Neighbour of the Staged Self-Immolation Victim, Ms. Liu Chunling Gives Her Side of the Story

I am a female Falun Dafa practitioner living in China. On May 12th, 2006, I went to Kaifeng City, Henan Province for a business negotiation. My business partner was also female, and so we talked freely. After a little while, I switched our topic to Falun Gong. When I mentioned the staged self-immolation event in Tiananmen Square, unexpectedly, my business partner told me that she was a next-door neighbor of Ms. Liu Chunling, one of the victims of the event who died of a fatal blow to the head from a policeman. She then told me many things about Ms. Liu Chunling.

She said: "Ms. Liu Chunling was from another city. She came to Kaifeng along with her stepmother and her daughter Siying after she divorced her husband. She made ends meet by working at a part time job. Life was very hard for her because she earned very little money. Because of the pressures in her life, she was often in a bad mood and she beat her daughter. The neighbors were very sympathetic to her family, especially to her daughter. One day in the summer, Chunling was once again in a temper and beat her daughter. She even forced her daughter to stand still in the yard under the scorching sun as a punishment. I was very sorry to see this, so I asked the girl to go home and told her that her mother would not beat her again. However, without her mother's permission, Siying did not dare to go home and just kept on standing in the sun.

"Some time later, we did not see the mother and the daughter for several days. Then there came the news on TV that they had gone to the Tiananmen Square to burn themselves and they were said to be Falun Gong practitioners. This was ridiculous. We lived so close to them and we saw each other so frequently each day, but we had never heard that they practiced Falun Gong. At that time Falun Gong was very well known in Kaifeng City. There were Falun Gong practitioners right in our Pingguoyuan District. Those women did the exercises following along with music played by a tape recorder right on the side of the street, but I had never seen Chunling do the exercises. On the other hand, how could she have spare time to practice Falun Gong when she was so busy with getting by? So every person in our residential area knew that the self-immolation was a staged event and that Chunling had been deceived and killed. It was such a pity.

"One thing was even more suspicious. I remember, not so clearly, that some police came and searched Chunling's home several days after the self-immolation event. Some of the neighbors and I witnessed the whole thing. To our surprise, the police found about 100,000 yuan in cash in her room, 100-yuan bills in bundles. This stirred up an argument among the neighbors. Chunling was so poor, so how could it be possible that she had so much money? She was very frugal in her life. No one had ever expected that she had so much money at her home. Now think about it: that could have been the money they were paid for risking their lives! They were deceived and killed without knowing what had actually happened. The dirty money was then taken away by the Communist Party. The Chinese Communist Party is really cruel!"