As police tackled them and dragged away at least one by the hair, members of Falun Gong stepped up their campaign of defiance yesterday, trying to petition Chinese leaders to end an intensifying crackdown on the banned spiritual movement.
Teams of plainclothes and uniformed police rushed about Tian-anmen Square, attempting to put a stop to five days of protests that until yesterday had been largely quiet and peaceful. At least 50 people were taken from the vast square, some of them shouting at police as they were wrestled to the ground.
Police set upon a handful of university-age practitioners as they took out a letter beseeching the government for tolerance. Officers twisted one youth's arm, forcing him to double over, chased down another fleeing across the street and grabbed the hair of a third, pulling him into a group of police.
The renewed confrontations proved how undaunted Falun Gong followers remain despite a three-month ban on the group and a fresh wave of repression by the government.
Spreading a dragnet across Beijing, police have arrested at least 3,000 group members this week from all parts of China, except Tibet, said a Communist Party source on condition of anonymity.
Falun Gong members have seeped into the capital in recent weeks on word that the government was preparing fresh measures to subdue recalcitrant followers. On the run as members of an outlawed group, they have slept in homes of sympathizers, at construction sites, any place they can find.
"We've been forced to sleep on the streets, under bridges, along avenues, passageways, with the possibility of arrest at any time," said Qu Dehong, who with his wife and 11-year-old son, left their Jidong County home in the chilly northeast for Beijing nearly six weeks ago.
"People sleeping on the streets is only the tip of it," said Yang Chunguang, a 28-year-old clothes merchant from the northeastern provincial capital of Changchun. Too poor to buy bottled water, some "are drinking out of toilets," using plastic containers found in the trash.
Through e-mail and mobile phones, believers in recent days have tried to counter the police action by contacting foreign reporters, discarding an earlier reluctance to use the Western media.
Falun Gong members held a daring, clandestine meeting with a handful of foreign journalists Thursday to appeal for international help against the relentless government crackdown. They insisted that if national leaders only knew the facts, they would see the movement as wholesome and non-threatening.
"What we want is not much -- we just want a peaceful place to practice," said Jiang Chaohui, a devotee who recently had to resign his assistant manager's job in a joint venture in the southern province of Fujian.
The speakers at Thursday's news conference included two police-men, both Communist Party mem-bers, from the northeastern province of Liaoning, who said they had been forced by their superiors to choose between their careers and their devotion to Falun Gong.
"Our Master Li taught us the universal law unselfishly," said one of them, Wang Zhiguo, 37.
"So on Oct. 15 I took off my police uniform and came to Bei-jing," he said.
Eleven-year-old Qu Yuyan said he had not been allowed to attend his school, in the northeastern pro-vince of Heilongjiang, because he practiced Falun Gong.
One speaker at Thursday's secret meeting, a 31-year-old hairdresser named Ding Yan from Shijiazhuang in nearby Hebei province, said she and others were badly mistreated after they were arrested on Tiananmen Square on Oct. 17.
She said she had been beaten in the face while in police custody.
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