Self-Immolation Incident still without Independent Verification

[Minghui Net] On January 23 and 24, in the absence of independent verification and without presenting Falun Gong's statement, some media in Japan cited the one-sided reports from the Xinhua News Agency and reported the 5-people immolation event on Tiananmen Square as carried out by Falun Gong practitioners. We believe these reports are one-sided and non-objective, and have significantly misled the audiences. Here, we'd like to offer our views regarding the self-immolation incident and hope the media can look into facts and promptly get across our opinions to the public.

1. It is groundless to shift the blame for the self-immolation incident to Falun Gong.

In order to persecute Falun Gong, Jiang Zemin's group has utilized every state apparatus and adopted all types of autocratic measures. On the issue of Falun Gong, Xinhua News Agency, acting as an autocratic publicity bureau, has been consistently fabricating lies in order to fool the public. Therefore, during the period when Falun Gong is persecuted, no statements from Xinhua News Agency should be quoted as factual. The Xinhua report about 5 Falun Gong practitioners' supposed self-immolation lacks any concrete evidence, because there's no way to verify that those who attempted self-immolation were either Falun Gong practitioners or others. Although two journalists from CNN witnessed the incident, the police on the spot confiscated their video recording, and they were detained for one and half hours. An American reporter in Beijing even suspected that the case was a trap planned by the Chinese communist party on the eve of the Spring Festival to prepare for even harsher crackdown and more extensive arrests and to justify the negative impact as a result of its suppression policy. Last year, after a man attempted a bomb suicide on Tiananmen Square, the state-run media in China had for a time tried to put the blame on Falun Gong. Later on, for various reasons, they negated Falun Gong's connection with the case. It was believed that the government feared the suicide news might arouse public irritation. Anyway, it is commonplace for the Chinese state-run media to override its own reports. Usually only after a period of silence on the part of the state-run media could the truth be discerned.

2. The act of suicide goes against Falun Gong's cultivation principles.

Since no investigation has yet revealed the truth concerning the Tiananmen self-immolation incident, all conclusions regarding the immolators' motivation are mere guesswork. If anyone has a chance to read the following statement on suicide by Falun Gong's founder, it is not hard to conclude that claiming that Falun Gong practitioners conducted the self-immolation was illogical and unsupported, because any suicide action goes against Falun Gong's cultivation principles.

The following is an excerpt from the book "Falun Dafa (Lecture in Sydney)"

Question: The third question is the issue of killing as mentioned in the book. Killing a life is a very big sin. If a person commits suicide, does it count as a sin or not?

Master (Li Hongzhi): "It counts as a sin. Now, this human society is no longer good, and all kinds of strange and bizarre things have appeared. They talk about the so-called euthanasia and give injections to let people die. Everyone knows it. Why do they give an injection to let a person die? They think that he is suffering. However, we think that his suffering is eliminating karma. When he is reincarnated in the next life, he will have a light body without karma, and he will have a great fortune awaiting him. While he is amidst the pain and is eliminating karma, he is certainly not having an easy time. If you do not let him eliminate his karma and kill him, isn't that murder? If he is gone, carrying the karma, in the next life he will have to repay the karma. So, which would you say is right? Committing suicide has another sin. This is because a person's life is pre-arranged. You have disrupted the sequence of the god's entire layout. Through the obligations you carry out to society, between people there is this kind of interrelationship. If the person dies, won't this entire sequence disrupt the god's arrangement then? If you disrupt it, he will not let you go. Therefore, committing suicide is sinful."

3. The Chinese authority has consistently fabricated and spread lies to slander Falun Gong.

Since the crackdown on Falun Gong started in late July 1999, in order to eradicate Falun Gong, the Jiang Zemin administration has adopted all types of autocratic and violent measures, such as reckless detention and beating, putting Falun Gong practitioners into labor camps or mental hospitals, etc. In addition, they also manipulated all state propaganda organs to fabricate false evidence and lies and spread them overseas to justify its crackdown. Not long ago, a spokesman from the Chinese Foreign Ministry claimed that no one had received labor education for practicing Falun Gong. Several days later, however, the Chinese Legal News disclosed that Masanjia labor camp in Liaonin Province alone had "transformed" over 400 Falun Gong practitioners. Such self-contradictory reports can be widely found in the Chinese state-run media.

For instance, to label Falun Gong as an X X (slanderous words omitted out of respect), a common trick played by the Chinese authority is to make up lies about Falun Gong practitioners' conducting suicide. Early in May 1999, the Public Security Ministry in Beijing published a rumor in the newspaper about "Falun Gong practitioners plan to commit group suicide in Xiangshan Mountain". Then, it spread this news among the local police, plain-clothes police and special agents, who began instigating Falun Gong practitioners to go to Xiangshan to join "group activities". At the same time, it dispatched armed forces and lay out armed police in Xiangshan and planned on murdering Falun Gong practitioners there but making it look like a group suicide. Then, it could label Falun Gong as an X X (slanderous words omitted) and carry out the slandering and cracking down on a larger scale. On December 29, 2000, Xinhua News Agency released another rumor that Falun Gong practitioners had been instigated to commit group suicide, which constituted another dangerous omen of planned murder. Several days ago, when Professor Zhang Kunlun, who had been arrested and sentenced to a labor term by the Chinese authority and then released under efforts from the Canadian government and people, testified before the international human rights organizations, he said: "They (the government) said: if Falun Gong practitioners are beaten to death, simply claim that they commit suicide". Some independent media also reported that during the Falun Dafa Taiwan conference, Jiang Zemin had sent out a forlorn hope (suicidal assassin) and planned to assassinate Falun Gong's founder using suicide bombs. It is not hard to infer from these examples that the self-immolation incident was another conspiracy to defame Falun Gong, which was part of Xinhua News Agency's rumor on December 29^th.

4. A One-sided Worldwide Propaganda Campaign

After the crackdown on Falun Gong started in late July 1999, Jiang Zemin claimed to eradicate Falun Gong within 3 months. Now that 18 months have passed , with more and more practitioners actively appealing and telling the truth to the international community, Falun Gong has received wide recognition and support from all walks of life in the society. In the face of that, the Chinese government further escalates its propaganda campaign. Recently, it staged a so-called "Anti-X (slanderous words omitted) million-people signature movement", forcing the public to give support to its atrocious crackdown policy. The government even placed a mandatory question of political choice into the tests of elementary and high school students: Is Falun Gong good, or (Party) Secretary Jiang good? One of the high-priority tasks on the agenda of the Chinese diplomats in foreign countries is to send out materials defaming Falun Gong to the local governments. What they attempted to do is to spread their monopoly propaganda throughout the world in order to cover up their crimes in cracking down on its people. We believe the Japanese media will also have a clear understanding of this point. At the same time, we hope that the Japanese media can be more objective, and avoid becoming accomplices of the autocracy and misleading the public on the issue of Falun Gong.

5. Falun Gong is always peaceful and non- violent.

The Chinese authority's autocratic and atrocious practices are leading to more and more protests against the government's corruption or malpractices from the general public or civil organizations, including some protests in extreme forms. However, Falun Gong is a pure cultivation practice based on the principle of Truthfulness-Compassion-Tolerance, and has no intention of engaging in politics. The practitioners' current efforts are nothing but safeguarding their freedom of belief and telling the truth to the international community to seek justice and understanding. Here we'd like to make it clear that Falun Gong practitioners' resistance to vicious conduct is linked to their practice of Truthfulness-Compassion-Tolerance, and their pursuit for human rights will always be peaceful and non-violent.

Falun Dafa practitioners from Japan

January 26, 2001