By Steven Mufson

Washington Post Foreign Service

BEIJING, Aug. 31 -- It was a double-feature video day at the Nongovernmental Organizations Forum on Women -- but not the sort of blockbuster performance that host nation China is eager to repeat.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese dissident recently released after nearly six years of house arrest, delivered a videotaped keynote address that had been slipped into China for the first full day of the forum.

"It is not the prerogative of men alone to bring light to this world. Women, with their capacity for compassion and self-sacrifice, their courage and perseverance, have done much to dissipate the darkness of intolerance and hate," Aung San Suu Kyi said in the video.

The video was noteworthy as one of the first public speeches by the newly released democracy advocate and because it was shown in tightly controlled Communist China, which has maintained close relations with the military dictatorship in Burma. Aung San Suu Kyi did not seek to attend the women's forum for fear of being barred from reentering Burma.

Chinese authorities made no effort to interfere with the showing of the video, but witnesses said a scuffle broke out between Chinese security people and conference participants following the screening of a video about Tibet titled "Voices in Exile." The topic is a sensitive one here because China invaded Tibet in the 1950s and ever since has been struggling against an exile-based independence movement.

The video was shown in a small third-floor room in a building in Huairou, the suburban town about an hour's drive outside Beijing where the NGO Forum is taking place. While it was playing, Chinese security officials scribbled notes. Afterward, a Chinese person attending the session grabbed the video out of the machine. He passed it to a Chinese security officer who started backing out of the room, but the 30 to 40 people who were crowded into the room moved to block the door, one of them later recounted. One member of the audience snatched the video back, and it quickly vanished from view once again.

The incident was just one of the controversies that have dogged the conference, which is supposed to be about drawing up recommendations to help promote women's health, human rights and economic advancement around the world, in anticipation of the official U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women, which opens here next week.

Participants complained today that the Chinese had broken commitments to provide adequate transportation to the meeting. Instead of buses every 20 minutes, as promised to the United Nations in June, China provided once-a-day bus service to and from Beijing hotels.

Many women also complained about heavy surveillance of particularly controversial groups. Chinese security men photographed and videotaped a workshop about the advocacy of women's rights in the United States and China. A caucus to discuss the human rights portions of the "program of action" document to be issued at the end of the forum was also attended by security men.

But more than a dozen activists of the London-based human rights group Amnesty International took part in an unprecedented protest on Chinese soil without much interference. Standing in front of the Huairou meeting place, they held up posters and T-shirts bearing pictures and names of 12 female victims of human rights abuses.

The people on the posters included Chinese journalist Gao Yu, who was jailed last year for six years on charges of leaking state secrets in articles published in Hong Kong.

Gao, 51, whose reports in the independent Economics Weekly won her an international reputation in the mid-1980s, was arrested in October 1993, just two days before she was to leave China to begin a journalism fellowship in the United States. She is reported to be in poor health.

Thousands of people, including actresses Jane Fonda and Sally Field, still have not been able to obtain visas from the Chinese government even though China told a senior U.N. official in June that China would not limit the number of people who could attend.

Chen Jian, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, said his government issued 27,496 visas but did not specify how many were for the NGO Forum and how many for the official U.N. conference.

Organizers said 17,000 women had arrived by Wednesday night to take part in the forum -- about 10,000 fewer than had registered for hotel rooms and nearly 20,000 fewer than had registered in New York for the meeting. U.S. officials said some people who arrived in Beijing without visas were forced to sleep at the airport and fly back to Japan.