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Here's some more about Fulong Gong. I hazily remember hearing awful stuff about them, but now I realize that was Chinese propaganda.

I found this info in a subreddit, quite a long thread about this group. Lots of pros and cons postings.

http://www.culteducation.com/groups/falun.html (note to my editor, the html tricks didn't work;)

The main problem with FLG is that its leadership is very secretive and nebulous (and money hungry). It offers itself as some kind of spiritual alternative to the Chinese Communist Party, but in reality, it is highly conservative in ideology and non-transparent.

The main reason why it was banned in China, was that it was targeting CCP for recruitment. The CCP got spooked when it realized that some of the senior CCP members in a province was leaking party information to the FLG (including membership information and inner party agendas).

FLG members staged a massive protest against a ban, when the ban was not even announced yet (it was only being discussed by a few high level CCP members). This incident convinced the CCP that the FLG was infiltrating into the CCP ranks (directly through recruiting or indirectly through family and friends).

At the time, more than a dozen similar spiritual movements were around in China.

After that, PRC government decided to announce an official ban of FLG, and cracked down on FLG.

What many didn't talk about was that the CCP also sacked and jailed over 1200 government officials for their connection to the FLG.

Similarly, many other government officials were sacked and jailed for connections to other spiritual movements.

In reality, the CCP was conducting an internal purge of "superstitious factions" of CCP members.

The CCP leadership believed that some of these factions were using various pseudo-religious beliefs to gain political power within the CCP. (This is absolutely forbidden by CCP party bylaws. CCP members are required to renounced religions). Similarly, CCP leaders believed that spiritual movements like FLG was trying to infiltrate the CCP to gain political power."

Oh, yeah, and I'm in after doing my patrol around the cornfield.