[Renminbao.com] According to sources inside Luoyang (the capital of Henan Province), the heads of the Henan provincial government and the local Communist Party were ordered to appear before the central government after 309 people died from a Christmas day fire in Luoyang last December. They were forced to take the full blame for what had happened.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. They decided that they would have to do something drastic to make up for their mistakes and regain the favor of the central government. After they came back to Luoyang, the provincial heads held a half-day meeting with the leaders of the local law enforcement community on January 4th, 2001. At the end of the meeting, they came up with a plan of paying huge sums of money to several people and sending them to Beijing as "Falun Gong practitioners", so that they could set themselves on fire on Tiananmen Square. In the minds of the local leaders, the shocking "self-immolation" episode would provide them with the much-needed political capital and favor of Jiang Zemin.
In the meeting, the provincial heads pointed out that these "Falun Gong practitioners" would have to be from outside of Luoyang, so people would not suspect that the two events ("self-immolation" and the Luoyang fire) were related. They decided to find the people from the next biggest city in Henan Province, Kaifeng. The law enforcement leaders suggested that it would be more convincing if the people involved had a wide age distribution, so they agreed to add a teenager and a young child to the list.
All the "self-immolation volunteers" were handpicked by January 10th. They were promised astronomical amounts of insurance compensation and monetary rewards, and told over and over again that "the fire would be put out as soon as it starts." The "self-immolation volunteers" then traveled to Beijing. The officials from the Henan provincial office to Beijing greeted them upon their arrival. These officials arranged a place for them to live temporarily, and handed out Falun Gong books to them so they could prove themselves to be "Falun Gong practitioners."
These "volunteers" did not know that the promise of "putting out the fire as soon as it starts" was only made by the local officials. The top-secret order received by the Tiananmen Police Station from the "higher-ups" was that they were not allowed to put out the fire until "sufficient amount of injuries have been produced." But because it was difficult to judge what really constituted "sufficient amount of injuries," the police rushed to put out the fire on most "self-immolation volunteers" before their injuries met the "requirement." Therefore the secret goal set by the "higher-ups" of producing 3 deaths was not accomplished.
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