Word: falun
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...fine, but public displays of religiosity outside the confines of state-controlled institutions are not. China's history is filled with religious uprisings against the state, like the millenarian cults that helped usher out China's last imperial dynasty, the Qing. Hence the continuing crackdown against the meditation movement Falun Gong or the raid last month on an unofficial Bible study in central Henan province that was termed "evil cult" activity by the police. In northwestern Xinjiang, where the Chinese government is fighting a separatist movement by the Uighur ethnic group, Muslim activity outside of state mosques is suppressed...
China's President isn't used to being heckled. But last Thursday, as Hu Jintao addressed reporters at the White House during his U.S. visit, a woman from a newspaper run by the meditation sect Falun Gong loudly interrupted him, calling him a "murderer" and threatening that his days were numbered. Among other allegations, Falun Gong, which is banned in China, accuses Chinese hospitals of harvesting organs from executed prisoners - including some of the sect's own members - and selling them for transplants. But Falun Gong activists aren't the only ones concerned about China's organ trade...
China's President isn't used to being heckled. But last Thursday, as Hu Jintao addressed reporters at the White House during his U.S. visit, a woman from a newspaper run by the meditation sect Falun Gong loudly interrupted him, calling him a "murderer" and threatening that his days were numbered. Among other allegations, Falun Gong, which is banned in China, accuses Chinese hospitals of harvesting organs from executed prisoners-including some of the sect's own members-and selling them for transplants...
...Falun Gong activists aren't the only ones concerned about China's organ trade. A day before Hu's interrupted White House speech, the British Transplantation Society, a group of 800 surgeons, issued a statement criticizing the use of death-row prisoners' organs in transplants-because it cannot verify China's claim that it only procures organs from prisoners who have given consent. "I don't believe anybody in a prison would be sitting around having voluntary consent discussions," says bioethicist Arthur Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania...
...without any real progress on these issues, Hu's first visit to the White House was marked more by visuals than anything else. There was the well-choreographed arrival on the South Lawn, which was upset by a "journalist" for a newspaper run by the Falun Gong, who protested China's crackdown on the religious sect. "Of course we knew she was with a Falun Gong paper," said a senior Administration official trying to explain the snafu. "But if we'd kept her out, the world would have screamed that we were guilty of censorship." So her cries came...