WASHINGTON -- They awaken with the birds in a ragged city park. They sit cross-legged on purple mats and do slow-motion calisthenics designed, apparently, for maximum simplicity.
This gentle tableau is the outward look of the Falun Gong, a movement that has drawn the Chinese government's sharpest crackdown since the bloody suppression of the student protests at Tiananmen Square.
As unheralded as the massing of 10,000 silent protesters outside a government building in Beijing one morning in 1999, a tiny cadre of hunger strikers appeared outside the Chinese Embassy here last month.
One of them was Amy Cheng of Hope Valley, R.I., whose experience links some of the world's most ancient spiritual traditions to the lightning powers of the Internet Age.
"The cultivation of Falun Gong has answered a lot of my questions about the universe and about life," said Cheng, a 38-year-old computer programmer and mother of two. She feels obliged, she said, to do her bit to call attention to the persecution of Falun Gong's followers in China.
Cheng and her compatriots seem so modest in demeanor, yet grand in their claims and ambitions.
The protesters are right in step with some all-American traditions -- the old-time religious revival, the New Age self-help group, the right of the people to peaceably assemble and petition their government for the redress of grievances. And they are totally wired to the Web -- a wellspring of the power that the Chinese government has found so threatening.
The magnitude of the spiritual force behind the physical regime is what sets Falun Gong apart from other disciplines in the Buddhist and Taoist traditions, according to Cheng, who has returned to Rhode Island after a five-day fast.
The Chinese government asserts that the movement is an evil cult, as evidenced by the public self-immolation of several practitioners in China this summer. Li Hongzhi, the Falun Gong founder who now lives in New York, has raised eyebrows by describing the practice, in part, as a response to the threat that aliens pose to humanity.
Cheng said the self-immolation might have been staged by the government and was contrary to the principles of the Falun Gong.
This is, in any event, a movement that has rippled more dramatically through international politics and diplomacy than any run-of-the-mill cult or protest group.
For Cheng, the proof is in the pudding: Falun Gong has so improved her life that she is willing to go to great lengths to protest its suppression. She has traveled to Geneva, Hong Kong (where she says the government denied her entry at customs), and now to the hunger strike in Washington, seeking news coverage at every opportunity.
She pays her own way, she said. She teaches weekly Falun Gong classes at Roger Williams Park and she touts the cause at fairs and festivals around Rhode Island. She and her colleagues have snagged Falun Gong features on local cable TV, maintained a Web site and petitioned town governments around the state for recognition of the Falun Gong.
The next great goal of the followers is to catch President Bush's eye before he makes his first state visit to China next month. But their momentary aim is rather small, according to Eugene Cui of Atlanta, the first of the hunger strikers to arrive Aug. 17. He fasted for 11 days, longer than Cheng and most of the rest.
If more protesters want to fast, he said, they will simply appear at the scruffy park across from the Chinese Embassy. They will stand their watch against the persecution and they will move on. And they will pass the word on the Net.