After 50 years of turning outward, China and its people are turning inward. This is the real lesson of the rapidly spreading Fa-lun-gong movement and of the Communist government's crackdown. PNS editor Franz Schurmann, professor emeritus at UC-Berkeley, has traveled widely in China and reads extensively in the Chinese media.

When troubled, nations, like people, tend to turn outwards or inwards.

For 50 years, China has been looking outwards. "The public is great, the private is trivial" was the great mantra of the Chinese revolution. Looking inward has long been viewed as a sign of weakness.

Now, suddenly, China is turning inwards, a shift that signals Chinese at all levels are feeling profoundly troubled. Nowhere is this more evident than in the spread of the spiritual movement known as Fa-lun-gong, and the government's determination to crush it.

"Fa-lun" is a Chinese translation of a Hindu concept which means the Wheel of Truth which crushes all falsehood. Gong means a spiritual power greater than any other power in the world. The spark that ignited the movement is a middle-aged trumpet player, now living in New York named Li Hongzhi. Like so many messianic preachers of other places and times, Li Hongzhi's teachings encompass both despair and hope -- a combination that clearly resonates with the soul of more and more Chinese people both inside and outside the country.

The movement's strongest following, astonishingly, is among old people -- men and women who were ten years old in 1950, the "golden age" of the Chinese Communist revolution. Too young to fight in the various wars in and out of China, they were fired by a Communist ideology that had moral power similar to that of Buddhism, Christianity and Islam.

Now they are old and troubled by what they see around them. Last April they surrounded Zhongnanhai, the compound where all top government leaders live, right next to Tiananmen Square. Ever since they have been demonstrating in front of broadcasting stations, furious over media attacks that dismiss them as superstitious crazies.

Corruption and feudalism bother them deeply. They know, too, that Mao Zedong failed because the Marxist doctrine of class struggle as the motor force of history came to a dead end. Now Deng Xiaoping and his successors are failing because the American model of consumer capitalism they adopted is also coming to a dead end-- evident in China's escalating deflation.

For decades these oldsters have admired the Communist government for what it has achieved, notably unifying a sprawling country and giving it stability. Today they speak about how the once revolutionary Communist government seems only able to tinker and repair; that it no longer has vision and faith. And now, as it faces serious internal problems and major setbacks in its international relations, it is acting towards Fa-lun-gong the way so many regimes in the past would have done. The old generals, cadres, workers and peasants are full of reproach. With every crackdown, they see it as forfeiting its charisma and moral credibility.

Retirement in China comes in the early 60s, but a recent government generational policy encourages old people to go back to workplaces as mentors and advisers to young workers and students and middle aged managers. Not surprisingly, many of the old pass on the wisdom they have gleaned from Fa-lun-gong and other spiritual beliefs.

Fa-lun-gong ideas are spreading fast, by word of mouth and even through the media publicity given them by furious official attacks. But no amount of government suppression can cut the ties between old and young.

In 1845 Hong Xiuquan, the peasant-born intellectual of the great Taiping (Great Peace) Rebellion (1851-64), read a just-translated New Testament and was taken by its mix of despair and hope. He felt he was the younger brother of Jesus and founded the God-worship Association. Less than ten years later his Taiping movement had conquered most of China.

It could happen again and those in the Zhongnanhai government compound know it. That is why as they prepare for their annual policy meeting in the Beidaihe beach resort, they too are turning inward.