Meanwhile, the group members staged no overt demonstration and were not easily distinguished from the hordes of Chinese tourists normally wandering the square. But their appearance in Tiananmen, China's symbolic political heart, in defiance of a three-month crackdown against Falun Gong assured their arrest.

Police in uniforms and street clothes aggressively questioned likely Falun Gong members, the middle-aged and older men and women who have filled the once widely popular group's ranks. Those who identified themselves as Falun Gong practitioners were quickly placed in police vans that crisscrossed the Square.

At least a dozen people, mostly middle-aged and younger men and women, were ordered into the blue-and-white vans and then driven off. Plainclothes officers pushed foreign reporterstrying to cover the arrests and told them to leave the square.

``This is the second day I've protested,'' whispered a bespectacled elderly woman to a foreign reporter shortly before calmly and obediently following plainclothes police officers to a waiting van.

``We're not afraid of being arrested,'' said another woman, Guan Zhen, who like other Falun Gong members had travelled to the heart of Beijing in a show of passive resistance against a fierce crackdown on the movement that mixes traditional Chinese exercises with elements of Buddhism and Taoism. ``The police know we are good people,'' she said.

Since the protests began on Monday, Falun Gong members have been courting detention in a fearless challenge to authorities.

But unlike the pro-democracy protests of 1989, where defiant students occupied the Square holding rock concerts and broadcasting bold political demands, the Falun Gong protests are low-key.

So low-key, that most foreign tourists in the square, bounded by the forbidden city, thegreat hall of the people and the mausoleum of chairman Mao Zedong, have not realised they are taking place.

They are demonstrations only in the sense that members of a banned group are milling around in public -- albeit in the most politically sensitive spot in China.

The subtle protests, which coincide with a meeting of the National People's Congress that is expected to tighten legislation against cults, clearly showed that the crackdown on Falun Gong has failed to intimidate all grass roots members. Hundreds of adherents have been rounded up since the group was declared illegal in July.

On Monday, Beijing accused 13 leaders of the crime of stealing and leaking state secrets, which can carry the death sentence.

For months state media have been filled with crude denunciations of Falun Gong's US-based founder, Li Hongzhi. He has been branded a fraud, a financial swindler and an enemy of the communist state.

Yet Li's followers are prepared to publicly take a stand, ordinary-looking citizens engaged inan extraordinary act of rebellion. Some have even dared to ridicule the police sent to cart them away.

US blasts China on new Falun Gong arrests