Word: gongli
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Although foreign companies often provide havens for practitioners, many comply with the authorities' demands. Indiana-based Cummins Inc., for example, followed government orders to investigate workers at its Beijing engine factory and issued a document to the police stating that nobody practiced Falun Gong. Had it found Falun Gong followers, says a company spokesman, "the government would have wanted us to report them, so we would have [done so]." Nor is Cummins alone. Chen Gang began working in 1996 for Carlsberg Brewery, the Danish firm that produces one of China's most popular beers. Police last year sentenced...
...success in breaking the movement, the government has not yet addressed the sense of spiritual emptiness that gave birth to Falun Gong. Incense smoke flows thick in Buddhist temples across China, and the number of Christians has increased tenfold, to roughly 40 million, since the communists first swept to power. Even Liu Shujuan, the apostate who now leads others away, seems ambivalent about her conversion. "It's hard to say," she replies when asked whether she would still practice had the government not banned Falun Gong. Pause. A glance at her government minders. "I think it's still better...
...weekday mornings Kery Wilkie Nunez does her Falun Gong exercises with two or three commuters next to the Dunn Loring metro station in the Virginia suburbs of Washington. The buzz from the nearby highway and the bustle of the rushing crowds aren't a problem. "You become peaceful and tranquil inside," says Nunez. It's different for the three or four doctors who do their exercises from 5:30 to 7:30 a.m. near the library of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. All they hear are birds chirping. Steven Reani does his exercises in the early morning...
...sense, Falun Gong followers in the U.S. are typical of their time and place. Like other Americans, they catch their religion, their health regime, their holistic exercise, their personal fulfillment--whatever Falun Gong may be--on the run. And Falun Gong is typical of modern America in another way: as soon as a new path to self-fulfillment opens up, it is crowded with a rainbow assortment of followers. In inner-city Washington, popular sessions with new practitioners are held each week in a house that stands in the shadow of the I-395 expressway. Out in genteel Manassas...
...short, it's not easy to generalize about Falun Gong's devotees in the U.S. Just when you think that they are all overeducated and prone to quirky intellectualizing (and many are), a practitioner with seriously calloused hands tells you he earns a living pressure-washing decks. Before discovering the texts of Falun Gong, he assures you, reading books was not his thing...