2001 Tiananmen Square self-immolation incident is a featured article; it (or a previous version of it) has been identified as one of the best articles produced by the Wikipedia community. Even so, if you can update or improve it, please do so.
	This article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page as Today's featured article on April 3, 2012, and on January 23, 2026.
Article milestones Date Process Result September 17, 2007 Peer review Reviewed October 11, 2007 Good article nominee Listed August 7, 2008 Good article reassessment Delisted October 13, 2009 Featured article candidate Promoted Facts from this article were featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "On this day..." column on January 23, 2008, January 23, 2009, January 23, 2010, January 23, 2016, January 23, 2017, January 23, 2019, January 23, 2021, and January 23, 2024. Current status: Featured article

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• There are apparently a few unsourced sentences or at least lacking in-line citations, including an entire paragraph in the "Falun Gong response" section.
• Shouldn't this have an infobox?

Skyshifter ^talk 00:54, 25 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The first issue has not been resolved as of this article's feature on the front page today. Yue🌙 (talk) 01:01, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

For an FA, this article seems to be in (relatively) rough shape; I’m surprised to see it as a TFA. Just reading through the lede there’s a cleanup tag and words to watch. 🌸⁠wasianpower⁠🌸 (talk • contribs) 06:47, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. I started a discussion about it: Talk:Main Page#Old FA articles. TurboSuperA+_[talk] 07:04, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

In the body we find:

• Ann Noonan of the Laogai Research Foundation suggested that it was "hardly a far-fetched hypothesis" that the government staged the incident

What is the Laogai Research Foundation? It was started by Harry Wu, who gave testimony to US congress about alleged harvesting of organs from Falun Gong practitioners.[1] [2] So the LRF is connected to or at least promotes Falun Gong narratives. To then present this view in the lede as "some journalists" also breaks WP:NPOV. TurboSuperA+_[talk] 09:29, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

The two key journalists who investigated the incident at the time were Philip Pan from the Washington Post and Ian Johnson from the Wall Street Journal. Johnson won a Pulitzer Prize for his investigation into the persecution of Falun Gong broadly, with this incident being part of it. I don't think either of them claimed it was "staged." They both reported on inconsistencies and expressed deep skepticism about the official narrative.

Pan's article from 4 February 2001, titled "Human Fire Ignites Chinese Mystery: Motive for Public Burning Intensifies Fight Over Falun Gong" is a good reference. In it, Pan traveled to Kaifeng, Henan province, and interviewed neighbors, colleagues, and locals about Liu Chunling and her daughter Liu Siying (two of the self-immolators who died). He found no evidence that they had practiced Falun Gong, directly challenging the official narrative. Here is a link to a Falun Gong-related source that has the full article which was originally printed in the Washington Post (article is now behind a paywall, so I am just providing this link for talk page reference). https://www.falsefire.com/en/reports/human_fire_ignites_chinese_mystery/

Johnson list of articles can be found here: https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/ian-johnson, but the best source from him is probably his book on the subject which was published later and includes more details. I don't have my copy anymore, so I can't say for sure whether he goes so far as to say it was "staged" there. Again, he probably just pokes holes in the official story and leaves readers to draw their own conclusion.

There was also a relatively recent documentary on the subject, but it came out through Falun Gong-related media so the documentary itself isn't a good source on the subject, but there may be journalists featured in the doc who could be cited. I'll look into it more.

The statement "Some journalists have claimed the self-immolations were staged" might just be too simplified and it would benefit from a more detailed description of what journalists and other relevant analysts said. —Zujine|talk 20:56, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I’ve updated the wording to remove the reference to journalists and align it with the cited examples in the body. Thanks. Path2space (talk) 21:28, 26 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

How did this become a featured article? I can find a discussion from 2009, but nothing more. Especially considering the fairly controversial subject matter, this status should be removed. Dreameditsbrooklyn (talk) 11:09, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah. It's bad enough treating anything Ownby says about this group as if it were unvarnished fact but to do so with an incomplete citation is rather shocking for a featured article. Furthermore, as @TurboSuperA+ says in the thread above it is also somewhat alarming for a featured article to be using "some journalists claim" sorts of language. If it is, in fact, an FLG connected propaganda outfit responsible for these claims that is important context that should be included. However I'm somewhat unsurprised to see such antics immediately after the restrictions on FLG were loosened by arbitration amendment. Simonm223 (talk) 12:17, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

1. The article is now seriously outdated. 2005 Chinese goverment release; 2014 AP article; 2013 academic article; 2015 academic article
2. falsefire.com is WP:EPOCHTIMES which is a deprecated source. It is relied heavily on in this article. NotBartEhrman (talk) 14:03, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I dug in a little more. There is a strong scholarly literature by James Lewis, Helen Farley, Paul Hedges on how to situate this event within the history of Falun Gong and China, as well as journalistic articles on this subject. It is a shame to have this article instead be about the rather non-existent debate over whether the protesters were Falun Gong at all. We should not waste any time on initial journalistic reactions which were largely naive and lacked context. (Falun Gong had two more self-immolations later in 2001.) Unfortunately I don't have free time to rewrite all of this NotBartEhrman (talk) 14:34, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

The discussion you linked is how it became a featured article. I guess the concerns from 2023 never resulted in a featured article review. -- Reconrabbit 16:17, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Alexa, Remind me to submit this for review to be de-featured in two weeks Dreameditsbrooklyn (talk) 16:26, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@Dreameditsbrooklyn Here's your reminder. NotBartEhrman (talk) 14:39, 6 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, this article seems to be quite the mess. Especially for such a controversial matter. VitoxxMass (talk) 17:01, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I have to say that this article reads more like a hit-piece than anything else; when I read the featured article summary I was pretty surprised to see that the language in the opening practically trashes the Chinese government account while giving creedence to Falun Gong's statements which are only really backed up from sources heavily linked to Falun Gong itself. Spacefire2 (talk) 20:42, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that the article seems to have problems and relies far too much on old sources, considering that many newer sources are available. Some sources also don't match what the text says. The article says "Chinese authorities struggled throughout the early years of the persecution to turn public opinion against Falun Gong. Instead, the campaign garnered criticisms from across a wide spectrum of Chinese society, with some commentators drawing comparisons to the Cultural Revolution and Nazi Germany's treatment of the Jews." The cited Washington Post source has no mention of the Cultural Revolution and says "The country's most liberal newspaper, Southern Weekend, has recently published several veiled attacks on the campaign; one was an analysis of Nazi Germany's treatment of Jews and how average Germans allowed it to escalate from discrimination to genocide", which is very different than comparing Falun Gong's treatment to Jews. Many sources in the background section also are from before the incident, so wouldn't using them to subtly suggest that this incident was fabricated violate WP:SYNTH? There are also some simple writing issues; the article first talks about Xinhua, then two paragraphs later mentions the New China News Agency (which someone without much knowledge about China might think is a separate news agency). The article also seems to rely far too much on primary sources. The Account 2 (talk) 18:32, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Revised to align wording with the cited Washington Post source. Thanks. Path2space (talk) 21:57, 26 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

As the user who first pointed out a few of the issues above, I am surprised that this became TFA without any improvement years later. The unsourced statements and prose were such a glaring that I'm not sure how this could be chosen as TFA. In hindsight I should've nominated it for FAR at the time. Skyshiftertalk 17:08, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Huge kudos to you for mentioning it. Please ping me when this gets taken to FAR so I can help out. Toadspike [Talk] 18:26, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Many of the Falun Gong-related articles suffer from opposing POV editors warring over the years. This article does seem to have been rather neglected. I responded above about some of the initial reporting from Pan and Johnson. Johnson won a Pulitzer Prize for his work on the subject, so I don't think it's quite right to say that they were "largely naive and lacked context." Some editors don't like Ownby, but his book is highly regarded within the academic and human rights communities. Lewis is especially one-sided in my opinion. In short, this subject has reliable sources who disagree with each other (the nature of a controversial subject). Both sides should be presented, but the thing that makes this article interesting, the reason why we are still talking about it 25 years later, is that the official story doesn't add up. I tend to agree that the quality of the article doesn't reach featured article status. I can make a pass on improving the citations and toning down some of the conclusive statements where more context should be given. —Zujine|talk 21:06, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Saying Lewis is one sided against the Falun Gong is kind of ridiculous, he is if anything criticized for being too sympathetic to NRMs. So him going the reverse is quite interesting! His books on the subject were well reviewed. PARAKANYAA (talk) 20:44, 26 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

How did it end up back on the main page on the 23rd? I'm not familiar with the process. ~2026-53127-5 (talk) 01:03, 25 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

For some reason no one checked if it meets the featured article criteria, which it clearly doesn't. FantasticWikiUser (talk) 07:36, 26 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Much of the content in the section "Falun Gong response" was removed by NotBartEhrman. The reasoning was based on the quality of the sources, but given the context that it is FG's response, I think that much of the content is still relevant. Not all of that content came from Epoch Times anyway, much of it can also be sourced to other books and reports.

Also, in the section on Third Party response, two paragraphs were deleted by NotBartEhrman, one of which was sourced to CNN and another to Schecter's book, both of which are reliable sources, and the content that was deleted was unique within the article. I don't see how their removal improved the article. I will have to look into the sources more to figure out if that photo was ever used by third-party sources. —Zujine|talk 21:22, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I removed it because the citation itself read "New Tang Dynasty Television," which by consensus is an unacceptable source. Because of that consensus, anything published by "New Tang Dynasty Television" or related organizations needs to be repeated by a RS. If Falun Gong's video response is notable, then that shouldn't be that hard.

I removed something which was claimed to be sourced to CNN but for which no citation was provided; I scanned the related sources and considered the claim of a CNN statement to be unreliable, which is really bad considering this is featured on the front page. NotBartEhrman (talk) 23:42, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

This sounded bizarre so I had to check. The statement attributed to CNN actually came from the Washington Post article cited in the next paragraph (which was being cited as reproduced on a falun gong website under "propaganda", somewhat disconcertingly):

Eason Jordan, CNN's chief news executive and president for newsgathering, said a producer and cameraman witnessed the self-immolations, but only because they were making a routine check of the square for Falun Gong protests on the day before Chinese New Year, which was marked by protests a year ago. He said the footage used in the Chinese television reports could not have come from CNN videotape because the CNN cameraman was arrested almost immediately after the incident began. (Washington Post: China Mulls Murder Charges for Foreign Journalists. Philip Fan, 9 Feb 2001)

It's not clear in what context Eason Jordan said this, and there is way too much telephone going on here for my taste. —Rutebega (talk) 20:58, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for flagging this. I’ve replaced the citation with the original Washington Post article located via ProQuest and updated the reference accordingly. Thanks. Path2space (talk) 23:22, 27 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]