Sacred and Secular Protest in Chinese Diaspora: Falun Gong and the Chinese Democracy Movement

Why did the Chinese religious group of Falun Gong better mobilize as a transnational protest movement than the Chinese democracy movement? How did Falun Gong's religiosity, its bonds of faith, its ideas about redemptive salvation, and its charismatic basis for action transform an émigré community from authoritarian China into an army of social movement activists? A new understanding of Falun Gong and the Chinese Democracy Movement, or "Minyun," is pursued within a comparative historical framework and a multi-method approach to data, including interpretation of primary source texts, participant-observation field work in the U.S. and Japan, and a quantitative analysis of protest events.;The comparison of Falun Gong and Minyun is constructed by drawing on an understanding of social movement activism as a historically particular form of collective action that is associated with democratic politics and is also forbidden in the People's Republic of China. The North American-based diaspora of mainland China, which since 1978 has grown from a mere handful of people to several million inhabitants, provides a setting through which differences between Falun Gong and Minyun protest mobilization can be documented and compared. Although both movements were politically repressed in China, evidence demonstrates that Falun Gong has been better able than Minyun to durably mobilize a constituency across time and place. In addition to this "quantitative" difference between the cases, also striking are the "qualitative" differences in how each movement enacted protest. I conclude that Falun Gong adopted a form of collective action that better conforms to the ideal type of a "social movement" than Minyun, which instead pursued something in the tradition of a tribune.;The dissertation provides a historical summary of both movements, a systematic study of their protest practices based on original data compiled by the author with support from the National Science Foundation, and an interpretive analysis of the intersection of religion and social movement activism within Falun Gong. Special attention is given to the ways in which the charismatic religious culture of Falun Gong facilitated its mobilization in the form of a social movement. I also introduce a novel concept, "charismatic recognition practices," to facilitate the use of Max Weber's theory of charisma in empirical research. Although more of the study concerns Falun Gong than Minyun, the comparison shows how historically shaped cultural dynamics from each movement migrated from China into North American-based diaspora and influenced how each movement took shape overseas.;For area studies specialists and global sociology, the dissertation offers an original understanding of the diaspora wings of two of the most influential – and most politically repressed – protest movements of reform-era China. For political sociology, the dissertation develops and extends several key concepts of the "contentious politics" perspective, including tactical repertoires, the historical specificity of the social movement as a form of collective action, and a relational sociology approach that emphasizes the triadic social dynamics of social movement protest.;In addition, the study challenges the rationalist and political economy assumptions that have shaped social movement studies since the 1970s and which have limited the subfield's capacity to integrate religious processes into political analysis. These two cases show that the adoption, or not, of the social movement form of collective action by mainland Chinese activists in diaspora involved more than deploying new tools or learning new practices. Comparing the tactical repertoires of both movements reveals that protest practices themselves express and perform particular relationships of authority between challengers, the public and state actors. For activists coming from a nondemocratic political context, engaging in "social movement" activism entails breaking away from existing notions of legitimate political authority – be they "authoritarian" or "traditional" – in favor of more democratic notions. For reasons unrelated to the ideational content of either movement, the elite Chinese protest practices of diaspora Minyun failed to make this break and thereby inadvertently reproduced traditional (or Chinese socialist) relations of political authority. By comparison, the charismatic practices and group level norms of Falun Gong encouraged a more radical break from socialist Chinese political authority by inventing a protest repertoire that emphasized appealing to the public as a source of power.