Not long ago, when Manhattan was the center of protest during the Republican National Convention, they were here. Tucked away amid the protest shantytowns, the AIDS activists, the advocates for the homeless and the antiwar protesters were the Falun Gong.
Almost three weeks have passed since the convention ended and all the other protesters have gone. Yet the Falun Gong remain, demonstrating against what they call the persecution of their movement in China.
There they are in front of the United Nations. There they are near Bloomingdale's and in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There they are near Zabar's and the American Museum of Natural History. There they are in Times Square, Bryant Park and Chinatown.
Why are the Falun Gong protesters still here? And why are they seemingly everywhere?
When a dozen or so Falun Gong practitioners were asked those questions this week, they laughed good-naturedly. The group had gathered in a Midtown apartment building at the request of The New York Times.
Falun Gong wants as many people as possible to know about the group's plight and that is only possible in the world's media capital, said Gail Rachlin, a Falun Gong practitioner and a former public relations consultant.
Why so many places across the city?
"As a New Yorker," said Ms. Rachlin, who functions as an unofficial spokeswoman and is now a real estate broker, "let me tell you that we go out of our way to pick the hot spots."
Falun Gong has protested in the city, on a smaller scale, for years. But in the last few months the group has increased its activities. Every day, 100 or more Falun Gong practitioners fan out to as many as 10 heavily traveled sites. They plan to do this as long as they can.
Yesterday, for example, about a dozen practitioners in their signature yellow T-shirts were on the sidewalk outside City Hall. Some sat cross-legged, others quietly walked around, handing out literature. Large photographs of burned and beaten prisoners were propped up against the fence of City Hall Park.
A black banner read, "This is what is happening in China." A practitioner with red paint on her wrists was roped to a miniature gallows, as another practitioner, dressed as a policeman in dark glasses, waved a truncheon.
"You can't not notice them; they're everywhere," said William Kane, 17, of Brooklyn, who delivers food for a nearby restaurant. "They're very effective. They got my attention."
But Roger Blank, 42, of Manhattan, a lawyer, doubted that their protest would make much difference. "It's not going to change the reality of the Chinese government," he said.
The founder and leader of Falun Gong is a former government clerk named Li Hongzhi, believed to be in his early 50's. He immigrated to the United States in the late 1990's, his followers say, and lives somewhere in the Northeast.
But Maria Hsia Chang, a University of Nevada, Reno, professor who has written a book about Falun Gong, said that Mr. Li lives in Queens with his wife and daughter.
Falun Gong's rise can be traced to the Chinese government's relaxed supervision of private associations in the late 1970's. At the same time, the government cut back on health care benefits, Dr. Chang said. Qigong groups, which promote healthful living, therefore attracted millions of followers. Falun Gong (literally, "Law Wheel Cultivation") is a variation of qigong ("energy cultivation"), a companion discipline to the better-known tai chi. Falun Gong focuses on calisthenics (four standing exercises and one sitting cross-legged), which Mr. Li says confer health and energy. Falun Gong has familiar Chinese elements of Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism, as well as non-Chinese elements, like a belief in extraterrestrials. The "wheel" in the Falun Gong name refers to an invisible wheel in the faithful that protects against illness, Dr. Chang said.
What Falun Gong isn't is political, Dr. Chang said. Mr. Li's writings are often explicitly apocalyptic, which is why Dr. Chang titled her book, "The End of Days: Falun Gong," (Yale University Press, 2004). "But the vast majority of Falun Gong have not done anything wrong or illegal by international standards, except to do these calisthenics," Dr. Chang said.
Falun Gong first came to Western attention in Beijing in 1999 when thousands of its followers demonstrated peacefully in front of the Chinese Communist Party headquarters. A worried government had banned Falun Gong and similar spiritual movements, but Falun Gong had swiftly and silently summoned its members to seek a reversal of the ban.
The government reacted harshly, arresting and imprisoning many practitioners. Messages seeking comment from the Chinese Embassy in Washington this week were not acknowledged.
But Chinese leaders have long been wary of any movement that might mean a rebirth of the pro-democracy movement that they suppressed in Tiananmen Square in 1989. And even before Communism, the central government feared movements that might turn violent on a colossal scale, like the Taiping Rebellion of the mid-19th century.
At any rate, none of these concerns can justify what has happened to Falun Gong, say its practitioners in New York.
A typical account is that of Gang Chen, 34, a former logistics manager in Beijing. As an advocate of Falun Gong, he said, he was imprisoned for 18 months in the Tuanhe labor camp in Beijing. One day, in February 2001, prison guards compelled other inmates to gag Mr. Chen as well as bind his hands and feet. An inmate sat on his back.
Before banning Falun Gong, the Chinese government estimated its adherents at 30 million. The movement has claimed 100 million practitioners worldwide.