5 Alleged Sect Followers Set Selves on Fire in Beijing

In a graphic escalation of the protest against the ban on the group, five alleged followers of the Falun Gong meditation sect set themselves on fire Tuesday in Tiananmen Square, state media said.

One woman died in the incident here hours before millions of Chinese rang in the Lunar New Year, and the four other demonstrators were injured, the official New China News Agency said. All five apparently came to Beijing from Henan, a poor, landlocked province that has witnessed a large religious revival in recent years.

But a Falun Gong spokesman in New York disavowed the protesters, saying they were not sect members but unrelated demonstrators whose actions the government was using to “smear” the group.

“The Chinese government is trying to shift the blame onto Falun Gong,” spokesman Erping Zhang said.

The attempted self-immolations occurred in two groups in Tiananmen Square shortly after 2:30 p.m., state media said. The protesters, four women and a man, doused themselves with gasoline and set themselves ablaze.

Despite the disavowal from New York, a CNN camera crew on the scene reported that four of the demonstrators had raised their arms in gestures of devotion to Falun Gong before they were subdued and the flames on their bodies were extinguished.

If the protesters were Falun Gong adherents, the actions would constitute a step beyond anything the sect has attempted in terms of defiance. In recent months, the rhetoric of the group’s founder, Li Hongzhi--who lives in New York--has taken on an increasingly apocalyptic tone, matched by intensifying vilification from the Communist regime.

The government regards Li as a political subversive bent on overthrowing the state, an impression that China’s top leaders formed in April 1999, when thousands of Falun Gong practitioners surrounded the Beijing government compound in a surprise protest. That action led to the prohibition against the sect three months later.

More Falun Gong protests are expected today, the first official day of the Year of the Snake. Since the Communist regime outlawed Falun Gong, the group has mounted almost daily demonstrations in the Chinese capital and has used national holidays for larger-scale protests to spotlight the continuing suppression of its beliefs.

Last year during the New Year’s holiday, hundreds of adherents protested in Tiananmen Square. Falun Gong spokesmen say followers have been detained in past days in a preemptive strike against such demonstrations.

Most of the protests in Tiananmen Square have involved followers unfurling Falun Gong banners and performing the slow-motion exercises that the sect advocates as a path to good health. Chinese police usually pounce on protesters within seconds and cart them off to detention centers on the edge of the city.

Zhang, the group’s New York spokesman, said that practitioners embrace peaceful and nonviolent protest and would not resort to anything like the self-burnings that occurred Tuesday.

“Our teaching forbids us from any forms of killing, [including] ourselves,” he said.

Still, the fiery protests came just three weeks after exiled founder Li issued a statement to his followers that appeared to encourage stepped-up actions against the Beijing regime--even to the point of martyrdom.

If the group faces an evil force, Li wrote on Jan. 1, “then various measures at different levels can be used to stop it and eradicate it.” Setting aside the principle of “forbearance,” one of Falun Gong’s chief tenets, is acceptable in such a case, he said.

The group says that nearly 80 followers have died in police custody since the ban on Falun Gong was issued in July 1999. Hundreds more practitioners have been arrested.

Li’s teachings promote a strict moral code and tell of cosmic reckonings to come. In August, he counseled disciples to lose their attachment to their earthly lives and to prepare for “consummation.” Falun Gong’s opponents, he warned, “will soon have to pay for all of their sins as they themselves are being completely eliminated during the Fa’s [the Law’s] rectification of the human world.”

For its part, the Chinese government has declared Falun Gong members “enemies of the people,” as an editorial in the People’s Daily put it Monday.

A faithful core of disciples has waged a cleverly organized, near-continuous protest campaign that has clearly given the government headaches in its attempt to stamp out the sect.

Within two hours of the attempted self-immolations Tuesday, security had been beefed up in Tiananmen Square, with uniformed and plainclothes police guarding every entrance to the plaza and even frisking some visitors. Officers were also posted at subway exits near the square--one of Beijing’s most popular tourist spots, which makes entirely closing off the plaza a difficult matter.

The Communist regime finds itself in a tricky position as it continues its campaign to crush the movement but at the same time improve its image abroad in order to win its bid to host the Olympics in 2008.

Last weekend, Chinese leaders told visiting U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan that Beijing might ratify a key human rights pact, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, sometime in the first quarter of this year.

Human rights advocates have also pressed Beijing to ratify another agreement, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The government has merely signed both treaties.