Cendana Wirasari Adiwarga sat perfectly still, her eyelids shut tight as Quincy Sun dragged a toothpick soaked with fake blood across her plump left cheek.
"There, all done," Ms. Sun said, appraising her handiwork. Ms. Adiwarga's smooth skin had been transformed into a garish tableau of bloody cuts and bruises. Ms. Adiwarga then rose to take her place inside a tiny metal cage, where she planned to sit for three hours on a blustery late October morning opposite a federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan.
"Maybe if people here see me suffer, they will know just one tiny speck of suffering in China," Ms. Adiwarga said.
The two women had flown long hours at considerable expense from the Far East to spread the word about the persecution of practitioners of Falun Gong, a spiritual practice of calisthenics and meditation that the Chinese government has banned and branded an "evil cult."
They and hundreds of other demonstrators from across the globe are flooding the streets and subways of New York, cheerfully but very persistently pressing stacks of literature into the hands of harried passers-by, waving gruesome photographs of victims and simulating brutal acts of torture. They claim that the Chinese government is not only suppressing the practice in China, as has been widely known and largely condemned, but that it is using harassment, spying and intimidation to destroy Falun Gong in the United States.
Supporters of the Falun Gong movement say 1,100 have died and thousands more have been tortured and imprisoned for their beliefs, chiefly in China, but increasingly in other countries.
Independent human rights groups say that practitioners of Falun Gong in China have been sent to labor camps, subjected to physical and psychological torture and killed since the Chinese government cracked down on the movement, which claims 100 million followers worldwide, in 1999.
While the situation in China attracted a good deal of attention in 1999 and 2000, its plight has largely fallen off the radar screen as the Chinese government has repressed the movement there, human rights officials say.
Thus the demonstrations in New York, which play out in parks and on street corners from City Hall to the Museum of Natural History. They began in earnest with the Republican National Convention in August but have continued, buoyed by volunteers from around the world like Ms. Adiwarga and Ms. Sun, from Indonesia and Australia. Others come from Taiwan, Singapore and New Zealand.
"Not content with torturing and killing in their own country, the Chinese government has carried out campaigns of intimidation" against practitioners in the United States, said Levi Browde of the New York Falun Dafa Association. "They send consular officials to intimidate practitioners here in the United States, even American citizens. We think Americans should be aware of what the Chinese government does in their own country."
Demonstrators say that the effort grew out of an e-mail and Internet daisy chain rather than a centrally organized campaign, and that they are paying their own way, bunking six to a room in cheap hotels or staying with practitioners who live in New York. Most who come are ethnic Chinese; few speak much English. They stay for a week or two, longer if they can afford it, and then are replaced by new volunteers.
The demonstrations are graphic. Photographs depict emaciated corpses, or victims with faces burned or battered. Over the past couple of months they have become a fixture on the city's streets, deeply unironic bits of street theater, drawing very mixed responses.
"The pictures are so gross, but when you see it day after day you just get desensitized," said Staci Singer, a stockbroker for TD Waterhouse, as she stood on Water Street last week, a few feet from Falun Gong demonstrators. "I just wish they'd go away."
But the displays also elicit sympathy.
"At first I thought it looks like a performance, some kind of art theater," said Reinhard Kressner, a Berliner visiting New York, who stopped to look at a particularly gruesome demonstration in Lower Manhattan, and was moved enough to sign a petition supporting Falun Gong. "This is about human rights. No one should suffer like this."
Falun Gong, which literally means "Law Wheel Cultivation," is a form of qigong, an ancient Chinese practice of breathing exercises. It is related to tai chi, and incorporates elements of Buddhism and other Eastern religions.
Falun Gong differs from most qigong practices in that it combines spiritual elements of moral self-improvement with some strange-sounding beliefs (practitioners believe that there is a wheel spinning in their bellies, expelling evil and attracting good) and an apocalyptic vision, said Maria Hsia Chang, a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, who wrote a book about Falun Gong.
"They believe that as you do the exercises not only will your health improve, it will also transform you spiritually until one reaches enlightenment," Dr. Chang said of Falun Gong members.
While some are sympathetic to the plight of its practitioners, other qigong groups have been quick to distance themselves from Falun Gong and its religious, messianic overtones, in part to spare their practitioners harassment in China. The practice is based on the writings of a former Chinese government clerk named Li Hongzhi, whose teachings inspired a huge following in China in the early 1990's after the government relaxed restrictions on private social groups. As the movement grew, the Chinese government cracked down, Dr. Chang said, perceiving in its popularity a threat to the central government's dominance.
Mr. Li fled China in the late 1990's and is thought to live in Queens, Dr. Chang said. He rarely appears in public. The group claims no central organization. There are no clergy members and no houses of worship. Practitioners meet in public places.
The current protests, the most intense the group has mounted in New York, are aimed largely at publicizing what the practitioners claim is a concerted effort by the Chinese government to harass practitioners and their supporters in the United States and other countries.
Practitioners of Falun Gong have filed several lawsuits in recent years against Chinese officials and embassy employees. They have compiled a list of incidents that runs 300 pages.
In an example cited in a federal lawsuit, a practitioner was attacked by men believed to be associated with the Chinese consulate in San Francisco while handing out Falun Gong literature in a public park. Tires were slashed on the car that a practitioner in Flushing used to transport Falun Gong materials, the papers said.
The complexity of serving papers on a sovereign government has held up the lawsuit, which was filed in Federal Court in Washington in April 2002, according to Jason Dzubow, a lawyer handling the case, but arrangements to serve papers though the State Department are currently being finalized, he said.
It is difficult to determine the veracity of the claims of harassment and even harder to ascertain whether the Chinese government has any connection to them. Practitioners have filed complaints with the police and with the F.B.I., according to the lawsuit, but it is unclear how law enforcement views the charges.
After residents of his district said they had been hassled while picketing the Chinese consulate in New York, Representative Frank Pallone Jr. of New Jersey asked the Manhattan district attorney to investigate, but said he did not know the outcome of the cases.
Mr. Dzubow said the similarities in complaints across the country is evidence that the harassment is coordinated. He said that at least one defendant in the case, the leader of a Chinese-American business association in Chicago, met with high-level Chinese officials. But he acknowledged that the plaintiffs had little evidence of direct involvement by the Chinese government.
The spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, Sun Weide, denied that anyone connected with the Chinese government had broken United States laws. But he said repeatedly in a telephone interview that Falun Gong is an "evil cult has ruined lives, destroyed families and harmed society," and that efforts to limit its spread were legitimate.
"We think it is the responsibility of any responsible government to combat this kind of evil cult,'' Mr. Sun said.
Gail Rachlin, a real estate broker in Manhattan who serves as a sort of unofficial spokeswoman for Falun Gong in New York, said that the practice was peaceful, and that its adherents had no political aims.
"People engaged in gentle exercises to improve their health who embrace truthfulness, compassion and forbearance are no threat to the Chinese government," Ms. Rachlin said. "All we seek is the right to practice without fear of death and torture."
Congress passed a resolution last month demanding that the Chinese government "immediately stop interfering in the exercise of religious and political freedoms within the United States, such as the right to practice Falun Gong, that are guaranteed by the United States Constitution," and urging the attorney general to investigate allegations of harassment and intimidation by Chinese officials.
But the practice's supporters say worldwide pressure has relaxed in recent years as China gains greater acceptance from the United States and others.
"I think a lot of human rights violations in China have dropped off the radar screen since the Chinese have been taken under our bosom as our allies in the war on terror," said William F. Schulz, the executive director of Amnesty International U.S.A. He questioned whether the notion that increased economic exchange with and in China would improve human rights.
And so Henny Chen, a 35-year-old merchandiser for a garment company in Jakarta, took two weeks off work, paid $865 for a round-trip ticket to New York and crammed into a room with other practitioners at a cheap Times Square hotel.
"If American people know how the Chinese government hurts people, maybe they would ask their government to help us," Ms. Chen said. "We are here to show the truth."