Sect Members Are Seized at Tiananmen Celebration

As fireworks thundered from Beijing’s outskirts, police at Tiananmen Square beat, kicked and detained at least 50 Falun Gong members who welcomed the Year of the Dragon with one of their biggest and most dramatic protests of recent months.

Practitioners, ranging in age and some with children, began converging on the vast square late Friday, minutes before the new year began. Many pulled red banners from beneath their clothing and waved them. At least two dozen people emerged from a pedestrian tunnel that opens onto the square and sat down cross-legged in unison, a pose typical of the sect that the government banned in July.

Police pounced on the protesters immediately, running toward them from all corners of the square. They kicked, punched and dragged protesters to their feet, herded them into vans and drove them away.

Other protesters who came to the square alone or in smaller groups of two or three were likewise quickly and violently tackled. At least two men were felled by police who took running starts at them, knocking their legs out from under them. Some officers shouted obscenities at practitioners as they beat them into submission.

The buildings around the square were decorated for the holiday, which is traditionally celebrated with family reunions and feasts of steamed dumplings. Trees were strung with multicolored lights, and the gate at the square was decorated with red lanterns.

Wang Xiaoping, a Falun Gong member from Beijing in her 20s, said she felt it was more important to express her dissatisfaction with the government ban on the group than to spend the most important holiday of the year with her family.

“They won’t let us practice; they are trying to crush us,” she said. “We’re not against the government, we just want the government to have peaceful talks with our master, Li Hongzhi.”

A man, strolling with a woman and a young girl, also was set upon. Police punched him in the face, while the girl screamed, “Don’t hit!”

Three tourists were detained, apparently because one took pictures. His film was confiscated.

Beijing banned Falun Gong as a threat to Communist Party control. The sect’s blend of meditation, slow-motion exercises and ideas drawn from Buddhism, Taoism and the group’s founder, Li, attracted millions of followers around the country.