On anniversary, Falun Gong followers stage large protest, drawing arrests

BEIJING- Falun Gong followers by the dozens unfurled banners and sat silently in Tiananmen Square Tuesday, prompting swift arrest from police, as the spiritual group marked the first anniversary of a mass protest that provoked a Chinese government ban.

Police detained at least 95 people in and around the square Tuesday morning. The vast plaza in Beijing's center seemed a swirl of chaos with small-scale protests erupting in all directions. Officers sometimes reacted violently, even though they were expecting the anniversary protests.

One officer punched a man in the face as he and three others tried to raise a banner. Fifteen people who sat in meditation on the square were jerked to their feet and pushed into a minibus. Police muzzled a middle-aged woman and pulled her backward as she tried to yell.

''The Great Way of Falun is good,'' shouted one middle-aged protester, leaning out a police bus window, his fist raised.

Foreign tourists, their mouths agape in surprise, watched the protests and their suppression. A tour guide told one group of American tourists not to photograph anyone in uniform. ''China is still a comparatively strict country,'' the guide explained.

Chinese tourists, too, eagerly ran across the square to glimpse the rare acts of civil disobedience.

The charged atmosphere and violence stood in contrast with the event sect members were commemorating. On April 25 last year, 10,000 group members surrounded the communist leadership compound near Tiananmen, meditating in silence for a day to protest official harassment.

Then police kept their distance. But the group's ability to mobilize followers alarmed Chinese leaders. President Jiang Zemin ordered a crackdown. In July Falun Gong was officially proscribed, its leading members arrested and its rank-and-file told to recant or face jail.

Since then, peaceful, defiant protests by Falun Gong adherents have become a daily sight in Tiananmen Square.

Since the April 25 demonstration, ''we have come to witness the Chinese government execute one of the largest, harshest and most arbitrary persecutions in modern history,'' Gail Rachlin, a New York-based spokeswoman for Falun Gong, said in a statement.

''Chinese leaders turned their country upside down'' by banning the group, the statement said.

It said 35,000 followers have been detained, with another 5,000 sent without trial to labor camps. Practitioners have been tortured, held in psychiatric institutions and given anti-psychotic drugs while others have lost jobs or been refused permission to attend school, the statement said.

Falun Gong attracted millions of followers with its blend of traditional beliefs, slow-motion exercises and the ideas of founder Li Hongzhi, a former government grain clerk who now lives in New York. Followers say Falun Gong promotes health and good citizenship.

Three Falun Gong followers protested Monday on Tiananmen Square and were quickly detained by police.

Despite heavy security, the three middle-aged men raised their arms in a meditation pose. Plainclothes police patrolling among the throngs of tourists on the square ordered the men to put their arms down, and within minutes led them to a police van that drove them away.

The government says Falun Gong is an evil cult that threatened public order and Communist Party rule, and led 1,500 followers to their deaths.

In another official report about the group's alleged misdeeds, police in eastern China's Weifang city arrested three principal Falun Gong members for cheating other followers of $36,000, state-run newspapers said Monday.

Tan Weijun, Li Weihua and his wife, Li Fang, told followers that Tan was even more powerful than Falun Gong founder Li Hongzhi, the Guangming Daily and other newspapers reported. The accounts said they promised Tan's protection if followers donated money.

The three allegedly concocted the scam to pay a $4,200 fine from August for selling Falun Gong literature.