Word: gongli
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...Falun Gong is an amalgam of religions and exercises that Chinese have known for centuries. Practitioners meditate during a series of ritualized motions that Li Hongzhi invented. The central tenet is that Li himself, either personally or through his books and videotapes, inserts the Falun icon, a swastika-like Buddhist emblem surrounded by yin-yang symbols, into the bellies of believers. The emblem spins: clockwise to absorb energy, counterclockwise to emit it. The Faluns on people's bellies can heal diseases, or Li can heal diseases through the Faluns. An advanced practitioner will open a "celestial eye" in the middle...
...allowed?the party retains a firm grasp on the tools of repression. But it deploys them only when it feels directly threatened. In 1992, when a former trumpet player and grain clerk named Li Hongzhi first mingled the tenets of Buddhism, Taoism and traditional Qigong exercises to create Falun Gong, the party took no notice, even when he published books, sold videotapes and lectured to mass gatherings. By some estimates his organization grew to 60 million followers?as many as in the party?and still China's Elite leaders had barely heard of Falun Gong. Until that morning two years...
...protest stunned the leadership, Falun Gong's membership rolls terrified it: included on it were retired communist elders and military officers. So the crackdown, when it began three months after the huge demonstration, stretched from the party's own ranks to the remotest rice paddies. A nationwide "responsibility system" put the onus on local police and government workers, factory bosses and family members to find practitioners and get them to renounce their beliefs. Police sentenced more than 10,000 followers to labor camps, and reliable reports say more than 220 people have died in custody...
...Today, Falun Gong exists in China almost entirely by virtue of the Internet. A savvy coterie of Chinese activists, many of whom live on the lam in safe houses, maintain ties through encrypted e-mails with Falun Gong's exiled leadership in New York, where Li Hongzhi now lives. It is these underground members who try to keep the movement public by protests or secretly pasting flyers reading "Falun Gong Is Good!" on the walls of apartment blocks. But the network is fraying. "It's a more autonomous movement now," says New York-based Falun Gong spokeswoman Gail Rachlin...
...visit to a Falun Gong safe house requires the kind of spycraft found in espionage novels. A journalist downloads an e-mail encryption program from the Internet and uses it to send his temporary mobile-phone number, the type that doesn't require registration, to a Falun Gong contact. He follows instructions to enter a crowded restaurant as someone outside secretly keeps watch. The coast is clear. He drives by taxi to a nearby market, walks through it, exits and finds another cab waiting to take him to the safe house. "We've figured out a system," says the organizer...