Middle School Teacher Suffers Solitary Confinement and Electric Shock in Shiling Prison, Siping City

Name: Xu Hongjun
Gender: Male
Age: 42
Address: Tonghua County, Jilin Province
Occupation: Teacher

Date of Most Recent Arrest: April 23rd, 2008
Most recent place of detention: Shiling Prison, Siping
City: Siping
Province: Jilin
Persecution Suffered: Detention, home ransacked, extortion, brainwashing, imprisonment, electric shock, beatings, forced labour reform, forced-feedings, torture, solitary confinement

Key Persecutors: Wu Guosheng deputy chief of the Tonghua County Public Security Bureau; Policeman Yu Jisheng

On December 5th, 2008, Falun Gong practitioner Xu Hongjun was sentenced to four and a half years in prison by the Tonghua County Court. Currently he is imprisoned at the 11th Prison District, Shiling Prison, Siping City. Because Mr. Xu refused to give up his belief in Falun Gong, he was beaten by police officer Yang Tiejun with a military electric baton. At the end of October 2010, Mr. Xu was twice subjected to solitary confinement in a small cell. His family and friends are very worried about his current situation.

Xu Hongjun is a teacher at the Eighth Middle School in Tonghua County. He is well respected by his colleagues for his skill and willingness to help others.

After July 20th, 1999 when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) started to persecute Falun Gong, Mr. Xu went to Beijing to appeal. He was arrested and beaten by police, and sent back to his hometown. He was then detained for a month by the Tonghua County Public Security Bureau for “disturbing social order.” After he was released, the deans of his school Hang Changchun and Wang Lichang deducted two months of his salary. Mr. Xu wrote them a letter to explain the facts about Falun Gong, but he was reported to the police by the leaders of the school. The school cooperated with the police, who sent Mr. Xu to the Tonghua City Forced Labour Camp. Police showed him the horrible scenes in the forced labour camp and threatened that he would be also persecuted if he refused to be “transformed” [forcibly renounce Falun Gong] Mr. Xu refused to give in. He was then detained at the forced labour camp and suffered persecution. He went on a hunger strike in protest and was force-fed. Due to the harsh treatment he received, Mr. Xu developed heart problems and was then released.

In 2001, the Tonghua CCP School held a brainwashing session. Xu Hongjun was forced to attend and pay for the food provided. The dean of his school sent people to the brainwashing centre specifically to watch Mr. Xu and report to the school regularly.

Twenty days later, Mr. Xu went back to school to work. The leaders of the school were afraid that he would affect their performance evaluation because he had refused to be “transformed.” They frequently talked to him and tried to force him to write a confession letter, but he refused.

The school administrators tried to frame Mr. Xu in all sorts of ways. They held a meeting for teachers in charge of the homerooms, and asked the teachers to have students monitor him. Some teachers told the students about the dean's idea. One time, Mr. Xu taught a class which teacher Hong Yushou was in charge of. In the class, two students fought with each other. After the class, Mr. Xu spoke to them and mentioned Falun Gong's principles to show them how to be good people. The students followed Hong Yushou's directive and asked Mr. Xu for Falun Gong books, saying that they wanted to practise Falun Gong. Xu Hongjun then gave them a copy of the Falun Gong book, Zhuan Falun. The two students took the book and reported to Hong Yushou, who then reported the matter to the leaders of the school. They then reported the incident to the Public Security Bureau and the Education Bureau.

The Politics and Security Section chief Wang Fu set a trap for Mr. Xu, asking him to help repair the TV in his home. As soon as Mr. Xu arrived at the chief’s home, he was arrested by police, who had been waiting for him. During the interrogation, Mr. Xu got away and jumped out of the second floor of the Public Security Bureau building. He injured his foot but managed to get back home.

The police chased after him and arrested Mr. Xu at his home. He did not cooperate with the arrest and shouted, “Falun Gong is good!” The police grabbed and bent his injured foot, dragged him to the police vehicle and took him to the detention centre again. During his detention, the prison instructor Jiang Minhua beat and verbally abused him. The prison doctor did not treat his injured foot, but just put plaster on it. Mr. Xu's foot eventually got infected, and he was released on bail for medical treatment. After he went home, he studied the Falun Gong teachings and practised the Falun Gong exercises. His foot soon fully recovered.

At the end of 2001, Mr. Xu was again arrested. He was sent to the Chaoyanggou Forced Labour Camp in Changchun. The forced labour camp launched a “tough fight” campaign against Falun Gong practitioners and brutally persecuted those who remained steadfast in their faith. The forced labour camp did not allow the practitioners to sleep for long periods of time, forced them to sit on a bench for long periods of time, used electric batons to shock them, and froze them in the cold weather. Many practitioners became injured or disabled due to the persecution.

On April 5th, 2002, the forced labour camp launched a campaign against Falun Gong practitioners called “The First 100-day Tough Fight.” All the officials and guards in the forced labour camp persecuted the practitioners together. They used extreme, brutal, and bloody ways to torture the practitioners, such as beating them with a high voltage electric baton, police baton, bamboo stick, triangular belt, metal bar, shovel handle, and police rope, kicking and beating them, pouring boiling water and cold water onto their bodies, and forcibly feeding them hot pepper water. Practitioner Bai Xiaojun from the First Division was beaten to death. Xu Hongjun and many other practitioners were severely injured, and some had difficulty walking after the beatings.

In October 2002, the forced labour camp started a second round of persecution on the practitioners. Mr. Xu was brutally tortured and was forced to sit on a bench continuously for two months. He went on a hunger strike again to protest, but the forced labor camp extended his term, locked him in a small cell in solitary confinement, and forcibly fed him, among other forms of torture. The police also put a large amount of salt into water and flushed it into Mr. Xu's stomach on two occasions.

As a result of all the torture, Xu Hongjun became very thin, and his body was covered with scabies. He developed pleurisy, his feet were ulcerated, and he could not walk. Even so, the forced labour camp still refused to release him. Police Chen Lihui also forced him to do intense hard labour.

In 2003, with Xu Hongjun's family’s insistence, he was released after his family paid 5,000 yuan¹ to the forced labour camp. By that time, he had lost consciousness and his ears had nearly rotted off. He was nearly blind in both eyes. The doctor from the Tonghua County Hospital said that his whole body was injured and the chance of him surviving was slim. His colleagues who went to see him also said that he might only have two to three days to live. However, firm in his faith, Mr. Xu miraculously recovered.

During Ms. Xu's imprisonment in the forced labour camp, his school and the Education Bureau also persecuted him financially. They deducted his salary and only gave him a minimal wage to survive on. After he went back to the school to work, the police did not relax the persecution against him. One day when he was working at school, the police arrested him and took him to the Tonghua County Public Security Bureau. Mr. Xu then had severe illness symptoms, and he vomited white foam. The police had to release him.

After Mr. Xu was released, he was constantly threatened and harassed by the CCP’s Politics and Law Committee and the Public Security Bureau, and the school administration tried to force him to give up his belief in Falun Gong. Related personnel included former CCP Tonghua County Party Deputy Secretary Feng Lihua, CCP Politics and Law Committee officers Luo Yu, Wang Hongsheng, Gao Wanyu, policeman Yu Jisheng, and other officials.

On the evening of April 23rd, 2008, Tonghua County Public Security Bureau Deputy Chief Wu Guosheng led Yu Jisheng and many other police officers to arrest Xu Hongjun at his home. They also took away his computer, printer, materials exposing the persecution of Falun Gong, and other personal belongings. At the same time, two other groups of police went to his parents' and his in-laws' homes and ransacked the homes. The police also arrested his father, who is not a practitioner (he was released later). This series of incidents caused Mr. Xu's young child, parents and in-laws, and other family members to suffer a great deal.

On September 23rd, 2008, the CCP held a court hearing against Xu Hongjun. The court did not allow Mr. Xu's attorney to defend him. At the trial, the court called his family members' DVD movies and his child's video game disks “Falun Gong related” and used them as “evidence.” On December 5th, 2008, Mr. Xu was sentenced to four and a half years of imprisonment in Shiling Prison in Siping.

Note

1. "Yuan" is the Chinese currency; 500 yuan is equal to the average monthly income of an urban worker in China.

Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2011/1/20/235083.html