The Washington Post
The Washington Post was the first media outlet in the world to report that officials in China had received explicit orders to torture and brainwash Falun Gong practitioners who did not abandon their beliefs. Before the publication broke this news in 2001, practitioners had been dying at the hands of police for nearly two years already, but the exact nature of Beijing’s direct orders had not yet fully come to light.
Earlier that year, the Washington Post‘s Phillip Pan authored a pivotal exposé of two of the participants in the “self-immolation incident,” a false “protest” the communist regime staged in Tiananmen Square in January 2001. The incident was scripted by the CCP for the purpose of vilifying Falun Gong practitioners in the eyes of the Chinese public. Pan was the first to uncover evidence that the immolators were not Falun Gong in his article “Human Fire Ignites Chinese Mystery,” included below.
