PRESS STATEMENT

The Xinhua News Agency's report that five members of the Falun Gong meditation group set themselves on fire Tuesday in China's Tiananmen Square is yet another attempt by the PRC regime to defame the practice of Falun Gong. We are calling on the PRC regime to allow the world media and international human rights groups to investigate this case to clarify the facts.

This so-called suicide attempt on Tiananmen Square has nothing to do with Falun Gong practitioners because the teachings of Falun Gong prohibit any form of killing. Mr. Li Hongzhi, the founder of the practice, has explicitly stated that suicide is a sin.

There are many other groups and many other Chinese citizens disenfranchised by injustice and corruption in society to protest the PRC regime using either confrontational or extreme measures. Based on the principles of Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance, in over 18 months of resistance to the persecution, the actions of Falun Gong practitioners have remained consistently non-violent and peaceful. It is the Chinese police officers who have, again and again, demonstrated their violence and brutality.

The state-run Xinhua News Agency, the PRC Foreign Affairs Ministry, and every arm of the PRC government have fabricated countless lies against Falun Gong throughout this crackdown. Not long ago, the spokesperson of China’s Foreign Affairs Ministry claimed that no one has been sent to labor camp for practicing Falun Gong. Yet, just days later, another government newspaper touted that over 400 Falun Gong practitioners have been "reformed" in one labor camp alone in Liaoning Province. International media and human rights groups worldwide, including Amnesty International, have full documentation of thousands of practitioners in labor camps and tens of thousands in detention.

More than 120 Falun Gong practitioners have been tortured to death in police custody, and yet of the handful of deaths that the PRC regime has actually acknowledged, they have claimed were either a result of heart attacks or from jumping out of trains or buildings. In reality, photographs of the bodies of the victims have shown clear physical marks from brutal beating. It is no secret that the PRC government and its mouthpiece will stop at nothing to fabricate lies to manipulate the public. They have ruined their credibility at every turn.

Again, we urge that the international media investigate further to ascertain the parties involved in this case, but we also hope that they will expose the inhumane tortures and brutal conditions that Falun Gong practitioners are forced to face every day all across China.

Posting date: 1/23/2001
Original article date: 1/23/2001
Category: Views on Cultivation

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