[Minghui 02/22/2001]

"Validate the Fa with reason, clarify the truth with wisdom, spread the Fa and offer people salvation with benevolence" (Rationality)

By Danny Schechter

February 21, 2001

What could be more dramatic? People are setting themselves on fire in  Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing. CNN is there. The police just  happen to have fire extinguishers on hand, and the victims are rushed to a  hospital after their agonies are thoroughly photographed for state  television. While the government-controlled media uncharacteristically  releases the story at once, it takes a week of production before video  footage is aired.

Soon, horrific images are rocketed around the world, seeming to confirm  China's charges that an evil cult is ordering brainwashed members to commit  suicide. Citing this new "evidence," the government insists that what it has  been saying all along about those "fanatical" Falun Gongers is true, and  these people must be banned as a threat to themselves and the nation. On  February 16 another suicide is attributed to Falun Gong. Alongside a charred  body an uncharred note is found allegedly claiming the victim did it to  support Li Hongzhi's spiritual practice.

The Wall Street Journal's Ian Johnson, one of the most insightful  journalists following this story, had his suspicions aroused by the speed  with which this story was covered, observing that the state media "reported  [the victim's] death with unusual alacrity, implying that either the death  took place earlier than reported or the usually cautious media had top-level  approval to rush out electronic reports and a televised dispatch. The 7 p.m.  local evening news, for example, had a filmed report from Mr. Tan's hometown  of Changde, a small city in Hunan province. Most reports for the evening  news are vetted by noon, so the daily broadcast rarely carries reports from  the same day, let alone an event that happened at noon and involved  satellite feeds from relatively remote parts of the country."

For news readers and media consumers, perception often trumps unclear  realities. In a world where dramatic images overshadow complex issues, Falun  Gong stands convicted of crazed cult behavior. Case closed!

Score a big one for Chinese President Jiang Zemin's crusade to "crush" and  discredit a growing spiritual movement that continues to resist a  state-ordered ban despite the detention of an estimated 50,000 practitioners  and over a hundred dead in police custody. Already, on the strength of this  one incident, The Financial Times proclaimed a "winner," as in, "Beijing  Wins Propaganda War Against Falun Gong." Note the headline. It doesn't refer  merely to one skirmish in a protracted media war that has gone on for 19  months, but to the war itself.

Many other respected news organizations disseminated the same story the same  way even though they were unable to verify it independently, instead using  accounts from Communist Party-controlled state media, especially the Xinua  news agency. Now, as new questions are raised and doubts expressed, it may  turn out that the world media have been misled into becoming an uncritical  transmission belt for Beijing's bullying.

The first incident happened on January 23, days after Jiang intensified his  official, nationwide, anti-cult media campaign. CNN was in the Square and  reported on the suicides but its tapes were confiscated, so we never saw  them. Seven days later, China's official TV shocked the nation with footage  of five people engulfed in flames, pictures said to be from nearby  surveillance cameras. Now a tragically disfigured victim of the incident,  12-year-old Liu Siying, says that her own mother told her to set herself on  fire to reach the "heavenly golden kingdom" in some accounts, or "nirvana"  in others. She has become a sympathetic symbol, even a poster child for  alleged abuses by the "evil cult." Her image is everywhere; her tragedy has  outraged all China. (In this respect she is the Elian Gonzalez of China!)  Yet only approved media outlets there have been permitted access to her.  Western reporters have been barred from direct contact.

Was she a Falun Gong practitioner? That seems doubtful, after The Washington  Post's Phillip Pan traced her to her home in Kaifeng (a town that  experienced an even more tragic disco fire recently, killing hundreds and  scarring many others). Pan discovered that the young girl's mother, who died  in the Tiananmen fire, was not known locally as a practitioner, but was  depressed, mentally unstable and accused of beating her daughter and mother.

Significantly, one of the CNN producers on the scene, just 50 feet away,  says she did not even see a child there. The government says doctors  performed a tracheotomy on the victim, but a pediatric surgeon said that, if  that were true, the child wouldn't be speaking right away.

Falun Gong spokespeople have been quoted as denying that they ordered,  orchestrated and participated in this incident. But in their statement,  which has not been carried in full anywhere, they go further and indict the  Western press: "It is troubling to us that the party line from the PRC  [People's Republic of China] mouthpieces, Xinhua News Agency and CCTV, is  being given so much airtime and so much credibility by the foreign press.  Xinhua and other state-run media outlets are generally never considered  credible sources, as even they openly admit that their function is to  disseminate propaganda for the Chinese regime. In fact, Xinhua is the Party  line.

"There is so much that remains unclear and unknown about the circumstances  surrounding the incident. And no one knows what occurred in the week after  the actual event and before the Chinese media outlets finally released their  fully engineered news articles and television programs. We must remember  that the Chinese regime is so tightly controlling every aspect of this case  that none of Xinhua's claims have been corroborated by independent sources."

And why would Falun Gong deny its role in the incident if it was a protest?  The Longhai Foundation, which monitors Chinese prisons, had similar  questions in the National Review: "Was this event staged or allowed to  happen by China's government in order to discredit the Falun Gong? It is  hardly a farfetched hypothesis. China's government has promised to  extinguish all problems connected with the Falun Gong in advance of the 80th  anniversary of Chinese Communism, which Beijing plans on celebrating this  July. ... Justin Yu, a journalist for World Journal, the Chinese-language  daily, reflected on the confusion faced by many Chinese over what to  believe. The PRC's propaganda coup against the Falun Gong relies upon  people's understanding of events in recent Asian history, such as the  73-year-old Buddhist monk in Saigon whose self-immolation was a form of  protest to fulfill his beliefs, [like] Koreans cutting off their fingers and  the Japanese ritual of hari-kari. But this situation is not clear. Who do we  believe ?the Communists? They have lied to us so many times, another lie  for them is nothing."

I asked Beatrice Turpin who covered Falun Gong in China for Associated Press  TV and wrote about her experiences for MediaChannel what her suspicion was.  She responded from her home in Thailand: "There was a big brouhaha with  Falun Gong protests and footage of police beating practitioners last Chinese  New Year and it would certainly fit in with typical China strategy to stage  an event this year and make the show their own."

Falun Gong practitioners initially told me their suspicions were aroused for  three reasons:

the people in the Square, said to be long-time practitioners, didn't do the  Falun Gong exercises correctly;  

authorities did not show any pictures or Falun Gong signs or books (which  prohibit suicide) that protesters usually bring with them into the Square;  

and a school one of the victims was said to have graduated from was in fact  closed at the time. They also say that there is no concept of "nirvana" in  their beliefs.  

These are perhaps small details, but they may be telling.

In a press release, Falun Gong pointed to other inconsistencies: "Xinhua  News Agency claims that within a minute of the man setting himself ablaze,  police had dashed over to him with four fire extinguishers and quickly put  out the flames. A European journalist based in Beijing, however, told us: "I  have never seen policemen patrolling on Tiananmen Square carrying fire  extinguishers. How come they all showed up today? The location of the  incident is at least 20 minutes roundtrip from the nearest building ?the  People's Great Hall. If they were to have dashed over there to get the  equipment, it would have been too late." Is it even possible that the police  could have responded with not one but four fire extinguishers within the  space of a minute if they didn't have prior knowledge that this was going to  occur?

"In terms of response time, another foreign journalist in Beijing expressed  shock that Xinhua was able to release the first report on the incident  almost immediately and in English, no less. Every Chinese citizen knows that  every report from Xinhua usually has to first go through several rounds of  approval by higher-ups and is generally 'old news' by the time it is  published. Moreover, state-run media have never released any photos or video  of Falun Gong protests in the course of 18 months of persecution to the  foreign press, so why now and with so little hesitation? And why only in  English and not in Chinese?"

The issue was raised with me again and again during a recent four-city tour  speaking about my new book on the Falun Gong. Some people told me Falun Gong  must be crazy if it does crazy things. When I challenged the assumption that  we in fact know all the details, eyes glazed over. Perhaps that's because  once people hear "facts" that seem to confirm their own assumptions, they  don't want to hear more, even if the original "facts" may be wrong or  misleading.

Hot images sear themselves into the brain; retractions and clarifications  rarely do. In the newly published Tiananmen Papers, on how the Communist  Party handled the student protests in 1989, journalist Orville Schell, dean  of the Journalism School at Berkeley, discusses the many forgeries and  falsehoods the Chinese government and others have concocted and circulated  over the years. Disinformation and misinformation are the trade craft of  intelligence agencies in many countries, especially China. It is not  surprising that Beijing is denouncing these new documents as fake. Clearly,  their publication is embarrassing to the secretive rulers of China,  especially President Jiang Zemin, whose hard-line role in those events has  been revived in the official persecution of Falun Gong.

Why did the deeply ingrained, institutionalized skepticism of our own media  crumble so quickly in the face of what smells like a stage-managed incident  that's being blatantly exploited for political reasons? Why would so many  American news outlets be so gullible? Is it because the whiff of  spirituality and mysticism in a culture few of us understand makes some of  us uncomfortable in our journalistic practice?

In my investigation into Falun Gong, I document a disturbing pattern of U.S.  media outlets echoing China's charges, including the frequent use of  pejorative words like "cult" and "sect" and even "mishmash." In some  respects the media in our own country also reflect a one-dimensional,  stereotyped perspective, downplaying and denigrating a force that doesn't  fit into simple left-right political categories and which they may have  trouble relating to because of its Asian character and roots in […] traditional qigong. Falun Gong is too often treated like the classic "other," too weird to be taken seriously  or show sympathy toward. (Incidentally, I am not a Falun Gong practitioner,  but our company has produced videos for Falun Gong, which gave me access and  information I used to write and produce a film and a book on the subject.")

At one of my bookstore appearances in Chicago, someone compared Falun Gong  and the current situation in China to David Koresh's Branch Davidians and  the 51-day siege in 1993 by federal law enforcement officers in Waco,  ostensibly to seize guns and protect children from abuse, a comparison China  has invoked to make the case that it's only doing what the U.S. government  did in combating its own dangerous cult. Someone jumped up to challenge the  analogy, arguing that Koresh and company were violent and Falun Gong is not.  He was right: There is no direct comparison, except in terms of the response  to what happened. Only the hard right-wing in the United States criticized  the government's brutal military intervention, which reminded me of the  words of that American lieutenant in Vietnam: "We destroyed the village in  order to save it."

The lack of empathy people felt for the families under Koresh's mad control  led to many rationalizing or not speaking out against the bloody and illegal  suppression that occurred in Waco. Once people are dehumanized in our eyes,  we may lose compassion for them and turn the other way when their rights are  violated, especially if we dislike their politics and consider them unsympathetic victims. If you want to know the details of where dehumanization leads in China, check out Amnesty International's recent report on the pervasive use of torture, which is often directed at nonviolent Falun Gong practitioners. Beijing, natch, calls that a forgery  too.

On February 17, more than a thousand Falun Gong practitioners protested  nonviolently in Los Angeles against the persecution going on in China. Few  media outlets showed up at their press conference, even though this is a  story making headlines worldwide. (I couldn't find any story about it the  next day in The Los Angeles Times, although their book review carried a  discussion of what happened in Tiananmen Square in l989.) Media indifference  fans public indifference. China's media are doing what you would expect, but  how to explain the attitude of the Western media, which has covered the  story so episodically?

In light of the prominent media play this "mass suicide" story received, it  is not too late to thoroughly investigate not only what happened but whether  and why we were all taken in.