Between State and Body: Religious Geopolitics, Cultivation and the Falun Gong

Abstract

This research analyses an ongoing struggle between continually evolving forms of the
 Chinese Party-State’s religious geopolitics, its repression of the Falun Gong, and FLG
 followers’ self-cultivation and strategies of resistance to the Chinese Communist Party
 (CCP). The PhD begins with a discussion of the Party-State’s strategies of sovereignty
 and governmentality, drawing upon the works of Foucault and Agamben, and using a
 documentary analysis. It then examines the FLG’s discursive strategies by comparing
 scriptures before and after the ban in 1999 to examine how collective subject formation
 is continually evolving in ever changing political and social contexts. The second part
 of the study develops Foucault’s discussion about self-care in an Eastern religious
 context, and is based upon original ethnographic data about FLG cultivators in Dublin,
 Taiwan and Hong Kong (2012-14). I adopt Foucault’s work on the ‘care of self’, which
 includes self-examination, self-mastery, to analyse how individuals choose teachings to
 guide themselves, exercise the power to modify and improve themselves, and also care
 for others. Through the voices of more than 62 participants and including participatory
 observation, the study illustrates how individual FLG followers cultivate and transform
 themselves into spiritual or divine beings. Both Foucault and Master Li Hongzhi, the
 founder of the FLG, are sceptical about hierarchical power-relationships and pastoral
 care. FLG cultivation is characterised by individualised actions of self-care, selfmastery
 and ungovernability, which challenges the Party-State’s religious
 governmentality. In addition, the CCP’s oppressive sovereignty and legitimacy are
 confronted by FLG’s reactive ‘telling-truth/saving-life’ activities, which include the use
 of urban landscapes, the internet, media, artistic peformances and the UN Human Rights
 system. These projects are mostly organised by individuals and are based upon global
 cooperation among FLG followers. The PhD demonstrates how FLG’s alternative
 geopolitical practices of truth-telling at multiple scales, while based upon the principle
 of caring for others, is integrated into a perpetual and dynamic process of individualised
 self-cultivation.