Why did China begin persecuting Falun Gong after tolerating the movement for nearly a decade?

According to my personal experience, after my relatives and friends came into contact with Falun Gong:

1. They no longer go to the hospital when they are sick, but practice Falun Gong, so that they miss the best time for treatment
2. Stop going to work to practice Falun Gong
3. Donate assets to Falun Gong organization . . .

Everyone who came into contact with Falun Gong became abnormal. People around them became scared. Thinking back to the terrible scene at that time, no one would want to experience it again.

This is not a religious issue, and other religions will not cause such results. This is more like the ban on drugs in various countries, just to prevent people from destroying their lives.

So this question is considered from another angle, why did China tolerate Falun Gong for nearly ten years?

I gleaned this from an article on Falun Gong in a winter 2000 magazine, seven A4 pages of text. I can only quote a few basic points here, relevant to the question, as in its Synopsis.

"Falun Gong's struggle with the Chinese communist government and the group's stress on physical fitness and personal morality should not mask the dogmatic and peculiar religious teachings of its founder and leader, Li Hongzhi. While communist leaders in China have legitimate reasons to fear this movement, which began in 1992, Westerners should also be wary of Falun Gong, particularly Li's teachings on the segregation of the races and the rejection of modern medicine.

"Li asserts that this world is beset with evil, disease, and immorality and only under his guidance can one attain perfect health and personal salvation. He claims that his Five Sets of Practice Exercises are derived from the purest form of Qigong, "the life force of the universe," and will provide practitioners with true wisdom and supernormal power. According to Li, what he has to offer not only predates all religions but also was uniquely given to him by the heavenly realm.

"What Li is merchandising as a way to good health actually leads people into thinking that the attainment of inner happiness is what is most important in life. In fact, he is trying to lure practitioners into dangerous occult activities." Photograph of police officers making preparations to destroy Falun Gong literature in the Yunan province of China on 4 August 1999. (Christian Research Journal article by Christine Dallman and J. Isamu Yamamoto, p 22, Vol. 22 Issue No. 2)

The article explained that the Chinese government was caught off-guard by 10,000+ Falun Gong members staging a silent but illegal protest at the government's compound in Beijing on 25 April 1999. Falun Gong wanted official recognition and respect, but the communist government saw this as a power struggle. Given thousands of year's of history of spiritual groups within China rising up long before Communism and becoming political forces that eventually toppled dynasties, it is easy to see why large groups of protestors are viewed with suspicion, and in need of being stamped on by the current regime.

At that time, the Chinese media broadcast the official report to the public, charging Falun Gong with promoting "superstitious, evil thinking." The People's Daily declared:

"We should be highly vigilant against superstition for it may confuse our [Communist] thinking, undermine our fighting will, shake our beliefs and destroy our cohesiveness." (CNN Interactive, 21 June 1999, 'China Calls for End to Superstition'. http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/asiapcf/9906/20/BC-CHINA-SECT.reut/index.html

Falun Gong is closely tied to the ancient Chinese practice of qigong which is a form of Taoism combining personal discipline with attainment of spiritual energy or life force. (Qi is generally translated as 'life force.') Its founder, Li Hongzhi claims to have been sent to earth by a supreme being. (David Rennie, "10,000 Cult Followers Join Demo in Beijing" Daily Telegraph, 7 May 1999)

He moved to America. In 1996 he gave his first Falun Gong seminar in Houston. The movement can be found all over the world now. He lives off the royalties of his books (translated into several languages) and followers consider his writings sacred, particularly his main text, Zhuan Falun (Spinning the Wheel of Law) which was published in 1994.

A good answer to your question was stated on 28 July 1999 by Ted Koppel's telecast of Nightline. He began by saying:

"Here's the problem: The Chinese government does not have a very good reputation for openness, nor, to be blunt, do they deserve one. They are secretive - sometimes to the point of paranoia, and they tend to be repressive in the face of even the slightest dissent. So when we in this country hear stories of the Chinese government cracking down on what is consistently being described as a perfectly harmless movement that has its roots in Buddhism, believes in meditation, deep breathing, stylized exercise, we tend to take that at face value; that is, after all, just the sort of reaction we would expect from the Chinese government. Only as Henry Kissinger once famously observed, 'Even paranoids have enemies.' And this time the Chinese government may, in fact, have something legitimate to be worried about."

Back in the late 1990s the number of Chinese who practices Falun Gong might have been greater than that of the total membership of the Chinese Communist Party.

Some adherents of Falun Gong are card-carrying Communists, even generals within the Chinese military.

Falun Gong's enrollment includes thousands of people in the West as well, Li living in Manhattan.

His spiritual teachings are incompatible with the atheistic doctrine of Chinese communism.

That is why China began persecuting Falun Gong some ten years after it started up.

All the information you need is in your question; you just need to look at things from the perspective of a paranoid, totalitarian regime like the Chinese Communist Party.

Falun Gong is a physical fitness movement which practices rhythmic motion and meditation.

Initially Falun Gong was seen as a benign movement. However over a decade, it rapidly grew; becoming wary, the government attempted to control it through state-run organisations like the Qigong Association, however Li Hongzhi, the founder of Falun Gong, chose to distance the movement from state control, and concurrently state-sponsored criticism of the movement appeared and grew. Why this happened is an interesting question but immaterial here.

By 1998 Chinese government sources estimated that as many as 70 million people had taken up the practice.

By comparison, there is upwards of 50 million Christians today in China, under tight control and partly driven underground.

A critical event occurred when "upwards of 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners" staged a protest, the largest of its kind since the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, which involved hundreds of thousands at various stages.

From the CCP's perspective, there was a

• rapidly-growing
• organised mass movement
• larger than any in China
• outside state control
• who were capable of mass protest on a scale rivalling the one that justified driving tanks down Chang'an Avenue

Furthermore, Falun Gong was seen as an easy target, as it was largely confined in China. Imagine the international backlash if the same persecution was carried out against Christians, or if they waited for Falun Gong to grow even more. Compare to the ongoing persecution of the Uyghurs, which is similar in scale.

Addressing a few more points:

Given political protests are wide spread in China ... 100's of such protests are daily events

Most of these are small scale, localised, and deal with issues that do not threaten the regime. Many are dealt with just as harshly, for example jailing the ringleaders, you just don't hear about them as much.

Given the only protest generally attributed to Falun Gong involved about .0001% of their membership

This is more of a reason to be paranoid; given their size, the fear was that they could easily stage much larger protests.