An Outsider's View: Falun Gong Prevents Suicide
Hu Ping
[Minghui Net] To prove that Falun Gong is a "XX" (slanderous words omitted), the Chinese government has gone to much trouble to publicize more than 1,400 alleged cases of people dying from practicing Falun Gong and at least 136 cases of Falun Gong-related suicides. This was for the span of time when Falun Gong came out in 1993 to July 1999 when the ban started (info from China News Agency, March 20th).
These two figures sound quite suspicious to me. But let's take a step back and, even assuming they're true and reliable, can they be used to prove that Falun Gong is harmful? No. Some people may have been fooled by these figures and ended up with a negative attitude towards Falun Gong, but that's only because they don't have a good sense of the relevant statistics and have nothing to compare them with.
The Chinese government claims that Falun Gong had 2.3 million practitioners. This, however, is an extremely low figure. If 1,400 people were to die during a seven-year period, that would be an average of 200 people dying each year. The death rate would thus be less than 0.01% per year, an average much lower than the conventional death rate of 0.65%.
In America, around 100,000 people die each year from the misuse of medication. There are currently over 200 million people in America. Thus, the death rate from medication misuse comes out to be around 0.05%. This percentage is slightly higher than the percentage of people who [supposedly] died from practicing Falun Gong each year. During the seven years from 1993 to 1999, there were 136 alleged suicide cases among Falun Gong practitioners, an average of about 20 per year. The international convention for suicide calculation is normally based on a unit of 100,000 people. Thus, the suicide rate for Falun Gong practitioners would be 0.87. Please compare the suicide rates from other countries:
Ireland (in 1968) -- 2.5
Chile (in 1967) -- 2.8
England (in 1968) -- 9.1
United States (in 1967) -- 10.8
Japan (1967) -- 14.1
France (1968) -- 15.3
Sweden (1967) -- 21.6
Hungary -- 33.7 ------ from American Encyclopedia (Version 1998)
According to The World Journal (Northern America Edition), last year there were 2,360 suicides in Taiwan-- a new record for the past nine years. Thus, Taiwan has a suicide rate of 10.64.
In China, some people said that there were about 200,000 people committing suicide each year during the 1990s, but a book entitled The Truth (Page 354 of the 1999 Edition, published by The Southern Weekend Publisher) revealed a much higher average. According to this book, Chinese experts estimated that the suicide rate for people living in the countryside was 303,047 people per year.
If you had an average of 200,000 people committing suicide each year, then the suicide rate would be 16.7 people for every 100,000 people (based on a population of 1.2 billion). Then, if there were 300,000 suicides each year, the suicide rate would be above 25.
By contrast, the [alleged] suicide rate of Falun Gong practitioners is estimated to be 0.87 for every 100,000 people. If we compare this with the rate of between 16.7% and 25%, the rate for Mainland China, we can see the latter is almost 20 times to 30 times greater than the former.
Though the suicide rates from Mainland China are somewhat questionable, we can say that the suicide rates from Taiwan and the other countries listed above are quite reliable. From the comparison we see that the suicide rate of Falun Gong practitioners was less than one tenth of that in Taiwan; it was also less than one tenth of that in the United States. Even when compared with the lowest suicide figure (Ireland - 2.5), the suicide rate for Falun Gong practitioners was only a third as high.
So instead of claiming that Falun Gong induces suicide, we should say that Falun Gong prevents suicide.
(Originally published on http://dajiyuan.com)
Chinese version available at
http://minghui.cc/mh/articles/2001/4/2/9579.html
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