Beijing launches anti-cult month

In the latest battle against cultish beliefs, the city is bringing a campaign into communities, turning families into the new beachhead in its war on heresy.

Beijing will focus work on promoting the "families say no to cults" campaign in the city's "anti-cult educational month," according to a press release-like article in yesterday's Beijing Evening News.

The anti-cult month started yesterday, said the director of the secretary's office of Beijing Anti-Cult Association (BACA), who asked to be identified only by his surname, Pang. BACA is a nongovernmental organization undertaking the campaign on behalf of an anti-cult arm of the municipal committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC).

BACA handed out more than 100,000 brochures yesterday to community representatives at a launch ceremony of the new campaign in Fengtai district, Pang told the Global Times. These materials urge the readers to walk away from cultish teachings, Pang said.

Working with families is an effective tactic in curbing cults, he said.

"Adherents tend to convert their families so that an entire family joins the same cultish group," he told the Global Times.

On the other hand, a practitioner can be reached through his family.

A person may not have a job - many adherents are retirees or unemployed - but he has a family, Pang said, which means the family-based campaign can cover the most targets possible.

By participating in the campaign, families promise to ensure that no one from their homes will get involved with cults, according to Pang.

An anti-cult official at the municipal committee of the CPC declined to comment yesterday.

The Chinese supreme court defined a cult organization in 1999 as any group that manipulates its followers based on superstition and deification of its leader. A cult is also carefully distinguished from the orthodox forms of religions.

"Chinese history is no stranger to heretic speeches that bewitched followers and incited disorder, and governments of past dynasties all punished cults," read a copyrighted article on the website of China Anti-Cult Association.

"In its early years, the People's Republic of China banned Yiguandao [a cult group]." The website contains many anti-Falun Gong accounts, such as descriptions from former adherents of how the group wrecked their families. China outlawed Falun Gong in the 1990s.