Hi and welcome back to malicious life in collaboration with cyberism.

A quick note before we begin, this episode follows from the content covered in our last.

If you haven't yet, go listen to our episode on the Great Firewall of China

and come back when you're finished. I'll be waiting. When Western technology companies marketed research, good services and employees to China

to help build the most impressive internet censorship and

cyber-spying apparatus in the world they were acting apolitically.

The consequences of those actions, however, were far from apolitical.

Take, for instance, the Falun Gong religious movement.

In a vacuum, Falun Gong isn't the most attractive protagonist of a podcast episode.

In addition to peace, meditation and and transcendence.

Its founder, Lee Hong Jé, is one of those religious leaders

who also preaches about the immorality of homosexuality

and aliens on earth influencing global politics.

In the US and Europe, Falun Gong is known for aligning with the alt-right, most notably by having

founded the Epoch Times, a pro-Trump paper with a

panache for conspiracies.

And the movement's official emblem, the felon, is basically just a bunch of swastikas.

Now look on its own I get it for thousands of years before the Nazis

the swastika was a perfectly innocent symbol in ancient Buddhism.

But considering Falun Gong was invented in the 1990s, you'd figure they could have gone with like anything else. So Falunong may be off-putting, but in the mid-90s they came under the ire of the Chinese state, in a way

you wouldn't wish upon your worst enemies.

The movement was growing and failing to comply with the secular government's

...