China Expels Western Falun Gong Members

About 25 members of Falun Gong expelled from China after protesting in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square returned to the United States on Friday, displaying bruises, cuts and scrapes from what they said were police beatings.

“I was trying to say ‘Falun Gong is good,’ but they kept hitting me over and over again,” Mark Gardner, 22, of Brea, Calif., said as he arrived in Detroit on a Northwest Airlines flight from China.

China expelled 33 Americans, four Britons and five Germans detained during a protest Thursday by foreign members of Falun Gong, diplomats said Friday.

Gardner had a black eye. Many of the others had dirty and torn clothes, and some were not wearing shoes at the Detroit airport as they left to catch connecting flights.

Chinese police said they detained more than 40 foreigners during the protest against a 2 1/2-year-old crackdown on the spiritual movement. The demonstration was the biggest yet by foreign followers in the square.

The protest came a week before a visit by President Bush to Beijing. Possibly to avert a diplomatic backlash, Chinese authorities took the unusual step of issuing a statement saying they had treated the detainees humanely.

Falun Gong activists in New York said as many as 100 followers had planned to take part in the protest, but those at the Detroit airport said they did not know the whereabouts of the others. The Chinese authorities’ statement said 14 Europeans were detained in their hotel rooms before the protest.

The activists said protesters tried to unfurl a banner and shout protest slogans.

Although many previous protests by the group took police by surprise, authorities appeared to have been prepared for Thursday’s event.

Checkpoints were set up around Tiananmen Square and foreigners were forced to show identification and open their bags for inspection. Foreign reporters were turned away or held near the square, preventing them from seeing clearly what happened.

In November, 35 Western members of Falun Gong were expelled after a protest in the square.

Falun Gong, loosely based on traditional Chinese religions and martial arts, drew millions of followers in the mid-1990s. It was banned in China in 1999 as a threat to public safety and Communist rule.