UNLIKE HONG KONG, where the Falun Gong spiritual movement has become a cause celebre, the sect is confronted with a mixture of general disinterest and open antipathy in Macau.
Although Falun Gong claims to have about 100 members in Macau, insiders acknowledge the real figure has fallen to about two dozen since Beijing banned the movement on the mainland in July 1999.
The sect is not banned in Macau, but it is not legally registered as an association either, leading the Government to regard the movement as officially non-existent in Macau. However, plainclothes detectives of the local security forces are known to regularly monitor the activities of individual Falun Gong members.
There are various reasons for the sect's predicament in Macau, traditionally a bastion of Chinese patriotism. Pro-Beijing conservatives are, quite naturally, hostile to a movement branded as an 'evil cult' by the central Government. However, Macau's liberals and pro-democracy activists are also not particularly sympathetic to the movement, which most of them regard as politically retrogressive for its perceived rehash of superstitious prejudices that originated in feudal China.
Better-educated residents are especially prone to dismiss the sect's anti-scientific stance as irresponsible hocus-pocus, such as its claim that old age and disease are caused by a demonic 'black energy mass' and that 'ordinary people' - the movement's term for non-members - are possessed by 'demons of sex' and other evil forces.
Macau takes great pride in its multiculturalism and centuries-old mixture of races. Little wonder then that many residents, namely those of mixed racial descent, are repelled by the ethnocentric diatribes of the sect's leader, Li Hongzhi, who states in his rambling treatise, Zhuan Falun (Revolving the Wheel of Law), that 'the races in the world are not allowed to be mixed up . . . mixed races have lost their roots . . . they belong to nowhere'.
Not surprisingly, Mr Li also advocates a sort of celestial apartheid by claiming that different races will go to different heavens and that those of mixed race are condemned to an uncertain afterlife - 'nobody in the paradise will take care of them'.