On the evening of April 24 more than two decades ago, Shao Changyong, a Falun Gong practitioner, went to his daily gathering with fellow adherents as usual.
His group had about 10 members, and one woman offered her home in Beijing as the meeting location. They usually read books of Falun Gong, a spiritual practice involving meditative exercises and moral teachings based on the tenets of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance, which became popular with about 100 million adherents in China at the time.
Shao still remembers that evening.
“Let’s not study the book tonight. I have some news,” their host said, he recalled….