BEIJING - Five Falun Gong members tried to immolate themselves Tuesday at symbolic Tiananmen Square on the evening of the most important holiday in China, Lunar New Year. This public protest dramatically raises stakes in the group's two-year battle with authorities to be recognized as a legitimate organization. [Editor's note: the suicide has nothing to do with Falun Gong. See http://clearwisdom.net/eng/2001/Jan/23/VSF012301_3.html .]

The act comes just as Beijing is trying to put its best foot forward for an Olympics delegation due to visit here on Feb. 9 - a fact that members of the spiritual movement are keenly aware of. In recent days, state-controlled Chinese news media have taken the most aggressive stance so far against what China sees as a serious threat, and what it routinely calls [slanderous words].

At the same time, in three days of meetings with U.N. officials in Beijing, including Secretary-General Kofi Annan, China committed to ratifying an important human rights pact in the next 2 1/2 months to help better its chances of winning its bid to host the 2008 Olympics. (The United States has also signed but not ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights.)

Tuesday afternoon in the square, several CNN reporters witnessed four women and a man dousing themselves with gasoline and setting themselves ablaze. One woman reportedly died.

Some Falun Gong leaders abroad claimed the act was a hoax committed by Chinese authorities, saying that suicide is forbidden by the teachings of Li Hongzhi, a former low-ranking Chinese official whose interpretation of qigong, the ancient practice of meditation and exercise, has spawned a worldwide movement. Members believe that the body and mind can be rejuvenated through disciplined exercises centering on a "wheel of energy" in the abdomen.

The Lunar New Year's Eve day of protests and arrests at the square suggests that in China, many Falun Gong members have taken a new step - past their supporters abroad - to publicize their case.

By nightfall Tuesday on a frigid evening here, some 120 security vans were parked around the huge expanse of concrete at the entrance of the Forbidden City, itself a center of Chinese cultural and political identity. Hundreds of Army police and plainclothes officers thronged the unusually empty square. One soldier twice smartly saluted a casually dressed man on a bicycle. "Have a Happy New Year," said one policeman wryly to reporters, referring to today's holiday, a time when the country slows down for a week, and roads jam with travelers going home to visit family.

Having outlawed Falun Gong, whose adherents tend to be middle and lower-middle class, with a surprising smattering of high government officials and their families, Chinese authorities seem unable to contain the spread of the group, also known as Falun Dafa. Following what seemed a several-month lull, both Chinese officials and Falun Gong members have escalated the rhetoric, with the Falun Gong targeting President Jiang Zemin.

Posters plastered around Beijing have appealed to the masses, claiming that the group is moderate and benign, that the crackdown against the [group] has led to the deaths in detention of many members in newly created camps, and that the entire anti-Falun Gong project is a vendetta against them by Jiang.

At the same time, Chinese officials have used the media, a variety of scholars, official religious leaders and self-described "rehabilitated" former Falun Gong members to mount their own campaign against the group. Official news sources have described [slanderous words].

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Critics sympathetic to China argue the government has, with its policy of ever more severe crackdowns in the past two years, created its own Frankenstein public relations monster. What has most concerned Chinese officials is the appearance of a well-disciplined, growing group conducting skillful protests, almost completely outside the purview of party channels.

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