THE TRANSNATIONAL FLOW OF TACTICAL DISPOSITIONS: THE CHINESE DEMOCRACY MOVEMENT AND FALUN GONG* Andrew Junker†

This article examines the tactical repertoires of two diaspora-based Chinese protest move-ments; the Chinese democracy movement and the Falun Gong, a religious community that has been banned in China since 1999. Data, which were collected and coded using quantitative narrative analysis (QNA) software, take the form of inventories of tactics used by each movement. In spite of general contextual similarity in political opportunity and context faced by both movements, the inventory data reveal that each movement had its own overarching “tactical disposition,” which is understood as a relational pattern between challengers, publics, and authorities. Findings also suggest that the tactical dispositions of the movements initially formed in China and then migrated to diaspora, where they influenced further tactical decision making. The durability of tactical dispositions across such disparate political settings (e.g., China/North America) points to the role of within-group culture in shaping how movements respond to protest opportunities in transnational contexts.

The date was June 3, 2009—twenty years since tanks in Beijing crushed the 1989 student-led democracy movement in China. I stood, along with about 150 others, in the rain holding a candle in a small triangular Washington D.C. park dedicated to the “Victims of Communism.” We listened to speeches from many Chinese dissident exiles, like Zhang Libo, who spent the year after Tiananmen hiding in the wilderness along the Chinese border with the USSR. We applauded the recently arrived immigrant Fang Zheng, who lost both legs to a tank on June 4, 1989. In six weeks’ time, I was back in D.C. to mark ten years since the Chinese state outlawed the indigenous religious movement, Falun Dafa. Again, I held a candle, but this time in a much bigger crowd and in a much more prominent place. Nearly a thousand participants occupied the Washington Mall, sitting in long neat rows between the Capitol Building and the Washington Monument. At one end of the gathering, dozens of Falun Dafa activists held candles and arranged their bodies to spell the words Falun Dafa in English and zhengfa, or “True Dharma,” in Chinese. There were no speeches this time: just candlelight, meditation, and Falun Gong music.

These two candlelight vigils, similar but different in key ways, were efforts to mount protest by two Chinese diaspora1 opposition movements: the Chinese democracy movement, or “Minyun” as it is known in Chinese, and Falun Dafa, also known as Falun Gong. The transnational wings of these two movements are diaspora counterparts to two of the most influential opposition movements that have unfolded in mainland China since 1978, when the reform era began. In spite of their starkly different sociological origins, in both cases the movements began in China, faced intense repression in the homeland, and mobilized protest

_______________________________ * Support for this research was provided in part by a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (0961624) from the Methodology, Measurement, and Statistics (MMS) Program of the National Science Foundation. I would also like to express gratitude to the insightful suggestions from anonymous reviewers and to Julia Adams, Roberto Franzosi, and Deborah Davis. † Andrew Junker is a Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago. Please direct all correspondence to Andrew Junker, University of Chicago, Society of Fellows, 5845 S. Ellis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60615, or to ajunker@uchicago.edu. © 2014 Mobilization: An International Quarterly 19(3): 329-350

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overseas by conationals and sympathetic supporters. Mobilization in diaspora meant that activists were free to associate, speak, demonstrate, and do many things that social move-ments in democracies do.

Figure 1. Minyun Candle Light Demonstration, Washington, D.C., June 3, 2009.

Note: Photo by author.

Figure 2. Falun Gong Candle Light Demonstration, Washington, D.C., July 17, 2009.

Note: Retrieved on March 4, 2014 from http://en.minghui.org/emh/article_images/2009-7-17-dcvigil716-01.jpg.

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What makes comparing the two movements striking, however, is their different diaspora mobilization experiences: Falun Gong, as remarked by sociologist David Palmer (2007: 281), has been “one of the best-organized and persistent oppositional movements in China, far surpassing democratic dissidents in its organizational and mobilizational capacity.” Some of this contrast in mobilization capacity, as well as in mobilization style (Yang 2009), is evident in the two events described above: In size, Falun Gong participants outnumbered Minyun several times over. In terms of place, the Washington Mall held more symbolic gravity than the Victims of Communism Memorial Park. Moreover, in regards to how participants per-formed protest, Falun Gong practitioners employed more visually striking displays and were infused with overtly religious symbolism.

These differences point to two problems at the same time: one, what is the relationship between a movement’s social basis, like popular religion or elite political dissent, and its tac-tical repertoire? And, two, how are tactical repertoires influenced by transnational migration? Using original data collected by the author, this article addresses these questions through a systematic study of the tactical repertoires of each movement using quantitative narrative analysis (QNA) (Franzosi 2009).

The data indicate that the tactical repertoires of the two movements differed according to how the movements were oriented towards political authority and to relevant publics. In this sense, the tactical repertoires of the movements had a kind of “dispositional” character over and above any particular protest tactic. Minyun’s repertoire had a dyadic pattern in which activists, acting as counterelites, made claims on behalf of the Chinese public directly to the homeland state. By contrast, the Falun Gong repertoire had a triadic pattern in which par-ticipants directly appealed for support to bystander publics in diaspora in hopes of influencing homeland political authorities. These different dispositions can be observed by comparing inventories of each movement’s tactics.

The second finding, which comes from comparing these two repertoires to the emergence of each movement in China, is that these dyadic/triadic dispositional patterns in tactical repertoires appear to have migrated with the actors and remained consistent from China to North American-based diaspora. The literature on transnational tactical diffusion has mostly emphasized strategic and deliberative action and overlooked the dispositional element that the current article highlights. Although scholars have recognized that migrant “activists draw on the resources, networks, and opportunities of the societies they live in” (Tarrow 2005: 2), these data demonstrate a complementary yet opposite process: namely, the underlying cultural structure of a tactical repertoire can develop in one political and national context and then migrate with movement actors to radically different political and national contexts. As actors consciously adopt new practices and pursue new opportunities, durable and culturally struc-tured “tactical dispositions” can continue to exert influence and shape the direction of adap-tation and change. Tactical dispositions, therefore, can be understood as one of globalization’s many “flows,” like people, goods, services, information, and ideas, that cross national boundaries and are consequential to contemporary politics (e.g., Tarrow 2005: 5; Wuthnow and Offutt 2008). The article concludes by briefly considering the theoretical implications of tactical dispositions and substantive implications for how we understand these two Chinese opposition movements.

DIASPORA AND TRANSNATIONAL MOVEMENTS

Because Minyun and Falun Gong both faced repression in China but mobilized in diaspora, these two movements involved transnational flows of people, ideas, and tactics. The diffusion of tactics and the evolution of repertoires in these cases present different issues than those generally studied in the literature. Diffusion has usually been studied as the spread of novel practices from one place by one set of actors to another setting for use by a different set of

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actors. Diffusion happens within national contexts (McAdam 1995; Soule 1997; 1999; 2004) or can be transnational (Biggs 2013; Chabot 2002; McAdam and Rucht 1993; Scalmer 2002). Diffusion, furthermore, can involve direct contact between key movement actors who bridge disparate activist communities, can be impersonally mediated by mass media and the Internet, and can flow through third party brokers (McAdam and Rucht 1993; Tarrow 2005).

These approaches to diffusion do not quite fit the Chinese diaspora cases in two ways. First, in typical models of diffusion, communities of people are usually geographically fixed (more or less) whereas tactics move across time and place. For example, Tarrow (2005) describes the modularity of tactics as being key to their diffusion from one setting to another and cites examples like demonstrations, strikes, and suicide bombings. In the diaspora movements studied here, however, the movement actors were primarily migrants who enacted practices in diaspora that had a prehistory in China. So the process being studied is how the movement of peoples also involved the migration of historically specific tactical repertoires. Not only does this suggest a different form of diffusion than is usually studied, but it has methodological implications as well. Rather than studying one tactic and how its spreads, one needs to study tactical repertoires as sets of tactics.

REPERTOIRE THEORIES

Tactical repertoire is one of the cornerstone ideas emerging from the post-1970 wave of scholarship on social movements. The central idea is that the ways that people protest are “fairly predictable, limited, and bounded by the repertoires that protesters have learned” (Taylor and Van Dyke 2004: 265). A “repertoire of contention,” as Tilly (1995: 26) dubbed it, is a “limited set of routines that are learned, shared, and acted out through a relatively deliberate process of choice.” Repertoires are “clustered, learned, yet improvisational” (Tilly 2008: 15)—they both constrain and enable tactical action. Considering how repertoires shape tactical choice has allowed scholars of social movements to contextualize strategic choice in reference to historical traditions of protest and better theorize innovation and diffusion. Nevertheless, the common sense appeal of “repertoires” has obscured some complexity that is inherent to the concept.

Notions of what is a repertoire vary in their degree of structural “depth.” Perhaps the shallowest view of a repertoire is Tilly’s formulation, in which he saw a repertoire as a “limited set of routines that are learned, shared, and acted out through a relatively deliberate process of choice” (Tilly 1995: 26). A set of routines can evolve over time, usually incre-mentally, in a contingent push and pull between “continuity and improvisation.” Pairs of contesting collective actors improvise tactics on the margins of known routines and new practices occasionally “stick” as regular elements of the evolving repertoire (Tilly 2008: 4-15). Tilly’s conception is historically grounded, but one can also describe its implicit theory of action as shallow because it emphasizes the rationality and deliberate choice exercised by actors as they learn and adapt (Tilly 2008: 29). History and structure exert their effects in this model as external factors that shape how actors optimize their efficacy in contention.

Given that the social movement literature has long privileged accounting for mobilization processes according to strategic rationality (Ferree 1992; Walder 2009), it is easy to see why Tilly’s analytical framework has been influential. Consider, for example, Michael Biggs’s (2013) illuminating study titled, “How Repertoires Evolve,” which traces the global diffusion of modern suicide protest. Biggs’s explanation for why a new protest practice is adopted in a new place emphasizes the rational judgment of actors: for diffusion to occur, potential adopters must not only know about the tactic, but must also “consider it to be feasible, legiti-mate, and effective” (Biggs 2013: 410). Like Tilly, Biggs describes how large historical shifts (changes in public display of corporeal suffering and the global expansion of media) contributed to shaping the context for the invention and diffusion of suicide protest. But when

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his analysis accounts for where and when the practice was adopted, he emphasizes conscious judgment: “Why, then, did people in other countries adopt suicide protest from South Vietnam? Again, this can be explained in terms of knowledge, effectiveness, and legitimacy” (Biggs 2013: 419). Activists learn about a practice and then evaluate its potential effec-tiveness in their own struggles. Biggs acknowledges that some deeper cultural dynamics structure what constitutes legitimacy, but he treats these influences (in the style of Tilly) as external variables shaping the exercise of strategic experimentation and choice.

Beyond the rationalist formulation of repertoires, there are at least two more levels of depth. First is the well-known “tool kit” approach (Swidler 1986; 2001), which has a more complex model of action than presumed by Tilly. Like Tilly, Swidler’s (2001) approach treats culture as a resource that agents use in the play of action. Unlike Tilly, however, Swidler emphasizes that the way actors use culture has less to do with stable goals than with what an actor already knows how to do. Familiar strategies of action shape what actors attempt to accomplish (Swidler 1986). This emphasis on “means” as prior to “ends” suggests that “culturally shaped skills, habits, and styles” (Swidler 1986: 275) prefigure those kinds of conscious deliberations about efficacy that are central to Biggs’s account. Data presented below support this aspect of the tool kit approach. At the same time, the data will challenge Swidler’s emphasis on institutions shaping an actor’s repertoire.

Although Swidler’s concept adds a layer of complexity to that of Tilly, Lizardo and Strand argue that her model of repertoire remains quite “lean.” In the tool kit approach developed by Swidler in Talk of Love, choices from within the repertoire are made in reference to external institutions with which the actor is “tightly interfaced” (Lizardo and Strand 2010: 208; for a related critique, see Reed 2002). By contrast, Lizardo and Strand (2010: 209-12) argue that still deeper approaches to cultural action are found in the “strong practice theory” of sociologists such as Bourdieu and Wacquant. Strong practice theory regards actors as deeply shaped by socialization experiences, which entail internalizing embodied schemas of action. Other “strong” theories of cultural structure are also found in the semiotic traditions carried on in sociology by Jeffrey Alexander, Philip Smith, and others (Alexander and Smith 2003). In either view (embodied or semiotic), action cannot be accounted for without also understanding how repertoires are durably shaped beyond the surface dynamics of rational judgment and interactions with external context.

This article holds that the leaner views of repertoire, like those of Tilly and Swidler, are insufficient for understanding tactical action; repertoires also have an internal, self-reproducing durability that cannot be reduced to the interaction of conscious agents with their immediate environment over time. Repertoires are internally structured by observable (but usually unacknowledged) patterns that shape how actors enact their identities, scripts, and social relations to political authority. The data presented here demonstrate that the tactical repertoires of Minyun and Falun Gong were organized by, and reproduced, different relational expectations regarding challengers, political authorities, and publics. Furthermore, these different relational patterns, one dyadic and one triadic, endured in both cases through diffuse processes of migration and transnational mobilization. Hence, the implication is that some form of deep cultural structuring—which I call “tactical dispositions”—shaped tactical decisions prior to conscious deliberation and endured within the movements across both space and time.

THE CASES: CHINESE DIASPORA MOVEMENTS

Both scholars and journalists regularly refer to the democracy movement of 1989 and to the Falun Gong as exemplars of the most politically sensitive topics in China.2 Minyun dates back to the May Fourth movement of 1919, in which Chinese educated elites rejected traditional culture in favor of “science,” “democracy,” and a secularist view of modern state building.

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Chinese democracy activism throughout the 1980s followed in this tradition: it was primarily enacted by youthful elites and was oriented towards the twin goals of democracy and building a powerful nation. The 1989 student demonstrations extended this tradition but were also a response to a host of economic and political pressures that accompanied China’s post-Mao transition (Calhoun 1995; Goldman 1994; Leijonhufvud 1990; McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly 2001: 207-18; Nathan 1985; Schwarcz 1986; Spence 1999 [1990]; Wasserstrom 1990; Zhao 2001).

Before the events of June 4, 1989, Chinese students and scholars had been fanning out across the world to study in economically advanced, democratic countries, and especially the U.S., for about a decade. In the spring of 1989, there were a little over 33,000 mainland Chinese foreign students in the U.S.3 Virtually all of them, it is commonly said, participated in some way in activities to support the protests in China. After the June 4th repression, diaspora Minyun activists, who were primarily students, continued to mobilize. They formed new organizations, published dissident literature, and organized campaigns, including attempts to broadcast independent news into China from a ship in the East China Sea. But the movement was dogged by internal bickering and low morale. Meanwhile, the domestic political scene in China had gone into deep freeze and overseas activism appeared fruitless. Within two years, Minyun had mostly dissipated overseas, although a handful of groups and publications still endure until today (Chen 2014; Chen and Lu 1993-94).

The reforms of the 1980s not only inspired political movements, but they also led to other kinds of social movements. Among these was a faddish rage for qigong4 exercise (Palmer 2007). Qigong consists of many different slow moving breathing exercises that are supposed to cure disease, prolong life, and even confer supernatural powers. In the mid-1980s, charismatic qigong preachers started doing mass teachings in urban parks. Falun Gong, which was founded by a faith healer named Li Hongzhi, began in 1992. Falun Gong originally enjoyed considerable state support, but in 1996 the winds of favor changed and Falun Gong faced official criticism, its formal organization was legally disbanded, and its publications were banned (Ownby 2008: 165-74; Palmer 2007: 249-56). Around the same time, Li Hongzhi immigrated to the U.S., where he continued to travel and preach. In 1999, activists in Beijing mounted a demonstration involving over 10,000 protesters with the aim of winning back their legal standing as a community. The state responded by banning the movement and subjecting it to vigorous repression (Chan 2004; Ownby 2003; 2008; Palmer 2007; Tong 2009).

As a qigong movement, Falun Gong took a more explicitly religious turn in 1994 (Lu 2005; Palmer 2007: 224), which is part of the reason that it was later attacked by political authorities. Since then, Li has preached his absolute authority in matters of morality and the cosmos. As a religion, Falun Gong resembles many centuries of other sectarian religious communities in China in that it has a charismatic leader, emphasizes self-cultivation and healing from disease, and propagates conservative social values and a millenarian view of history (Ownby 2008; Penny 2012).

The Falun Gong responded to repression in China by protesting vigorously. In China, for instance, during the first five months after Falun Gong was banned, Chinese officials stated that Falun Gong followers had had “more than 35,000 run-ins with the police,” mostly in trying to reach the National Appeals Office or Tiananmen Square (Rosenthal 1999). Meanwhile, in diaspora, Falun Gong followers engaged in petitions, marches, lobbying officials, publishing newspapers and other media, and disseminating information about the persecution in China.

Social scientists typically sort religious and political movements into separate boxes but Falun Gong activism has clear elements of both. Falun Gong practitioners have understood their efforts to resist the persecution, both in and outside of China, as an activity called “clarifying truth.” Although founder Li Hongzhi teaches that clarifying truth is not political in the sense of aiming to gain temporal power, a primary purpose of clarifying truth is to con-

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vince as many people as possible that the persecution of Falun Gong is wrong and should stop. Clarifying truth, moreover, is not the same as proselytizing. Conversion to Falun Gong might happen during clarifying truth, but practitioners believe that conversion depends on whether a person is predestined to become a practitioner (Ownby 2008: 140). The goals of activism are instead limited to convincing the public to interpret the persecution of Falun Gong as unjust and to act in ways that support the cause. Thus, from a social science perspective, clarifying truth looks like a sustained campaign of making public claims that bear on the interests of political authorities, and so ought to be seen as a social movement activity (Tilly and Tarrow 2007).

Yet, in the view of practitioners, more is at stake in clarifying truth than mere politics. Activism is itself a form of spiritual cultivation on the path to the ultimate Falun Gong goal of “consummation.” Furthermore, Li Hongzhi teaches that the persecution of Falun Gong is a history-ending showdown between good and evil: anyone who believes in the Chinese state’s portrayal of Falun Gong, even those not actively involved in the persecution, will necessarily face divine retribution. Thus, clarifying the truth also aims to save members of the bystander public from cosmic punishment.5 Enchanted framing and enchanted selective incentives motivate Falun Gong activism. This does not mean clarifying truth is less politically signif-icant than the activism undertaken by Minyun, but it does mean that the two movements are oriented by and for quite different cultural projects.

Comparing the Two Cases

In spite of how different the movements are in terms of social origins and purposes, certain commonalities are the basis for comparison. Minyun and Falun Gong are the only Chinese protest movements to emerge in the reform era that (1) began in urban centers; (2) spread across social divides such as province, occupation, class, and ethnicity;6 (3) mounted coordinated, national claims against the central state authorities; and (4) generated enough mobilization to spur the state to enact nationwide repression campaigns involving massive propaganda, arrests of leadership, and violence.

The Chinese democracy movement and Falun Gong share another feature, which is that, in both cases, events and repression in mainland China spurred political mobilization overseas by conationals and sympathetic supporters. In both, transnational Chinese participants aimed to use the free political space overseas to mount campaigns that influence homeland politics. The U.S. has been the home base for both diaspora movements and has also absorbed more Chinese migrants since 1978 than any other single country.7

The current study looks at how activists in both movements mounted protest and dis-regards the separate issue of the extent to which those protests were successful in achieving political aims. Nevertheless, it bears mentioning that the movements followed a similar beginning trajectory: both initially gathered steam and transnational sympathies but then failed to win any important changes in homeland politics. Over time, both movements have come to be seen as marginal to events in China and neither appears to enjoy much popular support today. Diaspora Minyun activism largely disintegrated within two years of the 1989 protests in China. By contrast, Falun Gong has remained active ever since 1999, but has evolved to include many less directly political but still publicly oriented activities, such as dance and music performances promoting a Falun Gong version of Chinese culture.

The purpose of the study, however, is to understand tactical repertoires, which are related to, but still distinct from, movement outcomes. The data here document what people tried, not what worked. Activists’ efforts, and the differences between what was tried in each diaspora movement, are important because they tell us about how movement tactics are shaped by within-group dynamics and how Chinese activists have approached the problems of mobili-zation in democratic and transnational contexts.

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Historical cases rarely make perfect comparisons, and these two are no exception. I highlight three problems in making this comparison. First, ten years elapsed between the student demonstrations in Tiananmen and when Falun Gong was banned and mobilized. Much changed in that decade. One area of change concerns immigration. In the late 1980s, much of the mainland Chinese diaspora community was foreign students and elite intel-lectuals associated with universities in North America, the Pacific Rim, and Europe. By 1999, when Falun Gong was banned, the émigré Chinese population was much more heterogeneous, including immigrants who had built successful careers in their adopted countries and professionals with impeccable language and cultural competencies. These differences in immigration cohort context were consequential for movement capacity, but the study here has not been able to examine the issue in depth.

A second problem for comparing Minyun and Falun Gong in diaspora is that the com-parison implicitly suggests that they are independent of one another. Yet Falun Gong par-ticipants knew about, and some members even participated in, the student movement of 1989. Did knowledge of diaspora Minyun’s experience influence Falun Gong tactical decision making? None of the Falun Gong discourse I have found online or read about in the secondary literature supports such a conclusion. From an early point in the movement’s political engagement, Li Hongzhi has emphasized that “Falun Gong is not political” and is not a “movement,” which discouraged strategic comparison to Minyun. One Falun Gong prac-titioner expressed outrage to me, for instance, when I drew an explicit comparison between Falun Gong and Minyun during our conversation. In spite of these good reasons to discount the conscious influence of Minyun tactical experience on Falun Gong, the data here are in-adequate to explore the possibility further. My analysis proceeds with the assumption that the two cases were relatively independent in regard to formation of tactics.

The creation of the Internet during this timeframe constitutes a third challenge. The Internet became available to urban consumers in China in 1996 (Yang 2009: 29). Falun Gong activists, even before transnational political mobilization but certainly afterwards, have relied heavily on the Internet to communicate. This means that transnational communication for Falun Gong activists was very low cost and highly efficient, whereas the publication-based communication that dominated diaspora Minyun in the 1989 era was expensive and relatively inefficient. Fortunately for research purposes, the picture is not as black and white as it first appears. History’s first “Chinese online communities” took shape in the Chinese diaspora during the 1980s. Chinese foreign students were entrepreneurs in using internationally networked computers at research universities to set up electronic newsgroups and online magazines. These allowed them to share news quickly without the expenses of the telephone and delays of the mail (Yang 2003; 2009:28-29, 159). During the Tiananmen protest period, at least one of the two electronic newsgroups, “Social Culture China,” briefly became the most heavily trafficked digital forum among hundreds in existence (Ståhle and Uimonen 1989: vol 1, p. xxxv). Transcripts of six months of these electronic communications during the 1989 demonstrations were compiled and published in late 1989 (Ståhle and Uimonen 1989) and served as one source of data in this study. Therefore, diaspora Minyun activists had a functional equivalent to the Internet of 1999 and were heavy users of that resource.

RESEARCH DESIGN AND DATA COLLECTION

The study aims to create comparable and empirically valid descriptions of the tactical repertoires used in each of the two diaspora movements. Unlike typical diffusion studies, which track a particular protest method across space and time, I recorded all of the tactics used in each movement for a set time period. The results are empirically valid tactical “inventories.” I collected event data from movement publications and websites based in North America and Europe. I used software designed for quantitative narrative analysis (QNA) to

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inventory all reported protest practices. Next, I studied the descriptive data from the inven-tories and inferred the underlying differences related to dyadic and triadic relations of challenger, authority, and publics.

Most studies of protest events have used newspaper accounts to glean data and subsequent research has affirmed that newspaper accounts are typically reliable for studying events of general public consequence (Davenport, Soule and Armstrong 2011; Earl et al. 2004; Koopmans 1998). But independent media are insufficient for inventorying a move-ment’s repertoire because newspapers will only report a small, newsworthy subset of activ-ities. Much of the activity of a social movement never reaches the attention of the general media (Taylor and Van Dyke 2004: 268). Activist-generated accounts, by comparison, include a broader range of happenings and thus better document the repertoire of a movement. The merits of using event narratives by activists are relative, since such narratives will also be incomplete and reflect particular biases within the movement community. As further dis-cussed below, for instance, Falun Gong narratives almost never mention fundraising, whereas as fundraising is commonly mentioned in some Minyun sources. This difference partly reflects what activists actually did, since Falun Gong doctrine strongly discourages asking for donations, but also reflects what activists consider to be acceptable to narrate.

The principal method of data collection involved reading and coding narratives by participants detailing protest actions. The audiences for all the publications were primarily people within or sympathetic to the movements. Coding involved recording information about date, location, and types of protest actions mentioned. Protest events were defined as protest actions involving more than one participant and occurring outside of mainland China, but including Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. However, since all sources were published in the United States, Canada, or France, they present a view of Minyun and Falun Gong mobili-zation from Chinese media in the “West.” The QNA software program, Program for Computer-Assisted Coding of Events, was used to record and verify data (Franzosi 2009: 89-96).8

The research design focused on two years of each movement’s respective diaspora mobilization, starting in February 1989 for Minyun and in October 2000 for Falun Gong. The time period was selected to cover the emergence of Minyun’s overseas activism and its period of greatest activity. Data for Falun Gong also aimed to cover the movement’s early phase but, for reasons of availability, does not include the period of movement emergence.

Selected articles were read and coded for information on diaspora protest events. Information was collected detailing time, place, and tactics. In addition, every protest practice mentioned in each event narrative was coded as a type of action. One activist narrative might describe several forms of action, such as marching, gathering signatures for a petition, and fundraising. In that case, the event was coded as containing three forms of action. If that same event narrative mentioned marching in several places, “marching” was only counted once for that event. Each form of action was counted only once per event, but any event could contain several forms of action. When the same data source included multiple accounts of a single event, the various narratives were crosschecked and combined so that the event and its related tactics only appeared once in the data.

Data Sources

Collecting activism narratives for the diaspora Falun Gong movement was relatively easy. There is one primary Falun Gong website, called Clear Wisdom (www.minghui.org), that has aimed from its beginning to collect and disseminate participants’ accounts of their own public activism. The website, which is described at length by Ownby (2008: 201-07), keeps an archive, sorted by topic, of all of its postings. The “diaspora news” section of the website includes thousands of activist-generated, Chinese-language narratives about protest activities done in diaspora. The two-year period examined here includes 8,796 postings. Since coding all of these articles would have been too labor intensive, a simple random sample of

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535 articles (about 6 percent) was selected for coding.9 Of these coded articles, 367 contained information about diaspora collective action events.

The collection of valid comparative data from Minyun was, by contrast, challenging. The most significant difficulty, as suggested above, was that Minyun mobilization occurred before the Internet was widely available. Ideally, one should compare sets of activism narratives that use the same form of media, and thereby control for the effect of media form on content. Although this was not a possibility, the two volumes of electronic communication transcripts published as Electronic Mail on China (Ståhle and Uimonen 1989) were used as one source for data collection, which I refer to below as the Minyun-E data. Because these transcripts are from electronic communications and frequently contain brief accounts of local protest activities, they approximate the Falun Gong media in terms of cost, global diffusion, and ease of communication. Unfortunately, however, the published transcripts only cover six months, were edited for publication in ways that may distort the picture of events collected from the data, and the original source materials appear to have been lost10 (see the appendix for further discussion).

In order to compensate for these limitations, I compiled additional Chinese democracy movement data from two years of published diaspora Minyun journals. I refer to these sources as the Minyun-J data. These two journals covered the dates February 1989 to January 1991. The first journal is China Spring (1989-91), which was published monthly from New York. The second is Minzhu zhongguo (1990-91), which was published from Paris six times per year, starting in September, 1990. Both print journals contain summaries of movement activities as well as feature articles that refer to specific events. Print journals are obviously quite different in form from the website articles of the Falun Gong, but the print journals are valuable to the comparison because they cover the full two-year period and have not been edited by third party publishers. Due to differences in the structure of the Minyun-E and Minyun-J datasets, the data are treated separately below. Therefore, the Falun Gong data is compared to two different sets of Minyun data, which are also contrasted to one another.

FINDINGS

The inventory data are counts of things that people reported doing. In summarizing the results, I first review the geographic distributions of protest events and then I summarize each movement’s most common tactics. These findings provide the basis for subsequent inferences about the “tactical dispositions” of Minyun and Falun Gong, which are discussed in the fol-lowing section.

Table 1 shows the geographic dispersion of protest events according to the three sources. For both movements, the sources show that events occurred primarily in North America and Western Europe. In total, the Minyun literature reported events in 26 different countries, whereas the Falun Gong sample reported events in 41 countries. Since the Falun Gong data are a small sample of the total source, the true Falun Gong geographic diffusion in this period was probably greater.

Summarizing the tactical inventories data is not as simple as summarizing the geographic data because the three inventories contain over 50 different forms of action, many of which appeared rarely. Nevertheless, each movement contains a much smaller subset of actions that were frequently mentioned and comprise the majority of action forms. Comparing these smaller subsets of tactics allows us to see important differences between the two movements. Minyun data will be considered first, followed by Falun Gong, and then the two movements will be compared.

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Table 1. Geographic Distribution of Protest Actions as Percent (N) of Source Data

Region Falun Gong Minyun-J Minyun-E 44 45 75

North America (207) (196) (291)

25 38 15 Western Europe

(117) (165) (59) 12 6 3

Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan (58) (27) (10)

8 3 2 Australia and New Zealand

(37) (13) (9) 5 2 2

Other Asian Pacific (24) (7) (7)

3 2 - Eastern Europe and Russia

(16) (9) - 1 - -

Other (7) - - 1 4 3

Unspecified (6) (19) (12)

Total Percent of Column 100 100 100 (Total Count) (472) (436) (388)

Note: Events in this table are defined by unique time and place.

Table 2. Most Common Minyun-J Collective Actions

Rank Action Form Percent (n = 531)

1 Conference or roundtable 19.4 (103)

2 March, rally, or demonstration 13.4 (71)

3 Public collective statement 13.4 (71)

4 Petition or open letter 8.3 (44)

5 Formal lecture 7.5 (40)

Total listed 62.0 % (329)

Table 2 shows the most common forms of action mentioned in the Minyun-J sources. Unlike table 1, which had counts of events, the tactical inventory tables provide counts of protest practices reported, not events. A single event narrative can mention more than one form of action; thus, counts of tactics reported do not equal the total number of events.11

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Figure 3. Minyun-J and Minyun-E Compared

The electronic transcripts data, Minyun-E, provide an overlapping but not identical picture of Minyun activism, as seen in figure 3. Since both sources separately recount the same time periods and many of the same activities, differences between them are due to the forms of media rather than to differences in what transpired in the world. For purposes of making a general characterization of the Minyun repertoire, I observe that six activities stand out as the most common tactics present in either Minyun-J or Minyun-E data: (1) formal conferences or round-table discussions, usually held on university campuses; (2) marches, rallies, or protest demon-strations; (3) making public collective statements, which are issued to the press; (4) distribution of petitions or open letters among movement constituents; (5) formal lectures, which involve publicly advertised events in which a public figure speaks to an audience; and (6) public meetings, in which students and scholars met on campuses to discuss events, form organi-zations, draft and issue public statements, and/or organize marches and demonstrations. In addition to these six actions that account for 60 percent of all actions mentioned in both sources, the Minyun-E has one more major entry, “fundraising,” which accounts for an additional 11 percent of the Minyun-E tactical repertoire. In fundraising, participants sought money from friends, colleagues, institutions and Chinatown businesses. Money was collected to send to pro-testors in China, either as cash or as equipment, like fax machines. These most common forms of Minyun activism, as will become clearer during the comparative analysis below, emphasized students and scholars (that is, counterelites to recognized political authorities) speaking together in a unified voice, or en masse, to political authority.

Turning to the Falun Gong, table 3 displays the religious movement’s most common tactics. The most frequently mentioned action is “public display of Falun Gong exercises.” In this activity, participants collectively did ritual Falun Gong exercises in a way that was deliberately meant for an audience to observe. Usually, these activities occurred in the context of either a larger formal event, like a cultural festival in which Falun Gong was participating, or as part of a Falun Gong protest. In both instances, the public display of Falun Gong qigong exercises

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Table 3. Most Common Falun Gong Collective Actions

Rank Action Form Percent (n = 941)

1 Public display of Falun Gong exercises 13.8 (130)

2 Leafleting and street canvassing 13.5 (127)

3 Petition or open letter 9.1 (86)

4 March, rally, or demonstration 7.5 (71)

5 Dressing uniformly 5.4 (56)

6 Collective Prayer 4.9 (46)

7 Public outreach event 4.6 (43)

Total listed 59.4 % (559)

would usually be accompanied by making of political claims about the persecution of Falun Gong, so this activity should be understood as a form of political action. In the data collection, completely nonpolitical religious gatherings to do ritual exercises were also sometimes men-tioned. These were coded as a separate form of action and accounted for 2.9 percent (27 in-stances) of the repertoire.

The second most common Falun Gong activity was “leafleting and canvassing.” This protest action involved activists occupying some public space, setting up information tables and displays, distributing literature, and trying to engage members of the public in conversations about Falun Gong and its repression. Both of these most common forms of activism related to reaching out to bystander publics, the significance of which I will consider more below.

The next two entries in the table, “petitions or open letter” and “march, rally, or demon-stration,” are also found in the Minyun inventories and their definitions are the same. Never-theless, it should be noted that Falun Gong petitions frequently involve activists gathering signatures from strangers, as part of a canvassing effort on the street, for instance, whereas Minyun petitions were usually circulated among student and scholar networks. Minyun petitions dominate the Minyun-E data because electronic mail, which was the source of my data, was an important means by which petitions were distributed.

Three more Falun Gong activities in table 3 need to be defined. “Dressing uniformly” refers to movement participants wearing coordinated clothes, like matching shirts bearing Falun Gong emblems. “Collective prayer” is, in this data, a specific Falun Gong form of coordinated prayer that began, at the behest of the religious leader, in May 2001. Referred to as “sending forth righteous thoughts,” all Falun Gong believers are supposed to spend five minutes in con-centrated prayer four times a day. The appointed times vary by time zone so that the action is conducted in complete global simultaneity. According to the religious leader, the prayers are a powerful tool in a cosmic battle between good and evil and have real world consequences.12 Finally, the last tactic falling within the 60 percent cutoff, “public outreach event,” is any event in which activists presented about Falun Gong to a formal audience, such as presentations at a college or in a municipal library. These were similar to leafleting and canvassing in that they also involved direct outreach to the bystander public in diaspora. Public outreach events, like most Falun Gong activities mentioned here, involved making political claims as well as reli-gious proselytizing.

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COMPARING THE MINYUN AND FALUN GONG TACTICAL REPERTOIRES

Figure 4 compares all of the action forms discussed above for each of the three sources, sorted by rank within the Falun Gong repertoire. The comparison highlights overlaps and differences in tactics between the two movements. Diaspora Falun Gong and Minyun activists shared many of the same forms of actions, such as marches and demonstrations, gathering signatures and submitting petitions, and making collective public statements. These commonalities correspond to the well-established idea that diverse collective actors within a regime context will draw upon commonly known tactics (Tilly 2008).

Differences between the repertories bring into sharper relief the particularities of each movement. The differences also provide a basis from which to infer distinct “tactical dispo-sitions” and their migration from homeland contexts into diaspora. My analysis will emphasize differences in underlying relational patterns—either dyadic or triadic.

The Minyun-E source commonly reported public, deliberative meetings, which were virtually absent from the Falun Gong repertoire. In practice, Minyun meetings involved Chinese foreign students and scholars on university campuses deliberating over what to do, drafting and issuing collective public statements, planning demonstrations, creating formal organizations, and coordinating fundraising to support student protestors in China. Publicly open and deliberative meetings were an organizational form that also exemplified the ideals of democracy as activists understood them. The Falun Gong data show that open meetings of this sort were not a feature of the religious movement’s repertoire.13 In Falun Gong activism, local cells of activists typi-cally created and executed protest actions according to campaigns disseminated through the Minghui websites and Falun Gong social networks (Ownby 2008).

Another difference between Minyun and Falun Gong is that Minyun participants engaged in much fundraising whereas Falun Gong participants did not. This difference is related to the particular tactical dynamics between Falun Gong and the Chinese state. One of the accu-sations made by Chinese authorities to justify the persecution of Falun Gong is that Falun Gong leaders are charlatans who cheat followers of their money. Falun Gong activists deny the accusations and independent evidence is ambivalent (Tong 2002). Nevertheless, a tactical consequence of the interactional dynamic is that Falun Gong participants have explicitly eschewed direct fundraising, since it would appear to give credence to the state’s accusations. This is not to say that the Falun Gong movement has lived on air and that other kinds of fundraising and income generation have not occurred.14 Instead, whatever fundraising occur-red did not surface in the website activism narratives. Excepting for public meetings and fundraising, however, the Falun Gong repertoire contained all of the remaining major actions present in the Minyun repertoire, even if only as minority forms of action.

The two most common Falun Gong tactics—“public displays of Falun Gong exercises” and “leafleting/street canvassing”—were activities that represent a categorically different orientation on action than found in the Minyun inventories. These tactics involved activist attempting to garner moral support and approval directly from bystander publics. “Leafleting and canvassing” involved personal, face-to-face efforts to persuade anyone at hand about the merits of their cause. Surprisingly, analog canvassing activities are virtually absent from the Minyun reper-toire.15

Instead of canvassing, much of the Minyun tactical repertoire was dominated by en masse activities—petitions, marches, conferences, lectures, issuing collective statements, and public meetings. A typical Minyun participant spent much time in formal environments (conferences, lectures) or in mass actions (marches, rallies, meetings). They made “public collective state-ments” that were disseminated to general publics (both in Chinese and English) through the media. Minyun activists spent virtually no time trying to personally enlist public support through persuasive outreach to individual strangers, with the exception of fundraising. By contrast, Falun Gong activists spent much of their time trying to persuade whatever public was at hand to support their cause.

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Figure 4. Minyun and Falun Gong Compared

How Minyun and Falun Gong interfaced with their potential publics points to differences in

how the repertoires were internally structured. If political contention is composed of challengers, publics, and authorities, as in Tilly’s polity model for example (McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly 2001), then tactical choices reflect expectations of activists concerning these different identities. I propose the term “tactical disposition” to describe how these underlying relational expectations shape repertoires.

Tactical Dispositions

According to Merriam-Webster, a disposition is both the “the tendency of something to act

in a certain manner under given circumstances” and “the way in which something is placed or arranged, especially in relation to other things.”16 Patterns in tactical repertoires show these dis-positional characteristics of tendency and arrangement.

The distinction drawn above between the en masse activism of Minyun and the public out-reach style of Falun Gong is a distinction between two different tactical dispositions. En masse activism emphasized a dyadic relationship between challengers and authorities. Minyun col-lective statements, marches, and conferences were performances of challengers as counterelites to the state. Challengers spoke directly to authorities on the basis of their collective identity as “students and scholars,” whose moral authority justified their speaking on behalf of a passive Chinese public.

Falun Gong activists also used en masse collective protests, but the more prominent part of their tactical repertoire was to seek political leverage by going out in groups or individually to enlist support by directly interacting with the immediate bystander public. Face-to-face canvassing, which Falun Gong activists call “clarifying truth,” involves individual activists soliciting strangers to engage in substantive discussions on a matter of public significance. When activists stage such conversations with strangers, they are enacting relations of common citizenship with a previously unknown member of the bystander public. The activist hails the stranger, whether Chinese or not, to enter into discussions about the cause and to garner support that can be exerted against institutional authorities through actions like signing petitions.

Tactical dispositions, therefore, are manifest through “contentious performances” (Tilly 2008) that simultaneously represent and create particular versions of challengers, authorities, and publics. Minyun performances produced virtuous elites confronting homeland authority in

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the name of the imagined Chinese public, whereas Falun Gong performances produced citizens appealing to citizens to make claims together against Chinese authorities. Seen from this perspective, Falun Gong protest practices exemplified a form of practical democratic citizenship that was absent from the Minyun repertoire.

Repertoire Migration and Durable Dispositions

Where did these tactical dispositions come from? What is immediately striking in both

cases is the similarity of these relational patterns to the way in which both movements operated in mainland China before overseas counterparts emerged. Even though both Minyun and Falun Gong activists in diaspora took advantage of political freedoms overseas and integrated many new tactics (like lobbying foreign states or candlelight vigils), the tactical disposition of their movements still replicated an underlying relational pattern borrowed from their Chinese origins.

Scholars have noted ways in which the Chinese democracy movement of the 1989 era rep-licated traditional Chinese or even Maoist conceptions of authority and protest (Wasserstrom 1990; Yang 2009; Zhao 2001; 2010). Yang (2009: 85), for instance, argued that 1989-era Minyun activists derived their cultural orientations on protest and authority from Chinese culture’s “emperor-worship mentality.” In the traditional relations of Confucian officials to the emperor, officials were supposed to act as the moral conscience of power and voice criticisms against the imperial administration when justified. According to Yang, the socialist intelligentsia class (zhishi fenzi) inherited the Confucian legacy and so this normative script for protest still pervaded Minyun activism of 1989. Zhao (2001: 55; 2010) accounts for the same tendencies by referencing the more immediate historical influence of “Marxist and populist thinking and prac-tice.” In either interpretation, Minyun activists in China attributed to themselves an exceptional moral authority to speak back to the state on behalf of the nation. The major forms of activism in Beijing during the 1989 protest period—collective demonstrations like marches and the hunger strike occupation, setting up independent student unions, and demanding dialogue between students and the highest leaders of the state—all suggest a relational stance in which challengers confronted the state directly on behalf of the public. Granted, public opinion was crucial to their success as it is for many protest movements, but the primary forms of Minyun activism did not involve turning away from the state to rally support and recruit involvement through the bystander public.

The preponderance of en masse activism in overseas Minyun, therefore, continued the tactical disposition that took shape in China. Activists consistently identified themselves in formal associations of “students and scholars,” which thereby reinforced notions that the authority to mount protest claims derived from their intelligentsia status. Petitions, demon-strations, and public collective statements were all ways of voicing claims as intelligentsia to homeland authorities on behalf of an imagined Chinese public. In spite of new social contexts for protest, the tactical disposition of mainland Minyun traveled with the movement across bor-ders and shaped its evolution overseas.

Falun Gong also exported from China its pattern of collective action. As shown above, the early repertoire of Falun Gong differed from that of Minyun according to its emphasis on face-to-face direct outreach. Looking into Falun Gong history, we can find prepolitical precedents in religious activities for such outreach activism. First, Falun Gong, like virtually all qigong health movements in China during the 1990s (Chen 1995; Palmer 2007), spread through people meet-ing in public parks to do the exercises together. In China, collective public practice of Falun Gong was an enactment of conventional routines. Redeploying those practices in order to formally explain Falun Gong to audiences was a diaspora transformation of these religious activities.

Face-to-face canvassing has a similar history. During Falun Gong’s surge into popularity between 1992 and 1999, followers in China adopted a proselytizing practice, called hongfa. Hongfa involves collectively entering public spaces, like a city park or a rural village, to recruit new members through one-to-one conversations about the benefits of Falun Gong (for more

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descriptions of hongfa, see Ownby 2003: 316-17). Not surprisingly, Falun Gong’s face-to-face approach to political activism grew out of, and merged with, proselytizing practices.

When Falun Gong was banned and activists in China mobilized defensively, both forms of action—public practice of the Falun Gong exercises and hongfa proselytizing—continued, but picked up new urgency and new significations, first in China and then in diaspora. When the state made Falun Gong illegal, both of these Falun Gong practices, including simply doing breathing exercises in public, became provocative acts of civil disobedience. In China, both practices also became preferred tactics by stalwart followers (Johnson 2004; Ownby 2008; Tong 2009). According to the inventory data, these two practices also became central to diaspora Falun Gong activism. As was true for Minyun, Falun Gong activists rapidly learned new forms of protest in diaspora, but the overall patterning of the repertoires, at least in the early period of the Falun Gong diaspora movement examined here, derived from practices in China.

My conclusion that tactical dispositions flowed with the movements from China to diaspora is based on the similarities we can observe across the settings and in the plausibility of pathways by which activists deployed practices in one setting that they had come to know (or learn about) from another setting. Nevertheless, one could make the alternative argument that it was strategic calculation, rather than enacting familiar practices, that led diaspora Minyun participants to focus on en masse activities and to not canvass bystander publics. Certainly, the data presented here are inadequate for deciding the matter. In my reading of diaspora Minyun discourses from the period, however, I have not come across any explicit discussion of this sort. Indeed, the routine tactics enacted by participants seem to have been automatic, whereas much debate and division swirled around the formal constitutions of Minyun organizations, when was the right time to establish an official opposition political party, and if violent resistance was warranted (Chen and Lu 1993-94; Ding 2008). Similarly, from the earliest moment of public Falun Gong discourse about opposition tactics, as can be read in the archives of the Minghui.org website, outreach activism had been assumed to be the most important form.17 To the extent that strategy was debated, it appears to have always focused on how best to influence the public, not whether such an orientation toward the public is justified at all.

A final question raised by the existence of durable tactical dispositions concerns structural determinism. I do not mean to conclude that the origins of a movement and its original patterns relative to authority and publics necessarily determine the movement’s future course, even when many contextual variables change. My argument has highlighted forces of continuity, but the same data could be examined for patterns of innovation. Under what circumstance and to what extent tactical dispositions determine outcomes are questions that require further research. Almost certainly the answer is complex and contingent on the circumstances of particular historical cases. The tension between what Tilly called “continuity and improvisation” is probably a universal feature of the relationship between tactics and context (Tilly 2008: 13). The value of the concept of tactical repertoires is that it helps us name and investigate the particular forces of continuity that are internal to movements.

CONCLUSION

Examining tactical repertoires of diaspora Minyun and Falun Gong reveal movement-specific patterns for how challengers, political authority, and the public relate during contention. Each movement’s tactical decisions were shaped by different tendencies and arrangements, with Minyun having a dyadic pattern in contrast to Falun Gong’s triadic pattern. Furthermore, such tactical dispositions were traced not to strategic decision making by activists, but to culturally recurrent patterns in action that emerged first in China and then moved overseas with the movements and their participants. The existence of durable tactical dispositions suggests that cultural reproduction occurred across time and transnational space, even as new tactics were

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being simultaneously adopted. Because tactical dispositions migrated across such radically different transnational settings, they ought to be seen as one of the “flows” of contemporary globalization.

How should we integrate the concept of “tactical dispositions” into the spectrum of theories about repertoires? On one hand, the persistence of patterns across time and space, even when goals and context change, fits nicely with Swidler’s (1986: 277) tool kit theory, which says that “styles or strategies of action will be more persistent than the ends people seek to attain.” Nevertheless, Swidler’s (2001) later work emphasizes actors matching known practices with external institutions. The persistence of tactical repertoires beyond their homeland political and institutional contexts is strong evidence against explaining the persistence according to external institutions. Therefore, the concept of tactical disposition belongs to those “deeper” cultural theories that posit internal processes (embodied or semiotic) to account for cultural repro-duction.

There remains need for more research on how variations in group culture can shape tactical creativity within social movements. Special attention ought to be given to the particular dy-namics that occur when religious cultural systems enter into the stream of political contention, since so much contemporary contention in the world involves religion. Furthermore, more atten-tion should be given to studying repertoires as entire sets of practices in order to explore their internal cultural configurations.

One final, and ironic, conclusion from the study also bears noting. The tactical disposition of Falun Gong, relative to Minyun, much more clearly emphasized citizen-to-citizen claim making and mobilization; by contrast, Minyun’s tactical disposition, undertaken in the name of democratization, emphasized a contest of authority between recognized political authorities and counterelites. From the vantage point of tactical dispositions, the Chinese new religious sect appears to have better realized an aspiration of progressive social movements, which is to bring ordinary citizens—not just elites—together as a consequential voice in political process. Yet the cultural dream that propelled the movement was not that of democracy and political freedom; instead, it was the dream of salvation and transcendence, formulated out of the abundant diversity of past and contemporary Chinese popular religious culture.

NOTES

1 I use the term “diaspora” like the Chinese term haiwai, which is often translated as “overseas.” Although event data in the study contains events mentioned in Hong Kong, I treat the diaspora Minyun movement as separate from the democracy movement of Hong Kong. 2 For example, Yang’s study of the Internet in China identifies the most forbidden topics to be the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations, the Falun Gong, and independent political parties (Yang 2009: 53). 3 Data for 1989 was received through correspondence from the International Institute of Education. 4 Pronounced “chee gong.” 5 For instance, see “Teaching the Fa at the Western U.S. Fa Conference,” retrieved October 2, 2013 (http://www.falundafa. org/book/eng/ daohang_1.htm). 6 Overseas Minyun was primarily composed of foreign students and scholars, but in China the student-led protests of 1989 attracted support and involvement by urban residents, professional associations, and factory workers. 7 See the United Nations Global Migration Database (UNGMD), retrieved March 29, 2010 (http://esa. un.org/ unmigration/index.aspx). 8 Including what Franzosi (2009) terms input-output and semantic coherence verification. 9 All 8,796 article titles were entered into a spreadsheet and then SPSS was used to randomly select 6 percent. The number to be coded was based on estimates of how long it would take to code each article, resources available, and what number would be large enough to allow for valid inferences. 10 According to personal communications with the original publisher. 11 On average, Falun Gong narratives mention more forms of action per event than Minyun accounts. The ratios of action form to event, defined by distinct time and place, are as follows: Falun Gong = 1.97; Minyun-E = 1.24; and Minyun-J = 1.19. The higher ratio for Falun Gong means that Falun Gong contained more detail and/or that more forms of action occurred at events. 12 For example, see “The Effect of Righteous Thoughts,” retrieved September 21, 2013 (http://en.minghui.org/ html/articles/2001/7/18/12385.html).

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13 My interview data suggest that Falun Gong activists have their own consensual practices for making group decis-ions at the local level. 14 Falun Gong practitioners, however, have repeatedly insisted to me in person that they do not do any fundraising. Participants contribute their own money for all immediate expenses, except where income is generated through sales of tickets to performances or advertising in Falun Gong media, which are practices that became more common after the early phase of Falun Gong mobilization examined here. 15 Leafleting and canvassing appeared once in the Minyun-E data and five times in the Minyun-J data, which is less than 1 percent of either data set. Public collective statements appeared 13 times in the Falun Gong data, accounting for 1.4 percent of the dataset. 16 See http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disposition and http://oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_ /disposition, retrieved September 21, 2013. 17 For instance, see http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/1999/7/21/3087.html, retrieved September 24, 2013.

APPENDIX: METHODOLOGY Falun Gong Data

Falun Gong has a primary, authoritative website, referred to in English as Clear Wisdom (Bell and

Boas 2003; Lu 2005; Ownby 2008; Penny 2012; Thornton 2010). The website is comprised of mostly user-generated postings, which are edited and formatted as if in a newspaper. The Chinese version of the website (www.minghui.org) keeps an archive of each day’s postings, organized by category and date, which included roughly 150,000 article titles for 2000 through 2008, when downloaded in March 2009.

The two-year Falun Gong dataset was drawn from postings to the “Diaspora News” category of the site, published between October 1, 2000, and September 30, 2002. Within these two years, the Minghui website archived a total is 8,796 postings classified as diaspora news (roughly 12 per day). From these, SPSS was used to generate a random sample of 535 articles, or about 6 percent. These articles were all read and coded for information on protest events undertaken in diaspora. Not all articles contained information on protest events and some articles contained information on more than one event. The total data set from the sample included 367 articles and 506 events, defined by unique start time and place.

The Minyun Data

Because the 1989 democracy protests in China occurred before the Internet, diaspora Minyun communication about protests followed other channels. In consideration of these constraints, Minyun data were compiled from two different sources, each of which parallels the Falun Gong data in different ways.

The Minyun Electronic (“Minyun-E”) Data. Minyun-E transcripts from 1989 online communication during the Tiananmen protests share significant structural similarities with the Falun Gong data. However, in view of comparison, Minyun-E also has important limits. First, unlike the Internet today, access to internationally networked computers was limited in 1989 and therefore selected for certain types of users. Minyun participants who used the “Social Culture China” online community had access to it through a university-owned networked computer. Another constraint of the era was that Chinese fonts for electronic communication had not yet been invented. All communication was in English. Therefore, in order to con-tribute to what became the Minyun-E data, a person needed to be comfortable communicating in English and have access to a networked computer. In spite of this limitation, it appears that many overseas Chinese students and scholars met these conditions. Also, information passed through electronic channels was secondarily shared through social networks and contributing writers frequently wrote and posted messages on behalf of friends who did not have direct access.

Still two more shortcomings from the electronic mail transcriptions need to be noted: the data source only covers six months of time and the publishing editors at Stockholm University abridged the contents such that selection bias may distort the picture of collective action that emerges from the materials (Ståhle and Uimonen 1989: vol 1, pp. xxxiii-xxxvi). The published transcripts are in two volumes. Volume one, which covers February to June 4, contains many more protest event narratives than volume two, which covers June 5 to July 4. If editorial selection rules were applied inconsistently favoring commentarial texts over protest event narratives in the second volume, distortion in the data would occur. However, there is no reason to believe that selection practices were systematically related to the types of action narrated by the original authors. Furthermore, the overall portrait of Minyun’s repertoires derived from Minyun-E looks plausible when compared to Minyun-J.

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In collecting event data from Minyun-E, all of the transcripts were read and all articles narrating any kind of collective action outside of mainland China were coded. Unlike in the Falun Gong data, Minyun-E was coded in the style of a census rather than a sample: the total population of events was included. Minyun-E included a total of 435 protest events, defined by unique start time and place.

The Minyun Journal (“Minyun-J”) Data. Given the limitations of the Minyun electronic data, I also compiled data from two diaspora Chinese democracy journals: China Spring, which was published out of New York in Chinese on a monthly basis throughout the period of data collection, and Min Zhu Zhongguo, which translates either to “Democracy China” or “People Rule China.” The latter was the flagship journal of the Federation for a Democratic China (Minzhu zhongguo zhenxian), which was founded in the fall of 1990 in Paris by leaders of the Tiananmen Square protests who had fled abroad. The journal’s first issue was published in September 1990; it came out bimonthly for the remainder of the data collection period. Given that both journals were only distributed in print, contents were edited and subject to cost considerations. Although dissimilar from the Minghui data in that regard, the democracy journals data have the benefit of being in Chinese and covering a much broader span of time.

The data from the democracy journals cover two years, from February 1989, through January 1991. As in the Minyun-E data, all articles mentioning diaspora collective actions were coded. The Minyun-J data included a total of 464 protest events, defined by unique start time and place.

Coding Procedures Falun Gong and Minyun-J data were coded by a single bilingual coder. Minyun-E was coded by

two coders who cannot read Chinese. Their work was secondarily verified by the bilingual coder. Inter-coder reliability was assured by following common coding procedures, randomized input-output veri-fication, and semantic coherence verification for all data (2009: 89-90).

Event dates are the initial date of action mentioned in the event narrative. Some events lasted for more than a day or were regularly occurring. Regularly occurring forms of action, like daily vigils conducted by Falun Gong activists outside of embassies and consulates, only appear occasionally in the source, so they are significantly undercounted. Such undercounts are probably more common for Falun Gong than Minyun.

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