China Arrests Protesting Sect Members

Police broke up a massive protest today by a popular exercise and meditation group outside the Chinese leadership’s compound in central Beijing. Scores and possibly hundreds of people were detained.

The protest by members of Falun Gong began late Tuesday night after at least 70 leading members of the group were reported arrested in a crackdown.

Most detainees today were middle-aged women. Some were dragged by their hair and pushed into police vans outside Zhongnanhai, the compound where President Jiang Zemin and other Chinese leaders live and work.

It was the second large-scale protest in Beijing by Falun Gong in less than three months. In April, at least 10,000 members of the group stood silently outside Zhongnanhai to protest what they said was official harassment.

The government has regarded Falun Gong with suspicion since the protest, which surprised and unsettled Chinese leaders.

About 40 Falun Gong members gathered silently outside the office of China’s state-run New China News Agency in Hong Kong today. Although most were reluctant to speak with reporters, one said the group was not protesting, but awaiting a response to a letter protesting arrests on the mainland.

The emergence of Falun Gong (literally, “Wheel of Law” in Chinese) has been an especially nettlesome problem for Beijing because of the group’s size and because of the intense devotion of its followers, who claim 100 million adherents worldwide, although critics say that figure is inflated. Some say the number is closer to 10 million. Falun’s founder, Li Hongzhi, left China for the United States in 1998.

Sects like Falun Gong, an exercise and spiritual practice that believes in an “orb of energy” in the belly, have prospered in China in the past two decades after the demise of Communist values.

Security in Beijing is especially tight in the months before the politically charged 50th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

The street west of Zhongnanhai was closed to traffic today. Police stopped people from walking past its other gates and were checking their identity cards.

The area was surrounded by hundreds of police officers, both uniformed and in civilian clothes.

On Tuesday, police arrested leading Falun Gong members in Beijing and at least 15 other cities, according to the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democratic Movement in China.

Police seized Falun Gong literature and smashed images of the group’s founder, the center said.