Saturday, May 13, 2000
ASSOCIATED PRESS in Beijing

Updated at 4.19pm, Saturday:
Falun Gong followers defiantly celebrated their banned sect's eighth anniversary on Saturday, holding yellow flowers and signs aloft in Tiananmen Square, and enduring arrest and physical assault. Police beat five people as they tried to unfurl a banner. Another woman was knocked to the ground by plainclothes security as she stood amid 10 followers raising signs. One read ''Truthfulness, Benevolence, Forbearance'' - Falun Gong's motto.

By mid-morning, police had seized at least 40 people staging small, sporadic acts of civil disobedience across the vast square in central Beijing.

The protest was the third recent demonstration to mark key sect anniversaries. On April 25, they came to remember a protest by 10,000 followers last year that provoked the communist government's crackdown. On Thursday, they honoured founder Li Hongzhi's birthday. Saturday's marked the sect's founding in 1992.

About a half-dozen followers raised yellow chrysanthemums for the anniversary. Police hustled them away, leaving the flowers scattered on the square's gray paving stones. A street sweeping truck was sent in to clean away the protest's remains.

Yellow is an auspicious color for Chinese and has been adopted by Falun Gong. Banners the followers tried to raise were yellow with vibrant red Chinese characters on them. ''Falun Dafa'' - another name for the group - read one banner before police ripped it out from their hands.

Even foreign tourists, milling among the thousands of Chinese visiting the scenic square, were not spared mistreatment. At least three tourists were detained, apparently for filming the protests. A uniformed officer pushed and kicked one of them into a police van.

Police have adopted increasingly rough tactics - evidence of their frustration in failing to stop demonstrations 9 1-2 months after the government banned Falun Gong as a public menace and threat to Communist Party rule.