Word: gongli
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...easy to get pulled in. A friend might have mentioned that a new group was gathering in the local park to do a form of traditional qigong exercises. One morning you found them, 20 or 30 people, under the yellow-and-red banner of Falun Gong--the Law of the Wheel Breathing Exercise--doing the slow-motion exercises to music from a tape recorder. There was no fee, no formal teaching--they just invited you to join in and copy their movements...
...being watched--that you and millions like you were already caught in the net of China's biggest internal security operation since the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989. One of the other members in your group may have sent you an e-mail about how some 10,000 Falun Gong members had gathered in Beijing in April to protest being called a cult. But nobody had been arrested, and you thought little of it. The exercises got your circulation going, and meditation afterward helped dissipate frustrations from work and your crowded apartment block. China began to seem livable again...
...July 22 the Chinese government announced that Falun Gong was banned--for practicing "evil thinking" and threatening social stability. All over China police began rounding up thousands of Falun Gong practitioners and driving them off to sports stadiums. There they were interrogated, sometimes for hours, and forced to sign letters disavowing the group. In scenes reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution, more than 2 million books and instructional tapes were pulped or crushed by steam rollers last week. And there was also the astonishing news that some of the arrested Falun Gong members were top Communist Party officials. On Thursday, Beijing...
...reach of the Chinese police, millions of his acolytes are running scared. Nobody dares go to the parks to exercise anymore. Many Falun Gong members have temporarily left home, and others are waiting for a knock on the door. "My mother was detained for 44 hours," says Sophie Xiao, a Beijing-born investment analyst now living in Hong Kong. "I was very worried. She is stubborn and wouldn't sign the letter of confession. She had to go to two police stations for questioning." Her mother is also a Communist Party member, which singled her out for special treatment...
...crackdown came after a secret three-month investigation of the sect by China's security services, during which agents infiltrated Falun Gong activities and clandestinely videotaped exercise sessions. The investigation was reportedly ordered by President Jiang Zemin himself after the silent demonstration by 10,000 members of Falun Gong on April 25 outside Zhongnanhai, the Beijing compound where China's top leaders live. At that time the group said it was protesting magazine articles labeling it a superstitious cult, a charge that could have led to its being banned. Instead it wanted to be recognized as a legitimate religious group...