Millions of young Chinese follow contactees who claim to receive messages from the aliens. Some end up in jail.
by Zhao Zhangyong
UFOs are coming back to China after a period of decline. As evidenced by social media, millions of young people are interested in UFOs and extraterrestrials, which is creating some concerns in the Chinese Communist Party.
The theme was popular in the late 1970s and 1980s, when UFO sightings were discussed in official media, and a China UFO Research Association was founded at Wuhan University and allowed to exist. Magazines and books devoted to the UFOs were widely read, particularly by college students.
UFO beliefs gained legitimacy and popularity in the 1990s, when they were openly embraced by the most popular novelist among young Chinese in these years, Ke Yunlu. Precisely because of his promotion of UFOs and qigong in the 1990s, Ke is somewhat less popular now, although his 1984 novel “A New Star” (新星), originally published in 1984 about an ambitious local Party bureaucrat who rises to national prominence through his campaign against corruption, is now read again in China. In fact, some believe it anticipated the rise of Xi Jinping.
Ke also promoted Hu Wanlin, a controversial healer from Sichuan who claimed he can cure most illnesses through qigong and herbal therapies. After Hu was accused of causing the death of several of his patients and ended up in jail, Ke had to produce two texts of self-criticism.
Before moving to writing acclaimed novels on the Cultural Revolution, Ke published in the 1990s widely read UFO books, where he claimed that Jesus was either the son of an extraterrestrial who had kidnapped his mother Mary and taken her to his spaceship, or had learned his doctrines from aliens. This part of Ke’s career is generally not mentioned in Chinese publications celebrating him as a significant writer. Memories of his UFO books, however, still remain.
What made UFO literature less tolerated in China was the government’s decision to crack down on Falun Gong in 1999. Since Falun Gong also includes UFO themes among its beliefs and literature, any other groups mentioning contacts with the aliens become suspicious. In the 21st century, discussing theoretically the possibility of extraterrestrial life was still permitted, but literature and groups who claimed that “contactees” were in touch with the aliens were much less tolerated and often labeled as xie jiao (“heterodox teachings,” sometimes translated as “evil cults”).
The most famous domestic UFO group in China was the Galactic Federation (银河联邦), founded by a woman called Zheng Hui (郑辉), born in 1966 in Nanning city, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. She was college-educated and worked at China Telecom until 2013, when she resigned to devote herself full-time to the activities of the Galactic Federation under the name of “Master Miao Le” (妙乐上师).
Zheng, an educated woman, was familiar with Western UFO literature (some of whose texts had been translated into Chinese in the 1980s and 1990s) and mentioned names familiar in Western UFO groups such as the Pleiadians and their commander Ashtar Sheran, the chief of the Galactic Federation. She identified Ashtar Sheran with Buddha, and claimed that he had appointed her as “Princess Buddha,” the representative on Earth of the Galactic Federation.
Not surprisingly, the Galactic Federation was declared a xie jiao in 2015 by the People’s Court of Qingxiu district in Nanning city, and started being included in lists of xie jiao by the China Anti-Cult Association. Zheng received an eight-year sentence under Article 300 of the Chinese Criminal Code, which prohibits establishing and being active in xie jiao, and is still in jail. Her group, however, maintains followers openly active in the Chinese diaspora abroad.
What the court that sentenced Zheng Hui had not understood is that her Galactic Federation, as an organized group, was just the tip of the iceberg. There were hundreds of UFO contactees in China, and references to the Pleiadians and Ashtar Sheran were not exclusive to Zheng’s movement.
During the COVID epidemic, contactees surfaced again, and the alternative theories that the virus was of extraterrestrial origin or that only benevolent aliens can put an end to the pandemic through their superior technology proliferated again. Some Weibo accounts presenting UFO theories and contactees gathered more than one million followers. Contactees who advanced what looked like “religious” claims have been taken to police stations and detained.
Certain Weibo accounts have been closed, only to be reopened under different names, initially claiming that they were only discussing “scientific hypotheses” and did not want to promote any xie jiao. The new popularity of UFO theories and messages among young Chinese is part of their attempt to find answers to their questions, which they feel the Communist Party is not delivering. Some of these answers may appear to many as strange or even ridiculous. However, in democratic countries, stories about the UFOs are freely discussed, and those who tell them do not risk to go to jail.