Word: gongs
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...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...
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...