TUESDAY JANUARY 02 2001

CHINESE police beat a Falun Gong demonstrator yesterday, one of hundreds in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, until his head and the ground were splattered with blood. Streetsweepers were told to clean the blood-stained stones.

On New Year's Eve, Western tourists looked on in astonishment as police beat with truncheons one female follower of the banned spiritual movement and roughed up another, stuffing her yellow Falun Gong banner in her mouth to muffle her screams.

Before noon again yesterday hundreds of women and middle-aged protesters were driven away in buses from the square. Despite the violence of the police response, many of those inside the vehicles shouted Falun Gong slogans and several threw the group's banners from the bus windows.

Hundreds of policemen, some in plainclothes, roamed the square amid throngs of tourists, pouncing on people who were trying to meditate or who were flashing yellow banners in protest at the ban on the movement, and dragging them away, witnesses said. The scenes have been repeated at Tiananmen on every major holiday since mid-1999, when the ban was imposed.

The latest protests show that Falun Gong, to the extreme frustration of the authorities, intends to continue its peaceful campaign against what it says is persecution. The civil disobedience struggle has resulted in scores of deaths due to police beatings and tens of thousands of people being sent to labour camps.

A Hong Kong-based human rights group estimates that at least 74 Falun Gong adherents have died in detention in China since July 1999. China has acknowledged that several Falun Gong supporters have died while in custody but claims that most deaths were due to pre-existing illness or suicide.

Falun Gong combines meditation and exercise with a doctrine loosely taken from Buddhist and Taoist teachings.