Award-winning Rice Specialist Dies of Persecution, Family Holds Jiang Zemin Responsible

An award-winning rice specialist from Heilongjiang Province died in 2015, after years of imprisonment and police harassment that wreaked havoc on his health.

Prior to his passing, Mr. Yu Liangbin had remained bedridden for six years following his release from a three-year imprisonment for refusing to give up his faith in Falun Gong.

The 75-year-old scientist was an agronomist with the Suihua Agriculture Institute of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Heilongjiang Province. During his tenure, he had won many awards for the significant contributions he made to the study of rice nutrition and growth.

Mr. Yu credited Falun Gong for curing his gastric cancer and giving him the energy to thrive in his career, yet he was sentenced to three years in 2006 for holding firm to his faith.

He was brutally tortured in prison and his health quickly deteriorated. After his release, the local authorities continued to harass Mr. Yu at home. They also terminated his job and stripped him of his pension.

Yu Liangbin spent the last years of his life in poverty and pain. After he died in 2015, his family filed a criminal complaint against Jiang Zemin on August 11th, holding the former dictator responsible for launching the persecution of Falun Gong that resulted in Mr. Yu's suffering and death.

Background

In 1999, Jiang Zemin, as head of the Chinese Communist Party, overrode other Politburo standing committee members and launched the violent suppression of Falun Gong.

The persecution has led to the deaths of many Falun Gong practitioners over the past 16 years. More have been tortured for their belief and even killed for their organs. Jiang Zemin is directly responsible for the inception and continuation of the brutal persecution.

Under his personal direction, the Chinese Communist Party established an extralegal security organ, the “610 Office,” on June 10th, 1999. The organisation overrides police forces and the judicial system in carrying out Jiang's directive regarding Falun Gong: to ruin their reputations, cut off their financial resources, and destroy them physically.

Chinese law now allows for citizens to be plaintiffs in criminal cases, and many practitioners are exercising that right to file criminal complaints against the former dictator.