A China without the Chinese Communist Party: The Geopolitics of the Falun Gong

The paper examines the geopolitics of the Falun Gong (FLG) and how its practices challenge the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) authority within the Chinese state. Drawing upon Laclau and Mouffe's concept of discourse, I analyse the FLG's scriptures in order to understand how its millennial ideas of 'telling-truth/saving-life' and 'reviving five thousand years of civilization' have developed since the People's Republic of China's (PRC) ban and crackdown on the FLG since 1999. Based on the FLG's resources and my fieldwork data, this paper also demonstrates how the concepts of 'telling-truth/saving-life' were practised and coordinated globally. This paper presents the dynamic relationship between spirituality and geopolitics. It demonstrates how politics are spiritually interpreted and how critical spiritual discourses are converted to geopolitical practices that challenge the authority of an atheist state.