Word: gongs
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Gone is the gong...
...vigilant security services' finding out. Some Westerners were comparing it to the flight of German Mathias Rust, who landed his small plane in Red Square in 1987, an audacious act that showed up the limits of what was supposed to be a formidable Soviet air-defense system. The Falun Gong gatherings were more than a worry for China's security services; they were also an embarrassment. The police discovered that the protest was planned in large part by e-mail and that Falun Gong had a "virtual" organization, which it claimed linked 39 provincial branches with 1,900 lower-level...
Beijing estimates that Falun Gong (also known as Falun Dafa) has acquired 2 million adherents since it was founded in 1992; the group claims 100 million practitioners. Official paranoia about this invisible force reaches as high as President Jiang. The 72-year-old leader, not known for late-night Web surfing, has reportedly become obsessed with the sect and its ability to organize its activities in cyberspace. Apparently Jiang frequently brings up Falun Gong in conversations with high-level foreign visitors, and Western diplomatic sources say he was driven outside Zhongnanhai in a car with tinted windows to observe...
Nervous people jump at shadows. If the leadership looks through its colored glass and sees a potentially threatening mass organization, the view from ground level is very different. Falun Gong is, for instance, an organization not of militant students but of housewives, retirees and administrators. Practitioners make Falun Gong sound like a sort of Buddhism Lite with quaintly named breathing exercises and a clean-scrubbed ethic that disapproves of smoking, drinking and the crass materialism of today's China. Sophie Xiao has been practicing Falun Gong for two years and says it has given her "answers to things...
...Catholics reside -- on the grounds that the Vatican maintains diplomatic ties with Taiwan. In more confident times, China?s Communist Party leadership may have been prepared to overlook such a detail, but Beijing is in no mood to entertain unpredictable guests right now. "The challenge of the Falun Gong cult has rattled Beijing, and the official attitude is that they?ll allow personal freedom of worship, they?re inherently suspicious of proselytizing or attempts to convert people," says TIME correspondent William Dowell...