Making Sense Of A Suicide.(Falun Dafa, analysis)(Brief Article)(Column)

It had been a long time since reporters had witnessed the awful spectacle of protesters dousing themselves with gasoline and then setting themselves on fire. Such desperate, grisly street theater takes us back to the carnage and confusion of the Vietnam War era. But two weeks ago, as a CNN camera crew watched, five people identified as Falun Gong sect members set themselves aflame in Tiananmen Square, leaving one of them dead, her 12-year-old daughter badly burned and an unmistakable sign that Chinese society is enduring the deep strains that always accompany accelerated change. At a time of such upheaval, expect to see religious cults in the land--any land. And whether on the wide plains of Waco, Texas (remember the Branch Davidians, the cult that went up in flames during a siege by federal agents?), or in the gritty streets of West Philadelphia (remember MOVE, the cult the city police force firebombed into near oblivion?), expect to see governments flailing, ineffectually and often violently, to exert control.

I have not come to this observation lightly or without experience. In the more than two decades since I was a young reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, sitting in the deathtrap called Jonestown interviewing a charismatic madman named Jim Jones, I've read a shelf of books and talked to many experts and eyewitnesses, none of whom could have predicted that 914 people would lie dead on the fetid jungle floor that November day in 1978.

What can we make of such insane tragedies? Journalists tend to assess cult behavior, an essentially psychological phenomenon, in political terms, the terms that they find most familiar and comfortable. In media reports Falun Gong is most often portrayed as a peaceful band of passive exercise and meditation enthusiasts with little or no political agenda. The Chinese government, meanwhile, is portrayed as a clutch of communist hard-liners, seeking to stamp out any deviation from pure party loyalty. But that misses the real point: whether capitalist or communist or some variant in between, when it comes to handling cults, the government never wins, not on the battlefront or on the public- opinion front, and often people die.

The great irony in comparing Jonestown of 1978 with Beijing of 2001 is that in '78 the cultists were the communists. Jim Jones was an avowed Marxist who had unsuccessfully petitioned the Soviet Union for asylum for his group to protect it from the "oppression" he felt in the United States. Tass, the Soviet news agency, reported approvingly in early 1978 that Jones, after failing to find "justice" in America or political asylum in Russia, had called on his members to "leave the Free World" to seek paradise in the then socialist Guyana. After a visit to that paradise the Tass reporter gushed, "The inhabitants of Jonestown are creative, they love work and they celebrate life. They ...