Shi Huirong, 40, a nurse in the hospital in Fangshan District in Beijing, remembers laying wide awake all night after her husband, Yan Qiyong, took her to join a local intervention workshop that offers advice to Falun Gong practitioners to help them get out of the cult.
It was July 5 this year.

"I was tired but I was afraid of having my body and soul destroyed in my sleep, as messages from the Master indicated," she said.

The master she referred to is Li Hongzhi, the infamous leader of the cult.

Two weeks later, Shi found herself freed from the fears and felt like she had awakened from a long nightmare. "I am my old-self again and sometimes I really regret that I ever practised Falun Gong."

Yan, her husband, said: "I could not find a better way for her except sending her to the workshop. She became emotionally very fragile. She kept murmuring that she couldn't reach the 'height' set by Li Hongzhi. She was so frustrated that she even tried to commit suicide."

Shi herself acknowledged that she wanted to kill herself because she was anxious to reach the stage of "consummation."

"When and how could I fulfil my dream? I became jittery," Shi said.

The first few days at the intervention workshop were difficult for Shi. She cried, cursed and fought with the staff and volunteers there and even went on a hunger strike. "I thought I could reach the stage of 'consummation' to fulfil my dream," Shi said.

Although she resisted their help, she couldn't help listening to the staff in the workshop. During the talking-out sessions, Shi found herself particularly drawn to Sun Baoyan, 49, a volunteer in the workshop who is the head of the personnel division of the hospital in Fangshan District.

"We are colleagues and have a very good relationship," Shi said. "We had also been the 'through thick and thin together'," she added, as they had once been in the same group practising Falun Gong. "I had admired Sun very much because she practised Falun Gong with great resolution," Shi said. "I had heard that Sun had given up Falun Gong before I came here, but I couldn't believe it."

When Sun greeted Shi at the workshop and found out that she was one of the workshop's volunteers, Shi said she hated Sun and despised her.

However, Sun was patient with her.

Sun started talking about why she had joined Falun Gong, how she had suffered and finally how she got out of the cult.

What moved Shi most were the sincerity and patience of the staff and volunteers such as Sun at the workshop. Among the volunteers were former members who had been deeply involved in the cult for four or five years. One had fasted for eight days in protest against the country's anti-cult law banning Falun Gong activities.

Falun Gong was banned in July two years ago when it began to reveal the features of a heretical cult, spreading ideas based on the claim that doomsday was coming; that human beings would become extinct and that its leader Li Hongzhi was the sole "saviour."

"Under the pretext of religion, the cult persuaded its believers to depart from mainstream society," said Lu Zhongfeng, a researcher from the Institute of History of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

"I tried to commit suicide several times in the first few days to reach the state of consummation, but they saved me," Shi recalled. "When I refused to eat anything, the staff and volunteers came to my room with a bowl of soup.

"If I did not eat, they did not eat, either. Every evening, they prepared hot water for me to have a bath," Shi said, listing such examples one after another.

"Even my family had had enough of me in the end, because I gave up my job and could not take care of my son. However, the workshop staff and volunteers looked after me with great patience and understanding," said Shi.

"I was deeply moved by the people who took care of me here," said Shi with tears in her eyes.

According to Zhang Zhi, a Fangshan district government official who has taken charge of the intervention workshops and who has talked with many of the workshop participants, understanding the Falun Gong practitioners is the first step to helping them get out of the cult.

Sincerity alone doesn't work, said Zhang, who requires his staff to study the Falun Gong doctrine carefully. "We cannot save a drowning person just by standing on the bank," he said.

The first question Zhang and his colleagues had to find an answer to was what aspect of the Falun Gong was so appealing to so many people?

"No one ever joins a 'cult'," Zhang said. "People join interesting groups that promise to fulfil their pressing needs."

Take Sun for example. Fangshan District is about 30 miles from downtown Beijing, where Sun's husband, Wang Guofeng, works; and her daughter, Wang Jing, studies at No 19 Middle School, also in downtown Beijing. Since the family was together only on weekends and during holidays, Sun often felt lonely during the week.

In her work, she also often felt frustrated with the unhealthy ways some people dealt with personal and social matters.

When she joined a Falun Gong group together with a number of friends, Sun found herself no longer lonely. Sun's faith in Falun Gong grew deeper because she thought its doctrine of "truthfulness, benevolence and tolerance" sounded very lofty.

But it was obviously not good news for her family.

"When I went home on the weekends, unfortunately, it was the very time my mother practised Falun Gong most devotedly, since she was still working week days at that time, and she had no time for me," said Wang Jing.

Sun got herself out of the Falun Gong cult after she went through talking-out and other help sessions with the staffs and volunteers at the intervention workshop in Fangshan last March.

Shi contracted serious TB in the spring of 1996. The disease not only brought her great economic loss, but also killed her enthusiasm for her job.

The same thing happened to Lu Shufang, 31, a worker in a small township factory. She freed herself from the cult in April and joined in the group to help Shi.

Five years ago, Lu caught influenza and fell gravely ill. "My salary was 400 yuan (US$48) a month at that time, but I spent more than 300 yuan (US$36) to see a doctor and still had not recovered in a month," said Lu.

They fell for the pitch of Falun Gong and began regular morning exercises, something they had never done before. They were told to keep even-tempered and good-humoured, without realizing that those healthy habits were not the invention of the Falun Gong.

Zhang said the cult's methods of recruiting, indoctrinating and mind-controlling its members are very simple. "They do not use exotic forms of mind control, but only more intensely applied common tactics of social influence," Zhang said.

Much cult recruitment is done by family, friends, neigh-bours, co-workers and teachers.

They recruit followers from their homes or from their schools or places of work.

Li Xuedong, 41, a demobilized soldier who is now a farmer, started to follow Falun Gong in 1998 under the influence of his elder sister.

"My sister practised Falun Gong devotedly and persuaded me to join, too," said Li.

"At first, I refused, for I was healthy and did not believe in any form of breathing exercises. But she kept promoting it and I became curious about why it was so appealing.

"I could not help reading the doctrine one day and was taken in by its teachings about 'truthfulness, benevolence and tolerance.' I believed that was what everyone should obey," Li recalled.

The health of many practitioners may improve at first. However, "it's easy to join but very difficult to break from it," said Shi.

They needed to elevate themselves and had to abandon many what the master says are mundane things in order to "safeguard" the cult.

In order to fulfill the master's teachings, Shi left her young son, who was only five years old when she started to practise Falun Gong in 1996, and gave up her job.

"Because Li Hongzhi asks practioners to 'give up fame, wealth and affection'," Shi said. "In order to devote myself to 'my dream,' I had to turn away from my family and my work.

"Though I once felt doubt about it, I did not dare to give it up, because of the threat from Li Hongzhi that if we stopped, we'd become evil or die."

Because of such fears, Shi, in her first few days at the workshop, put up hard resistance.

"Sun's own experience especially touched my heart," Shi said. "I realized that though she had stopped practising Falun Gong, she was still very kind and good to me."

Talking-out sessions and the sharing of personal experiences are the core in the intervention workshops in Fangshan District for Falun Gong practitioners like Shi, and have helped more than 600 local Falun Gong practitioners to break clean with the cult and help them build confidence in starting their life anew.

Many of the former practitioners like Sun have become volunteers at the workshops. "I stay here to help more people who were deceived and led astray like me," said Sun.

Shi will go back to work in the hospital soon, with renewed hope for a happy and fulfilling life.

(China Daily 08/14/2001)