Tiananmen Square Self-immolation Incident - Falun Gong Response

Falun Gong Response

Immediately following the self-immolation, the Falun Dafa Information Center denied that the self-immolators could have been Falun Gong practitioners, emphatically pointing out that Falun Gong’s teachings do not sanction any form of violence, and that suicide is considered a sin.

Falun Gong sources overseas questioned the official Chinese government account of the event, and apparent inconsistencies in government’s official narrative led to a hypothesis that the self-immolation was staged by the government to justify the persecution against Falun Gong by portraying its practitioners as irrational and suicidal. According to this hypothesis, the self-immolation participants were paid actors, and were presumably assured that the flames would be extinguished before doing real harm.

Falun Gong-affiliated New Tang Dynasty Television produced a programme called False Fire, which analyses the inconsistencies in the accounts of the event in the official Chinese media.

Based on a review of CCTV footage, the programme purports to demonstrate that the self-immolators donned fire-proof clothing and masks, and raises the question of why the participants’ hair and the apparently gasoline-filled bottles they carried did not catch fire. Falun Gong sources also noted that the self-immolators’ behaviour, the slogans they shouted, and their meditation postures were not consistent with the teachings or practices of Falun Gong.

Among the issues highlighted by the False Fire documentary is the conditions surrounding the deaths of self-immolators Liu Chunling and her daughter. A frame-by-frame analysis of the CCTV footage purportedly shows that Liu was not killed on scene by the flames, but by a deadly blow to the head from a man in a military overcoat. The False Fire documentary also says that Liu's 12-year-old daughter died under unusual circumstances in hospital, noting that she was recovering well before dying suddenly on 17 March. Some Falun Gong sources argue that she may have been killed by the government as a way of guaranteeing her silence.

Falun Gong sources suggest that the reaction times of state-run television crews and police on Tiananmen Square demonstrates they had advanced knowledge of the event. They observed that officers arrived almost immediately on the scene equipped with numerous fire extinguishers. Fire extinguishers are not standard equipment for police on Tiananmen Square, the nearest building that would house them was several minutes away from the scene.

The World Organization to Investigate the Persecution further called attention to portrayals of Wang Jindong in the state-run television, claiming that the man who self-immolated on the square was not the same person who appeared in subsequent interviews with CCTV. It pointed to a voice analysis conducted by the Speech Processing Laboratory at National Taiwan University, which concluded that the voices did not match, and also noted that the hairline and facial proportions appeared to be different. These observations were used to advance the theory that the self-immolators were actors.