Thursday, Oct. 26, 2000; 4:53 p.m. EDT

BEIJING --- The 11 Falun Gong followers eating stewed pork and spicy peppers in a private room at a Beijing restaurant knew it could be their last supper before a long detention in prison.

Mostly strangers, they introduced themselves in hushed voices and shared their anger over a Chinese government crackdown on their [group].

It was a scene replayed throughout Beijing on Wednesday night, a day before at least 100 [group] members were detained during one of Falun Gong's largest demonstrations since it was banned 15 months ago.

Thursday's events were brief but violent, like most the [group]'s previous demonstrations. No sooner had small bands of Falun Gong members begun to unfurl banners or throw leaflets than dozens of police rushed to pummel them and drag them to waiting vans.

One man, thrown to the ground, was kicked in the stomach and head until blood ran from his mouth onto the gray flagstones. An elderly woman was dragged by her hair for several yards as bystanders pleaded with police to stop.

Order was restored only after police closed China's best known public monument for almost a half hour. One witness said 30 police vans filled with protesters drove off the square, which could put the numbers detained over several hundred.

The beatings inflicted on demonstrators in full view of thousands of horrified tourists reflect the ferocity of government efforts to crush Falun Gong. The communist leaders oppose it as a public menace that has led followers to their deaths and as a threat to their own rule.

The protests that keep breaking out on Tiananmen --- literally on the regime's front doorstep --- highlight the [group]'s ability to organize activities clandestinely despite intense pressure from China's massive internal security apparatus.

That ability depends on the sorts of loose networks that brought together Han Xue and the 10 others on the eve of Thursday's protest.

"Our belief keeps us from being afraid," said Han, a 46-year-old former Beijing factory worker.

Han said he has kept in touch with only a few [group] members since the crackdown began. One of them told him of the protest in a phone call last month, he said. He called the others he knew, who did the same until word had worked its way throughout China.

"I didn't know any of them before today," Han said, gesturing across the crowded table in a restaurant in northern Beijing. "But we were all linked indirectly."

Han and the others bristled at criticisms in China's state-run press that Falun Gong was somehow controlled from abroad by founder Li Hongzhi, a former government clerk who [moved] to the United States two years ago.

They claimed that the decision to protest came from a feeling shared among members that something needed to be done to mark Thursday, the one-year anniversary of the day that China's president first publicly declared Falun Gong [...]

"There's nothing evil about Falun Gong," said Yang Hong, another of those at the dinner. "Falun Gong is truth. It's communism that is based on falsehood."

As a follower stood guard at the door to the room, one of the women pulled out a bundle of bright yellow banners on which she had painted the group's name or "Truth, Compassion, Tolerance" --- the group's Principles --- in large red characters.

She tucked one under her shirt to demonstrate how they could try to sneak the banners past police into Tiananmen Square. Then she handed some to the others.

"There are more than a hundred here," said Zhang Yuzhen, a 30-year-old former clerk who said she had been detained eight times since the crackdown. "Possession of just one is certain arrest."