don’t want to do that any more."
A category where Falun Gong loses out in the hipness department is the anal-retentive insistence upon the superiority of Falun Gong over all other belief systems. Master Li’s words must be heeded at all times, and you cannot practice Taiji or Qigong on the side, because this will ‘pollute your wheel’. On the plus side, the movement uses the internet extensively, and Master Li is holed up in an unknown New York apartment with his family, remote-controlling his devotees presumably through divinely gleaned Perl scripts and the like. Of course, no self-respecting contemporary pseudo-religion could do without aliens, so Li has thrown some of them into the mix, although it is unclear (to say the least) from the writings what they have to do with anything.
Lots of people have tried to debunk Falun Gong, and the most fervent and successful of these must be Sima Nan [see also this, and this too], a kind of Chinese James Randi who has made a career out of replicating ‘miracles’ and embarrassing self-styled qigong masters. Sima claims, interestingly, that Falun Gong is not the biggest of China’s many qigong movements, even though it boasts 100 million practitioners (state officials say 2 million). He estimates that another organization, Zhong Gong, is probably the largest, with approximately 20 million devotees. Sima has been beaten up by Falun Gong fanatics and is not even especially liked by the government because of his penchant for ‘outing’ state officials associated with the movement.
(http://www.powerbase-alpha.com/powerbin/7/cult.html)