Age of the law's end

Abstract

This article examines the rise and fall of the Falun Gong movement in China and its subsequent rebirth abroad. To make sense of Falun Gong requires situating the movement within the social context of post-Maoist China and its appearance at a time when the space of everyday life was, and continues to be, radically transformed by market forces in the name of, paradoxically, ‘scientific Marxism’. After examining the central role a reified view of science plays in the cosmology of Falun Gong, I turn to two central paradoxes: first, how the Chinese Communist Party's suppression of Falun Gong has itself been grounded in the Party's own reification of science, and second, how what began as a micro-level response to global forces has been sustained in exile by these very same forces.