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Template:ChineseText The Tiananmen Square self-immolation incident was an event which took place in Tiananmen Square on the eve of Chinese new year, 23 January 2001 when seven people attempted to set themselves on fire. Footage was broadcast nationally in the People's Republic of China by China Central Television (CCTV).

The broadcaster claimed the self-immolators as Falun Gong practitioners. Time said that it was possible misguided practitioners took it upon themselves to demonstrate in this manner, sparking a "propaganda bonanza" for the Chinese authorities. Falun Gong in New York emphatically denies that the people could have been practitioners because the teachings forbid suicide and killing. Falun Gong and some third-party commentators point to apparent inconsistencies in the government's version of events and assert that the incident was staged in order to turn public opinion against the practice and build support for the crackdown of the group.

According to Time magazine, the government's media war against Falun Gong gained significant traction following the act; the six-month campaign successfully portrayed Falun Gong as an "evil cult" which could unhinge its followers. Repeated broadcasts of images of a girl’s burning body, and alleged practitioners declaring self-immolation would "lead them to paradise" convinced many Chinese that Falun Gong was an "evil cult". CNN commented that the campaign is probably the government's first effort to gain public support for the crackdown of Falun Gong, and is reminiscent of its past political movements such as the Korean War and the Cultural Revolution.

Background

From 25 April to July 1999 approximately 300 Falun Gong demonstrations were held in China, often in response to reported mistreatment of practitioners. On 22 July of the same year, a decision was made by the Chinese Government to ban the group. The ban and the associated persecution is considered "politically motivated" and a major violation of human rights by human rights organizations.

By the end of 1999, Amnesty International expressed concern about claims of torture and deaths of Falun Gong adherents in police custody. Approximately 35,000 Falun Gong practitioners had been arrested in Beijing. Tiananmen Square became one of the prime locations where the practitioners were expected to routinely protest. On January 1, 2001, another 700 Falun Gong protesters were arrested in the square. The size of protests had dwindled to zero due to the Government crackdown, despite a call to step up protests "especially in Tiananmen Square," according to Time.

Amnesty International called on the Chinese government to stop "...mass arbitrary detentions, unfair trials and other human rights violations resulting from the crackdown on the Falun Gong..." in March 2000; Amnesty expressed concern that Falun Gong practitioners had been "...tortured or subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in detention." Another bulletin in December 2000 cited reports of torture, detention and ill-treatment, some ending in death, and condemned the authorities' "callous disregard for the lives of people detained solely for their peaceful activities."

According to Human Rights organizations, an intense propaganda campaign has been used by the CCP to turn public opinion against Falun Gong.

The Washington Post in August 2001 wrote that the authorities adopted three strategies to "crush" Falun Gong: violence against practitioners who refuse to renounce their beliefs; 'brainwashing' to force all known practitioners to abandon Falun Gong and renounce it, and a media campaign to turn public opinion against the practice.

Amnesty International refers to the Post article and says "The propaganda campaign capitalised on an incident on 23 January 2001 when five alleged practitioners, including a 12 year-old girl and her mother, set themselves on fire in Tiananmen Square."

Kilgour and Matas, who wrote a report on allegations of live organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners, say implementation of these strategies meant staged attempts to make the Chinese population think that practitioneres "committed suicide by self-immolation." According to Kilgour and Matas, the campaign had the desired effect over time, and many Chinese came to accept the Party line on Falun Gong. They say "This incitement to hatred is most acute in China."

According to TIME, prior to the event, many Chinese had felt that Falun Gong posed no real threat, and that the crackdown had gone too far, but the immolations marked a turning point in its anti-Falun Gong campaign. A paper from Falun Gong human rights group World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (WOIPFG) suggests that Jiang Zemin considered that the public was not responding as desired a year after initiating the crackdown: China had failed to "annihilate Falun Gong within three months", the persecution had met with international condemnation, as well as resistance from highly ranked Party officials.

The incident

On 23 January 2001 (Chinese New Year's eve) a group of men and women attempted to set themselves on fire in Tiananmen Square, five succeeded at ignition. A man sat down on the pavement northeast of the Monument to the People's Heroes at the center of the square, poured gasoline on his clothes and set himself on fire. Moments later four more people set themselves alight. A CNN camera crew were on hand to record the event. CNN producer Lisa Weaver said she could "smell burning flesh as the van slowly passed." As they were taping, military police stepped in, detained the crew, and confiscated their tapes. Nearby police with fire-extinguishers ran to the victims and put out the flames reportedly within the space of a minute.

The self immolators and their apparent outcomes, as reported by state-controlled media:

• Wang Jin-dong (王進東), male, hospitalised and later imprisoned for 15 years
• Liu Chun-ling (劉春玲), female, mother of Si-ying, died on the scene
• Liu Si-ying (劉思影), female, daughter of Chun-ling, died weeks later
• Chen Guo (陳果), female, daughter of Hao Hui-jun, suffered severe burn injuries
• Hao Hui-jun (郝惠君), female, mother of Chen Guo, suffered severe burn injuries
• Liu Bao-rong (劉葆榮), male, sentenced to life imprisonment
• Liu Yun-fang (劉雲芳), male, sentenced to life imprisonment

In later reports which appeared in state run media, the number of self-immolators rose from five to seven–two of whom apparently had failed to ignite themselves. According to these media reports, the people who attempted suicide were all from Kaifeng in Henan Province. It was claimed that they agreed to light themselves in different parts of the square at 2:30 pm; they smuggled gasoline into the square using plastic Sprite bottles. Liu Chun-ling reportedly died on the scene. A few months later, state media announced the death of Liu Si-ying, who had been hospitalized with severe burns following the incident. The other three were reported to have been "severely disfigured". Beijing denied requests from western journalists to interview Liu Siying and the three other survivors; only China Central Television and the official New China News Agency were permitted to speak to their relatives or their colleagues.

Reporting and analysis

State-owned Xinhua News Agency said that the self-immolators were "avid practitioners" of Falun Gong, allegedly having taken up the practice between 1995 and 1997. Xinhua also claimed that during the week preceding the event, they fantasised about "how wonderful it would be to enter heaven". Some western news organizations reported the Xinhua version that the immolators were practitioners, as, according to Danny Schechter, there were no sources to verify facts independently given the tight state censorship.

Falun Gong expressed its concern of western media's giving Xinhua's reports so much credibility and airtime, given that Xinhua openly admits it "disseminate propaganda for the Chinese regime." According to their press statement, "Much remains unclear and unknown about the circumstances surrounding the incident", including what took place in the week between the incident and when the "fully engineered news articles and television programs" were released.

Schechter, however, doubted Falun Gong would deny being involved in the incident if it was a genuine protest. Anthropologist Noah Porter opines that even if the participants considered themselves to be practitioners, they are no more representative of Falun Gong than Christianity is represented by people "who shoot and bomb abortion clinics." In the National Review, the Laogai Research Foundation suggested that it was "hardly a far-fetched hypothesis" that the government allowed or staged the incident to discredit Falun Gong, as the government vowed to crush the practice before the eightieth anniversary celebrations of the Communist Party in July. The article concluded that while the "PRC's propaganda coup" against Falun Gong is within the context of popular understandings of other immolations in recent Asian history, "...this situation is not clear", and for the Communists, this was just "another lie."

The New York Times stated that conflicting claims were difficult to assess "ith propaganda streaming in from seemingly opposite ends of the universe... especially since the remaining Falun Gong practitioners have been driven underground." It also noted one of the victims was able to "fluidly perform" Falun Gong's signature slow-motion exercises in front of Western media. CNN had reported that four of the victims were seen in flames, with their hands held "in a classic Falun Gong meditation pose", causing Falun Gong to file a complaint to CNN.

Falun Gong denied any practitioners could have been involved in the incident, as "...The teachings of Falun Gong prohibit any form of killing. Mr. Li Hongzhi... has explicitly stated that suicide is a sin." It accused the PRC Government of attempting to discredit the practice of Falun Gong. Falun Gong related commentators also pointed out that the main participants' account of the incident and other aspects of the participants' behaviour were inconsistent with the teachings of Falun Dafa.

One western diplomat commented that the public changed from sympathising with Falun Gong to siding with the Government after the event; human interest stories and accounts of rehabilitation efforts of former practitioners shifted popular consensus.

The Falun Gong group WOIPFG saw the incident as a major tool in the government's "global campaign to vilify Falun Gong practitioners to the Chinese people..." WOIPFG believed that hostility toward Falun Gong from the general public escalated, the campaign "clearly intensified," and that "hate crimes" targeting Falun Gong increased. It further alleged the death toll during police arrests or in prisons, labor camps and "brainwashing centers" all sharply increased.

False Fire

False Fire, a video programme, was produced by the Falun Gong-linked New Tang Dynasty TV. The programme attempted to deconstruct the event, alleging several apparent inconsistencies in the Chinese Government's version of the story:

Liu Chunling appears to fall from being bludgeoned on the head by a man in military suit, and may have died instantaneously as a result; the self-immolators appear to be wearing fire-protective clothing. The hair and bottle of gasoline at the feet of one of them is intact, although this should have caught fire first; Police, who normally are not known to carry fire extinguishers on duty, appeared to have accessed almost 25 pieces of fire-fighting equipment immediately despite the nearest building being 10 minutes away and only two police vehicles being at the scene; surveillance cameras in Tiananmen Square are usually fixed, whereas the camera of the CCTV footage zooms in on the scene as it unfolds; Wang Jindong shouts comments that do not form part of Falun Dafa teachings, his posture, including hand position and sitting position, does not reflect the full or half lotus position as in the Falun Dafa teachings; the victims were not kept in sterile rooms, as recorded by Chinese state media - inconsistent with proper care of severe burn victims; the girl who allegedly underwent a tracheotomy appeared to be able to speak and sing clearly mere days after the surgery.

International Educational Development (IED), a human rights NGO, said, after viewing False Fire, that it had "discovered that had in fact been staged". Charles A. Radin of the Boston Globe stated "In the slowed version, it appears that Liu Chunling . . . collapsed not from the flames but from being bludgeoned by a man in a military overcoat.”

The Washington Post questioned why the Chinese government happened to have a camera crew in place to film the incident. "The close-up shots shown on Chinese television appear to have been taken without any interference from police. In some, the camera is clearly behind police barricades and positioned directly above the apparent sect members. In addition, footage from overhead surveillance cameras in Tiananmen Square appears to show a man using a small hand-held video camera to film the scene, not a large TV news camera." Schechter noted that a CNN producer at the scene, "standing just fifty feet away" said she did not see any children. He doubted that the child, a tracheotomy patient, would have been able to "speak to the Chinese media so soon after the tragedy."

According to a Hong Kong NGO Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy, all of the victims, except 12-year-old Liu Siying, had previously protested for Falun Gong in Tiananmen Square. The Age described the immolation incident as the Communist Party's main piece of evidence in its campaign to portray Falun Gong as "dangerous and predatory," similar to Aum Shinrikyo or Jim Jones' cult in Guyana. It believes that this attempt has "fallen flat," and the "ready availability of fire-extinguishers and official TV teams and the lack of verification about the victims" raises questions about Falun Gong involvement, or whether the incident was staged.

Beyond the Limits of Forbearance

On January 1, 2001, Li published an article called "Beyond the Limits of Forbearance", wherein, according to Time, Li wrote that persecution of the Fa by "evil" (i.e. the Chinese authorities) could no longer be tolerated. The Guardian and Time said that Mr Li’s new scripture could have had something to do with the incident; that it was implausible for it to have been staged; that the scripture appealed to "radical" practitioners and those feeling "desperate or out of touch with the exiled leadership”; and that "a Beijing arm of Falun Gong strongly suggested the protesters... were devotees".

The Guardian's John Gittings thought that Li had confused his supporters in his New Year message "that the 'forbearance' taught by Buddha 'does not mean tolerating evil beings'." According to Gittings, ten days later, Falun Gong in New York said that "certain disciples had some extreme interpretations we are going to resort to violence". Falun Gong said that Mr Li meant it was time to "bring the truth to light" about China's atrocities, using peaceful ways to expose and resist the persecution.

China scholar David Ownby refers to the same scripture, and said that he found no evidence of it being interpreted as a call to violence or retaliation: " assures his followers that they are right to want to eradicate the evil forces and that this evil will indeed be eradicated—although the form taken by such apparent militancy, beginning in the spring of 2001, was that of sitting in a meditative posture and 'emitting righteous thoughts.'"

The Asian Wall Street Journal wrote that the danger of putting Li's scripture as cause for the immolations "implies, insidiously, that the blame lies with the victims... the fundamental, human issue is the Chinese government's brutal campaign to wipe out Falun Dafa and the misery resulting from it." They write that in the face of the "brutalities" visited on practitioners, "it's not so difficult to imagine why a few persons would have succumbed to despair. And that makes them deserving of our pity rather than our cynicism."

The participants

After denying press access to the victims for a year after the incident, the government granted foreign press interviews in the presence of state officials in April 2002. When asked why they set themselves on fire, Hao Huijun said that she had realised the futility of writing letters and demonstrating by waving banners, "so finally, we decided...to make a big event to show our will to the world.... We wanted to show the government that Falun Gong was good."

Xinhua reported that Huo Xiuzhen, Liu Chunling's adoptive mother, spoke of her daughter's "obsession with Falun Gong", her "worshipping of Li Hongzhi", and how she would teach her daughter to practice Falun Gong. However, Liu's neighbours, when interviewed by the International Herald Tribune, stated that she was not a native of Kaicheng, was deeply troubled, and beat her mother and daughter. None of the interviewed had ever seen her practice Falun Gong. Falun Gong disputes that Liu was a practitioner because she "...was witnessed beating her stepmother and child... is not according to a Falun Gong practitioner's standard." Specifically, Zhuan Falun urges compassion, and specifically that practitioners should not lose their temper in disciplining children.

Wang Jindong, who, according to state-run media, is serving a 15 year sentence in Henan Provincial Prison, denied that he had been bribed by the government to stage the incident, and said he "felt humiliated because of my stupidity and fanatical ideas."

However, WOIPFG stated that the analysis by of the broadcasts by Speech Processing Laboratory at National Taiwan University , concludes that the first person named as Wang Jindong who appeared on CCTV was not the same person who appeared the second and third times. Falun Gong related sources insist that images of Wang Jindong that appeared in different state controlled media reports seem to be of different people .

Government actions

Following the incident, Tiananmen Square was shut down. Seven days after the event, China Central TV aired their footage of five people in flames, said to be taken by nearby surveillance cameras.

The government immediately used the twelve-year-old Liu Siying as an example that Falun Gong was harmful to children. After having had a tracheotomy, according to Government sources, she was able to speak through "approved media outlets", saying that her own mother told her to set herself on fire to reach the "heavenly golden kingdom". The media parade incited 8 million students to join the "Anti-Cult action by the Youth Civilised Communities Across the Nation". Posters, leaflets, videos and lectures began in the class rooms nation wide about the supposed detrimental effects of the practice. Regular anti-Falun Gong classes were scheduled in schools on the orders of the authorities, with 12 million children submitting writings disapproving of the practice.

Within a month, authorities issued a glossy pamphlet entitled The Whole Story of the Self Immolation Incident Created by Falun Gong Addicts in Tiananmen Square featuring color photographs of charred bodies. The State Council's "Office for the Prevention and Handling of Evil Cults", declared after the event that it was now ready to form a united front with the global anti-cult struggle. The IHT reported state controlled media attacked Falun Gong and Li Hongzhi morning and night, on a daily basis. Meetings took place in factories, offices and universities; schools were ordered to "educate" pupils about Falun Gong. The Government announced that religious leaders from across the country had delivered denunciations. In Kaifeng, the post office issued an anti-Falun Gong postmark, and 10,000 people signed a petition denouncing the group.

By March 2001, before the National People's Congress, Premier Zhu Rongji and former Premier Li Peng made it clear that the elimination of the group was top priority. An anti-cult exhibition targeting Falun Gong was held in July 2001 at the China People's Revolution Military Museum in Beijing; Beijing newspapers have run exhibits of "former practitioners" thanking the Communist Party of China for "rescuing" them; in the form of a cartoon of Li Hongzhi covered in swastikas, the Chinese government compared Li to Adolf Hitler.

According to Amnesty International: " important part of the government’s propaganda campaign has been publicizing statements from people claiming to be former Falun Gong practitioners who denounce Falun Gong, speak of the damage the practice has brought to Chinese society, praise the government for its firm action against the movement, and eventually show their deepest gratitude towards the government’s saving them from being brainwashed by the “evil” cult."

The New York Times' Erick Eckholm opined that the Chinese government's propaganda was "as wooden and anachronistic as ever. First, suppress the news. Then, days later, orchestrate a crescendo of extreme television, radio and newspaper reports and editorials. Finally, marshall relatives of the duped victims to utter condemnations of the evil Master Li, then ask major groups -- from leaders of Catholic, Buddhist and Muslim churches to the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce -- to issue shrill denunciations."

According to Reporters Without Borders, in February, state media accused CNN, the Associated Press, and Agence France-Presse news agencies of having "encouraged" the immolation at Tiananmen Square. The authorities also threatened journalists with legal action for "homicide." A CNN official confirms that one of his teams was arrested that day near Tiananmen Square and that police confiscated their videotapes. The agency accused the Chinese government of trying to discredit foreign coverage of the country's repression against the Falun Gong movement.

Later reports

According to state media, Liu Yunfang was sentenced to life imprisonment, Wang Jindong received a fifteen-year sentence, and a Beijing resident, who allegedly provided them lodging and helped in the preparation, received a seven-year sentence.

In April 2002, after denying press access to the victims for over a year, the government suddenly granted the first meeting of the victims with foreign press, in the presence of government officials. At the time of meeting with the press, Chen Guo and her mother were still in the hospital. Chen had a face of blotchy grafted skin with no nose and no ears and one eye covered by a flap of skin; she apparently had lost both her hands. Her mother had also lost her hands, ears and nose; both eyes were covered with skin grafts. Wang Jindong had scarred, leathery cheeks and blackened fingers. The survivors admitted to setting themselves on fire to "strengthen the force of Falun Gong", and denied that the government was involved in staging the immolation incident .

In 2005, the authorities announced Liu Yunfang's prison term was reduced to 19 years for good behavior. Liu said he stopped believing in Falun Gong on 27 September 2003. Wang Jindong said. "I have totally woken up and I think I should persuade people still addicted to Falun Gong to wake up, too. Wang's 15-year term was cut by 2½ years because he was "active in rehabilitation,".

See also

• Persecution of Falun Gong
• Tiananmen Square protests of 1989

References

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• Falun Gong
• 2001 in China
• History of Beijing
• Political repression in the People's Republic of China
• Propaganda in the People's Republic of China