Hundreds of millions of Chinese television viewers were yesterday exposed to pictures of a badly burnt 12-year-old girl lying in a Beijing hospital bed.
The young girl, named by state TV as Liu Siying, was filmed receiving treatment for severe burns in a special unit of Jishuitan Hospital. A badly charred hand was all that you could see of her heavily bandaged body.
The broadcast of the pictures of Liu Siying and four other patients was part of the ongoing propaganda war being waged by the Chinese authorities against the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement.
According to CCTV, and in widespread reports in State-controlled newspapers yesterday, Liu Siying was one of the group of Falun Gong members who turned themselves into human torches after dousing themselves with petrol on Tiananmen Square on the eve of the Chinese New Year on January 23rd.
The official state news agency, Xinhua, also carried vivid interviews with the survivors, including Liu Siying, who was quoted as saying she had wanted to "reach paradise". She said she believed the flames would not hurt her.
She said she had been persuaded by her mother, Liu Chunling, to join in the self-immolation. In the television close-ups, the girl could be heard saying through the bandages: "Mom fooled me".
Her mother was reported to have died in the suicide attempt. Xinhua claimed the woman was obsessed with Falun Gong, and had persuaded her daughter to pursue the cult.
In the television pictures, staff in the burns unit of the hospital were filmed talking to the victims about their experiences. One, named as a music student, Ms Chen Guo (19), who reportedly suffered burns all over her body, told a nurse: "I regret it very much. I want to play music in the future".
In an interview, the chief doctor in the unit said it was his view that the tragedy was caused by the teachings of Li Hongzhi, the leader of Falun Gong.
Commentators yesterday described the television and newspapers pictures as the strongest attack yet on Falun Gong by the authorities in its attempt to discredit the organisation and portray it as a fanatical group which has duped its millions of members all over the world.
The group itself, through a spokesperson in Hong Kong, Mr Kan Hung-cheung, cast doubt over the authenticity of the pictures. He again distanced the group from the self-immolation incident.
"The reports cannot confirm those people are in fact Falun Gong members . . . it is not beyond the Chinese authorities to resort to underhand means to smear us, including that of concocting the pictures," he said. He said Falun Gong members cannot kill and cannot commit suicide. "So these people cannot be real Falun Gong members." Falun Gong preaches salvation from a corrupt world through meditation and the study of texts based loosely on Buddhism and Daoism. The movement - established by Mr Li Hongzhi in 1992 - was banned in July, 1999, after it demanded official recognition by the Chinese authorities. China claims Falun Gong is an evil cult which cheats its members and is responsible for the deaths of 1,600 people by suicide or refusing medical treatment.
Falun Gong claims that more than 100 members have died in labour camps since it was banned.