More recently, the Chinese authorities' paranoia in religious matters has become apparent in the persecution of the Falun Gong spiritual movement. It was banned in July 1999 and thousands of its members have since been arrested.
2002 February 23, Bei Ling, Andrea Huss, “Warming Up to China, Neglecting Democracy”, in The New York Times[3], →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 09 November 2010, Opinion[4]:
As President Bush addressed students at Qinghua University in Beijing on the 30th anniversary of Richard M. Nixon's momentous trip to China, where was the mention of the six Qinghua graduate students recently sentenced in southern China's Xiangzhou District Court, in Zhuhai City, for "utilizing an evil cult to sabotage legal enforcement"? All are practitioners of Falun Gong, the outlawed meditation movement that numbers its followers in the tens of thousands. They had been writing articles about the persecution of Falun Gong members.
The decision to ban the group entirely was made after 10,000 Falun Gong adherents staged a silent protest outside the gates of Zhongnanhai, the Communist Party’s leadership compound in Beijing, to complain about reports in the state-run media that the group said were defamatory.
Without prior knowledge and from out of nowhere more than ten thousand people suddenly gathered at the entrance to the center of Party and government power, surrounding it for the whole day. Such rigorous organization and discipline and the rapid transmission of information are rare. Nevertheless, our relevant departments knew nothing of this beforehand; despite the fact information about local Falungong organizations and their contact systems is readily available on the Internet.]
