MCLC: Chinese Mayan-doomsday cult

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Anne Henochowicz <annemh at alumni.upenn.edu>
Subject: Chinese Mayan-doomsday cult
***********************************************************

Source: The New Yorker
(12/19/12):http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/evanosnos/2012/12/chinese-
mayan-doomsday-cult.html

What’s with the Chinese Mayan-Doomsday Cult?
Posted by Evan Osnos

China has rounded up five hundred or so members of a fringe Christian
group known as the Church of the Almighty God, which contends that the
world will end on Friday. It had been distributing pamphlets and sending
out cell-phone messages around the country warning, as one pamphlet put
it: 
<http://articles.latimes.com/2012/dec/17/world/la-fg-china-doomsday-arrests
-20121218> “December 21st is approaching, and on that day half of the
world’s good people will die, and all evil people will die out—only if you
join the Almighty God movement can you avoid death and be saved.” The
group also predicts
<http://news.sky.com/story/1026951/china-cracks-down-on-doomsday-cults>
that “the sun will not shine and electricity will not work for three
days,” according to the state press.

China is more taken with doomsday talk than you might expect; the
thoroughly middlebrow Mayan-related thriller “2012” was such a box-office
smash in China that it came back for a 3-D run. But it was the Almighty
God’s more pointed message that really caught the Party’s attention. The
group—which teaches, among other things, that Jesus Christ returned to
earth in the form of a Henan woman named Deng—was known to call China “a
fortress of demons,” and it exhorted its followers
<http://www.duihuahrjournal.org/2012/12/chinas-almighty-god-rises-with-thre
at.html> “to destroy the great red dragon.”

Once the group was in the crosshairs, doomsday threats were being
mentioned everywhere. Police in the province of Henan, where a man, last
Friday, attacked a school with a knife, injuring twenty-two children, said
that the suspect had been inspired by “doomsday beliefs” peddled by a
local woman who predicted, as the state press put it, that “the end of the
world is coming and the earth will explode.” State television also used it
as an occasion to mention that it would step up “our anti-self-immolation
fight,” a curious reference to the nearly one hundred Tibetans who have
set themselves on fire since 2009 in protest of Chinese policies.

China has a long history of religion-infused political rebellions, dating
at least to the nineteenth century, when a group called the Taiping
Heavenly Kingdom attempted to overthrow the emperor. But these days the
Party is especially uncomfortable with obscure religious beliefs because,
in the post-Socialist era, many in China have begun to hunt for something
to believe. At times, it can feel like half the people at a dinner table
are trying out a new guru. In my neighborhood the other day, I was walking
down a hutong that hugs the eastern wall of the Confucius Temple, when I
came upon a new set of official posters on the bulletin board. They were
cartoons with big-headed smiling figures and puffy comic-book writing,
beneath the title, “Be On The Lookout for Cults, Build Harmony.”

This was the latest offering from the government body known as the Beijing
Counter-Cult Association. The association seems to be especially busy in
our neighborhood because it’s ground zero for spiritual activity of one
kind or another in the capital. In addition to the Confucius Temple, it is
home to the Lama Temple (Beijing’s largest Tibetan monastery) and it has
several blocks of fortune tellers. The new posters contained a set of
instructions: “Countermeasures for the Falun Gong’s Everyday Tricks of
Trouble-Making and Destruction.”

It’s been thirteen years since China cracked down on the Falun Gong
spiritual movement, arresting practitioners and pressuring them to
renounce their beliefs. (The group’s status was the subject of a hearing
<http://www.cecc.gov/pages/roundtables/general/roundtable2/index.php> this
week before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China.) But China
maintains a fierce opposition to the group, and the posters provided a
sense of how the government perceives that kind of threat.

One cartoon showed a smiling trio of women. It turned out, according to
the poster, that they were “forming secret ties and an underground gang to
cause trouble and destruction.” Another panel showed a man running around
town, posting what was described as “reactionary slogans and banners and
counter-propaganda on front doors, and in bicycle sheds, and mailboxes.”
One more cartoon showed a woman at a computer, where she discovered that
cults will “use computer networks to create and spread all manner of
rumors, and throw social order into disorder.”

The last cartoon I saw before I continued on my way showed a group of men
talking about what happens in the halls of official power in Beijing—a
fairly common occurrence in a year like this. But that, the cartoon
explained, was a trick known as, “Using hot topics that people are
interested in to make a ruckus, confuse public opinion, and damage stable
communities.” The poster suggested a countermeasure: “Keep away from the
back-alley grapevine, avoid being taken advantage of by cults.” It showed
a hand on which was written four habits to remember: “Don’t listen, don’t
read, don’t share, and don’t join.”