ABSTRACT
New media and communication networks have allowed the creative commons – whether professional journalists or ordinary urbanites – to produce and circulate media stories and news events about their everyday lives and social realities across geopolitical borders and assume national and sometimes transnational significance via the shared space in the media sphere. In the process, not only are subjectivity and citizenship refigured, but body politics are also contested. This is evidenced in the state’s media campaign against Falun Gong, a quasi-religious movement banned in China as a cult in 1999, and the latter’s counter-media campaign against the Chinese state. The media campaign war over Falun Gong refers to systematic, sustained, institutionalised and highly visible propaganda clashes between the two parties, through the integrated uses of both old and new media at a level of transnational significance. This war draws on representation politics that ultimately leads to an examination of Chinese body politics. Literature on Falun Gong has been increasing since 1999 when the qigong-
cum-religious and spiritual movement made news headlines internationally as the crusader, victim or vandal of human rights in China. The Chinese state media, pro-government scientists and scholars have denounced Falun Gong as an ‘evil cult’, and its practitioners ‘cultists’ or innocent people blinded by the cult leader Li Hongzhi, whose vicious personal interests are aided by hostile international anti-China forces. The followers of Falun Gong, however, have portrayed Li as a modern-day prophet and Falun Gong as an ultimate truth whose significance and global influence is comparable to that of Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed. Western media and other third-party organisations tend to associate the saga of Falun Gong with that of human rights in China.1 At the same time, scholars of religion, history and politics in Chinese studies view Falun Gong as: an intriguing part of the Chinese spiritual continuum; an integral part of Chinese cultural traditions and the cultural revitalisation movement; and a consequence of China’s rapid modernisation and globalisation (L. Li 1999; Ownby 2002). The historian David Ownby has described Falun Gong as an example of ‘modern incarnations of a popular religious tradition with an appeal capable of reaching north and south, town and village, rich and poor, educated and illiterate, and… Chinese and foreigner’ (Ownby 2003: 239).
