Herman Salton

Arctic Host, Icy Visit: China and Falun Gong Face off in Iceland Herman Salton

In July 1999, when the Chinese Government declared war on a peaceful spiritual movement called Falun Gong, few expected that a showdown would be taking place in one of the most remote countries in the world. Yet when President Jiang Zemin paid an official visit to Iceland in June 2002, the heart of the harsh struggle between these two antagonists moved to the Arctic. In contrast to the violence of the anti-Falun Gong campaign in China, one would have expected democratic Iceland to be even-handed and to allow peaceful protests against Mr Jiang. But the host was in no mood to tolerate dissent: it banned Falun Gong practitioners from the country; used a secret blacklist to identify actual and presumed members of the spiritual movement; ordered the national airline to deny them passage; and arrested those who managed to slip through the net. This book analyzes these little-known yet extraordinary events and argues that they are only one example of the multiple ways in which a rising China successfully manages to export its authoritarian methods abroad. For Beijing, the world has become a stage on which its battle against internal dissent is mercilessly waged.