Chinese police detained up to 200 people in Tiananmen Square yesterday as they crushed protests by the banned Falun Gong movement to mark their founder's birthday.
Hundreds of police battled all morning to snuff out small-scale protests erupting across the vast central esplanade.
At one stage a group of 15 protesters unfurled two 20-foot red banners before they were engulfed by scores of police who knocked them to the ground.
Falun Gong members raise at least a dozen banners. Each time large numbers of police sprinted to the scene and the protesters were bundled into police vans.
At regular intervals over a four-hour period many small groups of people, mainly middle-aged and elderly women from the countryside, were detained without protest. Falun Gong practitioners, who have flocked to the square in their thousands to protest since the movement was outlawed in July, tend to admit they are group members when asked.
Police officers were heard to ask people if they belonged to a "heretical cult", while Falun Gong practitioners replied, "No, we belong to a just movement."
Yesterday's protest was one of the largest by the movement since it was banned. It gradually petered out towards midday.
At least three foreign journalists and photographers were detained, along with a Swedish tourist who had set up his video camera in the square.
"We are just a group of tourists and we know absolutely nothing about what is going on," said one of the tour group, as other tourists were forced to expose their films.
The protests came a day after the Communist government put out contradictory statements claiming victory over the group but also warning that Falun Gong still posed a danger to society.
They also came as Falun Gong practitioners in Hong Kong held a small parade yesterday to celebrate the birthday of the movement's exiled founder, Mr Li Hongzhi.
A Falun Gong spokeswoman in New York, where Mr Li lives, said she expected more protests in the coming days as tomorrow had been designated World Falun Dafa Day to mark the movement's eighth anniversary.
"I anticipate they're going to go out there every day as they have done in the past. This is not going to go away," she said.
Falun Gong claims tens of millions of followers in China, attracted by Mr Li's eclectic teachings in traditional qigong Chinese breathing exercises and Buddhist and Taoist philosophies.
The Communist government launched a crackdown on the movement after it caught the authorities off guard by assembling 10,000 followers around the Communist Party's headquarters in Beijing in April last year.
The government banned Falun Gong in July, labelling the movement an "evil cult".