Those people who set themselves on fire are not Falun Gong practitioners. The teachings of Falun Gong permit no suicide. I think it is another tactic that the Chinese government used to demonize Falun Gong and justify their crackdown. Such methods have been used previously. They spread rumors about Falun Gong practitioners committing group suicide and so on, but never succeed. But this time, it indeed attracted the world’s attention and disturbed people.Looking through the history, such things happen again and again. A recent case is 1989’s democratic movement, the Chinese government said there were rebellions in Tiananmen square, soldiers were killed and that was why they sent soldiers to Tiananmen square. The Chinese government needs an excuse to attack its “enemies,” if they cannot find one, they create one. The methods they employed in the crackdown of Falun Gong are unimaginably cruel and unjustified. They encourage sexual abuse by putting naked female practitioners into men’s cells; they beat practitioners to death and said they committed suicide; they sent them to mental hospital and injected them with nerve-destroying drugs and said they were mad. One case said an old man (not a Falun Gong practitioner) in his late period of cancer was too poor to cover his medical expenses. An official came in and promised that he didn’t need to pay anything if he told the media that he was a Falun Gong member and practicing Falun Gong caused his cancer. The old man refused to cheat in his last few days of life and that is how this information is leaked out. It is unknown how many similar cases are included to pile up those 1,600 killing/suicide cases claimed by the Chinese government. Facing such brutality, Falun Gong practitioners are armed with nothing but their belief in Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance. There may be more difficulties ahead and waiting for us, but we will never resort to any violent way to resolve the crisis. We will continue to appeal in a calm and peaceful manner, and we believe truth will stand out eventually.Yongyi Julia Jiang

Research associate

Food science and human nutrition