Word: falun
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China's crackdown on the Falun Gong sect may be inflating the size of the dragon it is trying to slay. Beijing ratcheted up its campaign against the religious group Thursday, branding it a "devil-cult" and vowing to show it no mercy. But despite the heavy prison sentences that Chinese law prescribes for members of cults, hundreds of Falun Gong members continued their almost daily protests in Tiananmen Square and elsewhere in China. Although the authorities fear the consequences of allowing a millions-strong religious sect whose leader is based in the U.S. to flourish beyond official control...
...while getting rich is marvelous, it can also be numbing. Communism and its concordant atheism remain the state religion. Indeed, Hu Jintao, a contender to succeed President Jiang, built his career partly on suppressing Tibetan Buddhist followers of the Dalai Lama and, it is believed, supported the crackdown on Falun Gong, the mystic sect that claims millions of members in China. As a sign of his ascendancy, Hu, a civilian, was elevated last week to the vice chairmanship of the critical Central Military Commission...
...That much was evident in August when the government banned the Falun Gong religious cult, whose members had sought comfort in its otherworldly explanations of the traumatic social changes under way in China. But the communists are struggling to come up with a coherent ideology to offer a society that it's trying to lead away from the party's own traditional beliefs...
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...