Provocateur E-mails Frame Spiritual Group, Bewilder Recipients

For months now e-mails have been going out around the world to academics, politicians, nongovernmental organizations, and media workers, making unhinged, overzealous, and often maniacal claims. The senders say they are practitioners of Falun Gong, (also known as Falun Dafa) a Chinese spiritual discipline. Recipients, who may be greeted as “You garbage-brained idiot,” often don’t know what to think.

Scott Lowe, a professor and chair of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, was met with that salutation in an Oct. 12 e-mail last year. “Odd, to say the least,” he observed in an e-mail to The Epoch Times.

Lowe had received similar e-mails every few days for a couple of months until recently. “They were pretty weird and made me immediately suspicious,” he said.

The e-mails he received included out-of-the-blue requests with no context, written in wacky Chinglish, for advice on matters of Falun Gong doctrine, or contained excerpts of experiences of Falun Gong practitioners from Falun Gong websites.

Executive Director of the Falun Dafa Information Center Levi Browde, believes that what Lowe received was part of a concerted, albeit strange, campaign. “These e-mails are the latest attempt by the Chinese Communist Party to destroy the reputation of Falun Gong,” he said in an interview.

Someone calling himself “Mike Strike” was particularly interested in giving the appearance of heavy-handed proselytizing to Lowe. Lowe was not sure whether he was dealing with a Chinese provocateur or an overly enthusiastic Falun Gong follower.

“It’s a perfectly weird thing to send someone you don’t know,” he wrote.

“I, at least, know what Falun Gong is, so I have some context for the story being recounted. If I were, say, a foreign diplomat or government employee who’d received the e-mail, I’d presumably think whoever sent it was unhinged,” he wrote.

After the Falun Dafa Information Center published a press release describing the e-mails, dozens of recipients in various fields have forwarded what they received to the information center.

Kyle Thomas, a psychology researcher at Harvard University, received a plaintive note on April 26 from “Simone, a senior high school student living in America.”

The e-mail began by saying that Falun Gong is “the most supernaturalscience” and that the founder of Falun Gong “has a lot of special thoughts, which are attractive to me very much.” Then it elaborated on how the practice was apparently making her paranoid about her friends and family.

The e-mail was traced back to Hangzhou, China, according to the header information made available to The Epoch Times.

“Simone Yuang” has a history of sending such e-mails. Simone Yuang was the same name used by someone claiming to be a Falun Gong practitioner in an e-mail sent to all of the Auckland, New Zealand, city councilors on Feb. 25. That e-mail said that those people who died in the Christchurch earthquake got what they deserved. Councilor Cathy Casey characterized that e-mail as “reprehensible.”

When Kyle Thomas was informed of the provenance of the e-mail he received, he wrote: “Wow, how ridiculous. I don’t know anything about Falun Gong… but I can’t believe the [Chinese] government cares enough to do stupid things like this. I was mainly just confused by the e-mail.”

With the direct-sell approach of sending out e-mails the CCP is able to circumvent the discredited state-media propaganda model and get its message in front of VIPs in the form of concocted, irrational Falun Gong testimonials, interviewees said.

“It’s a new way of packaging an old message,” says Browde. “But the propaganda line is the same.”

Read More...Propaganda Against Falun Gong

The propaganda against Falun Gong began when the communist regime, fearing that more people had taken up this spiritual practice than were members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), launched its attempt to “eradicate” the practice. An internal Party memo from that time sets forth a three-pronged strategy to do this: destroying the reputation of Falun Gong practitioners, bankrupting them financially, and physically destroying them.

Many of the underlying themes in the e-mails echo the basic propaganda messages of the Party-state’s 12-year anti-Falun Gong campaign: that Falun Gong is irrational, bizarre, menacing, dangerous, or simply unworthy of respect, Browde says.

Lucy Zhou, a spokesperson for Falun Gong practitioners in Canada, says that the e-mails also show the failure of the Party’s campaign to agitate against Falun Gong.

“After so many years many people in Western society learned the truth and found out that they were spreading hate propaganda, and so they were ignoring them. Now the CCP invents this new way,” she said. “It is just so low, base, and indecent.”

“If it’s misinformation, the method is relatively subtle,” Lowe said. They don’t need to take care with what is sent, since “the point is to cast doubt. … The e-mails just need to muddy the waters, so that the next time the recipient reads something about the movement they’ll think, ‘Oh, right. It’s those crazy people who send me weird e-mails out of the blue. Perhaps they’re harmless, but you can’t be sure.’”

Browde said that if people don’t realize the e-mails are fake, they could have the effect of marginalizing Falun Gong practitioners, even with would-be supporters.

Every e-mail comes with a set of technical information called a header. In some mail services, such as Yahoo, headers contain the location of the sender. Gmail’s headers do not, however.

The information center was able to trace many of the e-mails sent with Yahoo to China by sifting through the header information and looking up the IP addresses. Some came from Wuhan, some Beijing, others Hangzhou.

While it is impossible to know the breadth of the campaign, the sampling of e-mails reviewed by The Epoch Times indicates that dissemination was potentially extensive.

Recipients came from a broad background, including legislators in Canberra, Australia, local officials in Auckland, New Zealand, elected officials, graduate students, and professors in the United States, and journalists, researchers, and city councilors in Canada.

The e-mails exhibited distinct tendencies, from making outright threats with hostile language, to sorrowful stories of the troubles brought by Falun Gong, to direct excerpts from Falun Gong websites without context.

The CCP has a rich history of strategic deception and perception management, according to research produced by scholars over the six decades of the Party’s history.

These are sometimes called “psychological operations,” where Chinese state actors seek to advance the interests of the Party-state by influencing the thoughts of outsiders on any given topic.

“Perception management is part of a continuous Chinese effort to influence how other nations perceive Chinese interests and actions,” says a research report produced by the Science Applications International Corporation.

The fraudulent e-mails come under this explanation, according to experts on Chinese propaganda.

Zhang Kaichen, a former director of propaganda in the northern Chinese city of Shenyang, said he was not particularly surprised by the idea.

“They’ve been doing the persecution for 12 years, and now they’re like ‘the donkey that exhausted its tricks,’” he said, drawing on an old Chinese phrase. “They’re at their wits end, they’ve got no other better way to attack Falun Gong. They’re left doing this quite ridiculous behavior now,” Zhang said.

The incompetent manner in which the message was delivered, and how easily traceable it was back to China, also did not come as a surprise to Zhang. For people working for communist bureaucrats it’s a case of simply “completing the task, completing the task.”

“This technique could be effective on people who don’t understand Falun Gong,” says He Qinglian, a prominent commentator and economist who has written a book on media control in China.

“They can reach a really huge number of people like this. Even if it’s just five percent of people who read and believe it, they’ve reached the propaganda effect.”

“Throughout history the Communist Party has always sought to slander the reputation of its enemy,” He Qinglian said.

“This elaborate form of deception is mindboggling to Westerners,” Browde said. “Who would think that a major government would engage in such intricate subterfuge to discredit practitioners of a spiritual discipline?”

Marginalizing Falun Gong practitioners has real world consequences too according to Browde. “The Communist Party will have a freer hand to persecute practitioners in labor camps.”