Evil cult or spiritual sect? The Falun Gong is the most persecuted group in China, even though 10 years have passed since thousands of its activists stunned the leadership by quietly surrounding its headquarters in the heart of Beijing for a day and then melting away.

The demonstration was unprecedented. Seemingly out of nowhere 10,000 people appeared who stood silently for hours before walking away into the night, leaving barely a scrap of rubbish behind them. They read and they meditated. Their aim was to demand justice for fellow believers detained or harassed by police.

The size, discipline and organisation they demonstrated struck fear into the hearts of a leadership extremely wary of groups that could threaten its authority.

Two months later the government labelled the Falun Gong an “evil cult” and banned it, arresting its leaders and launching a campaign to forcibly reconvert its tens of millions of practitioners and obliterate it from the face of China.

It was seen as the biggest threat to Party rule since the 1989 student protests in Tiananmen Square.

A decade later, even mentioning the name of the sect is virtually taboo. Anyone caught in possession of Falun Gong literature faces incarceration. Anyone practicing its meditation exercises risks arrest.

Its combination of traditional Chinese calisthenics and a hotch-potch of ideas drawn from Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism and the often-unorthodox teachings of its founder Li Hongzhi had attracted as many as 70 million adherents by 1999, outnumbering the Communist Party’s 55 million members.

Representatives overseas, where it appears to draw a large following and its yellow-shirted believers can be found protesting outside Chinese embassies worldwide, say the decade long crackdown has cost the lives of 3,200 practitioners, including 104 last year.

China says some have died in detention because of hunger strikes or refusing medical help. It denies any have been deliberately killed. US-based Falun Gong spokesman Levi Browde said since 1999 the group has recorded more than 87,000 cases of torture and estimates that anywhere from 200,000 to 1 million practitioners have been detained for various lengths of time.

Mr Browde says the persecution remains relentlessly systematic. “After the Olympics we have seen that the time between someone being picked up and their death has become much shorter.”

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu this week said: “Ten years ago the Chinese government outlawed the Falun Gong cult in accordance with the law. The Falun Gong violated human rights by controlling people’s minds, causing illness, disablement or even death of many innocent people and practitioners.”

It is impossible to know how many followers it can currently command in China because it has been so deeply driven underground but Falun Gong leaflets are frequently pushed under front doors, DVDs are slipped into letterboxes, or even into machines sent for repair.

Its believers though operate with utmost secrecy. Bu Dongwei was twice sentenced to terms of “re-education through labour”, a punishment in China that requires no legal process.

After a search of his home turned up Falun Gong books he spent two-and-a-half years in a labour camp before his releasee last year.

He left for the United States last November. He told The Times that he had committed no crime under Chinese law. “I was a student of biology but when I read about Falun Gong I found that many of the questions I had about life were answered. And Falun Gong also teaches how to be a good person.”

Lawyer Cheng Hai has taken on several Falun Gong cases even though his defence may have little impact on the outcome.

“The government’s treatment of the Falungong does show a slight easing up. After so many years of suppression, there are fewer criminal cases and sentences are a bit lighter.”

However he says the courts remain particularly sensitive to Falun Gong cases and their general attitude is to be “rather tougher than softer”.

He says both sides bear a responsibility for an often unnecessary conflict, arguing that the Government could be more flexible while the Falun Gong could stop demanding the Party step down.

“Neither side can extinguish the other,” he argues. “Otherwise they will both be losers.”

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