Word: falun
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...visit to a Falun Gong safe house requires the kind of spycraft found in espionage novels. A journalist downloads an e-mail encryption program from the Internet and uses it to send his temporary mobile-phone number, the type that doesn't require registration, to a Falun Gong contact. He follows instructions to enter a crowded restaurant as someone outside secretly keeps watch. The coast is clear. He drives by taxi to a nearby market, walks through it, exits and finds another cab waiting to take him to the safe house. "We've figured out a system," says the organizer...
...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...