When Chinese police stopped a bus at a checkpoint recently, the driver called out mockingly: "All right, everyone who is in Falun Gong put up your hands." Passengers laughed. The policeman didn't.
The incident, related by a traveller in southern China, illustrates how the moral authority of the Beijing government has been compromised by its attempted crackdown on the Falun Gong spiritual movement. No one, not even the police, can tell easily whether a person is a member of the organisation which practises breathing exercises and meditates on Buddhism and Taoism, and which Beijing banned on July 22nd as a threat to public order.
Many Chinese people apparently find the sudden outpouring of anti-Falun Gong propaganda in the official media hard to swallow. While some prominent members have made "public confessions" in a purge of party and military ranks, there are reports that others have resigned from the Communist Party rather than denounce the organisation, which is composed mostly of solid citizens.
In a stepping up of a continuing propaganda onslaught against its leaders yesterday, Beijing described Falun Gong as a body with every feature of a cult and "very dangerous to society".
"Cults are anti-government and most of their leaders have political ambitions," said the official news agency, Xinhua. "They also attempt to take the place of the government."
The emergence of a rival ideology of any kind has rattled Beijing, especially in the run-up to the massive celebrations planned for the 50th anniversary of the victory of communism in China on October 1st.
New restrictions have been placed on the international media. All incoming video recordings addressed to Western news organisation now must be screened by officials, who also demand to know the subject matter of all outgoing foreign programmes.
The alleged sect's highly-disciplined members first came to public attention when 15,000 adherents silently besieged government headquarters in Beijing on April 25th, demanding recognition and an end to harassment of members in the nearby city of Tianjin.
Despite the subsequent crackdown, and the empty corners of public parks where the practitioners once exercised, there is evidence that they haven't gone away. Hundreds of restive members tried to mount protests in Beijing in the past two weeks, according to official sources.
The authorities have offered a reward of 50,000 yuan (£4,500) for information leading to the arrest of Li Hongzhi, the New York-based leader of the group. Officials compare him to the American cult leader David Koresh who died with 80 followers in a fire in Waco, Texas, in 1993.
Xinhua yesterday mocked Mr Li for allegedly claiming to use magical powers to postpone the end of the world by 30 years and that only Falun Gong could save the human race.
Mr Li says that his organisation, which claims about 100 million members around the world, is apolitical and poses no threat to China. The authorities have also apparently failed to get a retraction from the most prominent China-based member, Mr Li Chang, a former deputy director at the Ministry of Public Security, which conducts blood tests and analyses fingerprints, footprints and handwriting. Mr Li Chang reportedly shielded Mr Li Hongzhi from arrest by Beijing police in the mid-1990s and helped him move to the US.
He was among thousands of Falun Gong members detained last month, all but 100 of whom have been released. Police rounded up about 300 adherents at Tiananmen Square on two occasions late last month, a security source told Reuters news agency. Protesters from more than 20 provinces demanded the government lift a ban on Falun Gong and revoke a warrant for the arrest of Mr Li Hongzhi.
Police also detained about 100 Falun Gong followers at the Beijing train station last week, stopping them from heading to the square. They were later released and sent back home, underlining the belief that the crackdown is aimed at leaders among party cadres.
The government this week claimed that 99 per cent of its supporters in the Communist Party had renounced their beliefs and the official People's Daily declared the "Falun Gong problem" solved after the vast majority of supporters had "come to their senses".
Police who infiltrated the seven-year-old organisation, in a move believed ordered by President Jiang Zemin after the April protest, apparently found it had 23,000 practice sites and about two million members.
AFP adds: Chinese fighter jets have twice crossed the dividing line in the Taiwan Strait as tension with nationalist Taiwan has mounted, President Lee Teng-hui of Taiwan said yesterday.
He told a meeting of government officials that each time the incident had involved Sukhoi 27 fighters, but added that they did not seem to be flying in an aggressive pattern.
"Media reports have said Chinese communist fighters had occasionally flown across the middle of the Taiwan Strait," Mr Lee said. "As a matter fact, they did it only twice, with one sortie going 5 km over the middle and the other for 10 km."