Word: gongs
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...year-old boy with a stiff cowlick waits at the safe house near a cabbage field on Beijing's dusty outskirts. He is a Falun Gong orphan, living testimony of the crackdown's wreckage. His family members were neighborhood leaders, lieutenants in the group's structure. When the crackdown began, the boy returned from school to find police surrounding his home. Twenty days later, the authorities broke in to discover his granny and aunt hanging side by side in a dual suicide, presumably to avoid persecution. They incarcerated the boy's mother in the kindergarten where she taught. She slept...
...rare and dangerous for practitioners to meet together. But Falun Gong's leaders overseas can still get their message out through followers such as a woman in her thirties who met recently with TIME. An accountant for a foreign company in the capital, she goes early to work to secretly use her firm's overseas data line to access Falun Gong's website, minghui.org. In early January, she found an article by Li Hongzhi called "The Limits of Forbearance." "I copied it onto a CD-ROM and gave it to everyone I know," she says. Through such networks...
...immolations on Jan. 23 became a propaganda bonanza for the government and marked a turning point in its anti-Falun Gong campaign. China's newspapers and TV screens were covered with grisly images of smoldering human forms. Before that day, many Chinese had felt the crackdown had gone too far?that Falun Gong posed no real threat. With the immolations, the government's six-month propaganda campaign portraying Falun Gong as an "evil cult" that unhinged its followers seemed more credible...
...small city in southern China, 2,000 km from Beijing, the incident gave a typical follower pause. The young artist began practicing Falun Gong in 1996 after finding a book of Li Hongzhi's lectures at a friend's house. After the crackdown, he put his thumbprint on a police document promising he would never again practice, but he was lying. He never joined in the political protests, but at home he continued meditating and gliding through the slow-motion exercises, jealously guarding his secret belief. But the deaths shook his faith in the movement. "It's wrong for people...
...Falun Gong's leaders badly flubbed their damage control after the immolations. Instead of acknowledging that the five protesters might have been misguided practitioners, they denied any connection with them. Implausibly, the Falun Gong website insists the episode was set up by government provocateurs. Few were convinced by that line. At the same time, Falun Gong's leaders abroad are demanding ever-higher levels of loyalty from followers. An editorial on the website calls for action "especially at Tiananmen Square," even though government repression has reduced the number of demonstrations there to basically nil. Li Hongzhi recently urged followers...