Word: gongli
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...protest stunned the leadership, Falun Gong's list of members terrified it; included were retired Communist Party elders and military officers. So the crackdown, when it finally came three months after the huge demonstration, stretched from the top of the party's ranks to the remotest rice paddy. A nationwide system of collective guilt held police, factory bosses and family members accountable when people around them practiced Falun Gong's slow-motion spiritual exercises. Foreign companies fell in line. Police sentenced more than 10,000 followers to labor camps, and Falun Gong's exiled leaders say they have evidence that...
Today Falun Gong exists in China almost entirely by virtue of the Internet. A group of activists maintains ties through encrypted e-mails with Falun Gong's exiled leadership in New York City, where Li Hongzhi now lives. These leaders direct a dwindling pool of committed practitioners, many of whom live on the lam in safe houses. But even this network is fraying. "It's harder to stay in touch, and everybody seems to be watched," says New York-based spokeswoman Gail Rachlin...
True enough. A recent visit to a Falun Gong safe house in Beijing was like something out of a Tom Clancy novel. To get there, two people downloaded encryption programs from the Internet and used them to exchange temporary mobile-phone numbers, the type that don't require registration. A reporter was told to enter a crowded restaurant as someone outside secretly watched. A taxi ride to a nearby market followed. On the far side of the market, a second cab was ready to drive to the safe house on the city's dusty outskirts. The two-bedroom apartment looked...
...rare and dangerous for practitioners to meet. But Falun Gong's leaders overseas can still get their message out through followers like a woman in her 30s who met recently with TIME. An accountant for a foreign company in Beijing, she secretly uses her firm's overseas data line to read Falun Gong's website. In early January she found an essay by Li Hongzhi called "Beyond the Limits of Forbearance." Written at the time the demonstrations were starting to ebb, the essay urged more dramatic actions against the "evil" of the crackdown. "I copied...
...Suddenly, the "evil cult" looked genuinely sinister. In South China, 1,200 miles from Beijing, the incident gave a typical follower pause. The young man, an artist, had tried to preserve his faith. Though he had put his thumbprint on a police document promising never again to practice Falun Gong, privately, he continued meditating and gliding through the exercises at home. The deaths shook his belief. "I thought, 'It's wrong for people to do that, for any reason,'" he recalls. He no longer practices...