Persistent Protesters From Banned Sect Keep Beijing Police on Edge

July 21, 2000

BEIJING, July 20 -- The police and Falun Gong followers played a grim game in Tiananmen Square today, with lean young cadets dashing across the vast open space to snatch down ocher banners briefly unfurled by middle-aged members of the banned spiritual discipline.

Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of the group's followers have been taken into custody in recent days as protests increase to mark the first anniversary of the government's crackdown on the movement that swept the country in the late 1990's, gathering millions of adherents. The arrests and a pervasive anti-Falun Gong propaganda campaign may have shrunk the group's numbers, but they have also hardened the will of those followers who remain.

Meanwhile, exhortations by Falun Gong's exiled leader, Li Hongzhi, have become increasingly urgent in recent weeks, as he praises followers who "defend the practice" and warns of destruction for those "evil beings" who stand in its way.

"The wicked and evil will soon be eliminated, the vile ones in the human world will receive due retribution, and sins will no longer be allowed to continue," he wrote recently on the group's official Web site (www.minghui.org/eng.html). "Disciples are waiting to reach consummation, and I can wait no more."

Mr. Li founded Falun Gong in the early 1990's, developing a series of yogalike exercises based on the Chinese practice of qigong, a discipline of breathing control and meditation intended to channel the body's qi, or life force, to various ends.

His message of personal salvation from a morally degenerating world struck a chord with millions of Chinese disillusioned with the spiritual vacuum created by the collapse of the country's Communist ideology and by rampant corruption.

But the Chinese government grew increasingly uneasy with Mr. Li's growing popularity, and in early 1998 he left under pressure and moved to the United States. He owns a house in New York.

China began arresting adherents of the sect a year ago in a midnight raid on the group's most prominent members. Despite well publicized prison terms of up to 18 years for the most active followers and reports of torture and death among believers who have been detained, Falun Gong adherents continue to arrive on Tiananmen Square, China's symbolic center and most public space, to bear fleeting witness to their faith.

The protests appear futile amid the crowds of tourists from across China who fill the square each day. So huge is the square that the small bands of protesters attract little attention in the few seconds that it takes for the plainclothes police officers spread among the crowds to subdue them. The protesters rarely manage to raise a banner long enough for anyone to read it, and they are whisked away in the blue-and-white police vans that cruise around the square for that purpose.

Because China's state-run news media rarely mention the protests, few Chinese are even aware of them.

"What was that?" asked one woman after a dozen young police officers had dragged down a banner and bundled several Falun Gong followers into a van that arrived within seconds.

"Some troublemaker," replied a man beside her.

The periodic scuffles, occasionally over elderly men or women who sat in the lotus position and raised their arms in the opening gesture of Falun Gong's meditative exercises, gave a bizarre edge today to the square's otherwise festive atmosphere.

Tour groups marched around behind guides, and children flew colorful kites. Occasionally bystanders gathered to watch silently as the police pummeled a resistant protester. At one point, uniformed police officers could be seen punching a man in the back of one of their vans.

Falun Gong activists abroad have grown increasingly sophisticated in their efforts to reach people inside China and keep the movement alive.

Its members have established an expanding network of Internet sites that occasionally circumvent China's efforts to block access. And the group has begun daily Chinese-language broadcasts into China, though the broadcasts were jammed soon after they started this month.

The group's message has taken on an increasingly apocalyptic cast as China's effort to exterminate the movement grinds down its numbers. This week, a message on Falun Gong's main Web site reported that Mr. Li had been locked for nine months in a battle with evil forces that damaged his body and turned his hair gray.

"Fellow cultivators, let us strive forward diligently and courageously," the message said. "Let us cherish the repeated opportunities that Master, through tremendous sacrifice, has created for us to advance towards consummation!"

Mr. Li's writings do not explain the reference to "consummation," but the message suggested that it referred to a transcendent event of the sort promised by many religions, old and new. "That humankind has made it to the year 2000 is not to give humankind prosperity, and even less is it to allow humankind to continue creating karma for their own selfish interests," the message said.

It is that sort of talk that most worries Beijing's leaders. China has a history of millenarian movements that have led to tens of millions of deaths and marked the end of some dynastic governments. Invisible as the Falun Gong protests are to most Chinese, they represent the most coordinated and sustained challenge to Communist Party rule since the pro-democracy movement of 1989.

"The cult will not voluntarily step down from the historical stage," said an editorial today in People's Daily, the party's official mouthpiece. The fight against Falun Gong, it said, would be a "long-lasting, complicated and acute struggle."