Word: crackdowns
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...year-old boy with a stiff cowlick waits at the safe house near a cabbage field on Beijing's dusty outskirts. He is a Falun Gong orphan, living testimony of the crackdown's wreckage. His family members were neighborhood leaders, lieutenants in the group's structure. When the crackdown began, the boy returned from school to find police surrounding his home. Twenty days later, the authorities broke in to discover his granny and aunt hanging side by side in a dual suicide, presumably to avoid persecution. They incarcerated the boy's mother in the kindergarten where she taught. She slept...
...immolations on Jan. 23 became a propaganda bonanza for the government and marked a turning point in its anti-Falun Gong campaign. China's newspapers and TV screens were covered with grisly images of smoldering human forms. Before that day, many Chinese had felt the crackdown had gone too far?that Falun Gong posed no real threat. With the immolations, the government's six-month propaganda campaign portraying Falun Gong as an "evil cult" that unhinged its followers seemed more credible...
...small city in southern China, 2,000 km from Beijing, the incident gave a typical follower pause. The young artist began practicing Falun Gong in 1996 after finding a book of Li Hongzhi's lectures at a friend's house. After the crackdown, he put his thumbprint on a police document promising he would never again practice, but he was lying. He never joined in the political protests, but at home he continued meditating and gliding through the slow-motion exercises, jealously guarding his secret belief. But the deaths shook his faith in the movement. "It's wrong for people...
...Chinese companies are ground zero in the crackdown. At a state-run winch factory in Beijing, workers still follow the communist tradition of group exercises every morning at 10. Falun Gong practitioners once conducted their own meditation sessions to musical accompaniment in the factory yard. Then came the Beijing protest two years ago. Days later, managers drew up lists of practitioners. They fired those who attended any demonstrations, including three in a workshop run by a foreman surnamed Lai. Today, Lai is responsible for watching the several practitioners who remain on the job. If any of them protest, he says...
...Foreign companies are generally not required to participate in the crackdown, but working for foreigners is not always a haven for Falun Gong members. Indiana-based Cummins Inc., for instance, complied with state orders to investigate workers at its engine factory in Beijing, putting its company stamp on a document for police stating that no employees practice Falun Gong. Had it found practitioners, however, "the government would have wanted us to report them, so we would have," says a company spokesperson. Chen Gang began working in 1996 for a joint venture of Carlsberg Breweries, the Danish brewer, and quickly rose...