Word: hongzhi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...COVER STORY About Falun Gong | Crackdown Li Hongzhi | Modern religion in China | Your Views...
...Chinese society?entrepreneurs, artists and religious groups regularly push the limits of what's 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...
...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...
...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, Li's words spread to more radical practitioners. Later that month, five suspected followers set themselves afire in Tiananmen Square, including a 12-year-old girl...