More on the Propaganda About "1400 Deaths"

We don't hear it much anymore, since the claim has been thoroughly debunked, but in an attempt to demonize Falun Gong early in the persecution, the Chinese Communist Party widely broadcast claims that the practice was responsible for the deaths of 1400 people, allegedly because they were not allowed to take medicine. Setting aside for the moment the fact that practitioners have never been forbidden to take medicine, and setting aside the fact that many of the purported 1400 deaths were fabricated out of thin air by the CCP, let's take the number at face value and see where it leads. By 1999, according to the Chinese regime's own statistics, between 70 and 100 million people were practicing Falun Gong. Among those who were attracted to the practice, many were older and had serious, life-threatening diseases, which neither modern Western medicine nor Traditional Chinese medicine had been able to cure. Plus, both Chinese and Western medicine were expensive and out of reach for millions of Chinese, whereas one could practice Falun Gong for free. So, even setting aside the doubtful accuracy of the claim of 1400 deaths, this is an amazing statistic that actually promotes the benefits of Falun Gong. Out of 70 million people practicing Falun Gong in China, 1400 were supposed to have died. But out of 70 million people not practicing Falun Gong in China, how many would have been expected to die in a given year, according to China's age-adjusted mortality rate for 1998? The answer: 455,000.