Cheng Rulin is Tortured and Sentenced to 14 Years; His Family is Financially Devastated by Police Extortion

Mr. Cheng Rulin, 41, is a resident of Luqiao Town. Since Jiang Zemin started persecuting Falun Gong in 1999, officials from the "610 Office" in Luqiao Town, constantly paid him visits and harassed him, day and night, for no reason. Even the neighbours were not able to rest well because of this. In the two years from July 1999 to 2000, Cheng Rulin and his wife, Meng Xianghua (also a Falun Dafa practitioner) were illegally detained many times and paid a total of more than ten thousand yuan in fines. Their once happy family was destroyed. After October of 2000, Cheng Rulin had no other choices but to leave home to escape the persecution, while one of his brothers (a non-practitioner) was illegally detained for forty days by the Huanghua Police Station simply because he had a phone conversation with Cheng Rulin. The family felt compelled to pay fifty thousand Yuan in bribes after the brother was threatened with a long sentence. Altogether, the total amount of illegal fines imposed on Cheng's family over the past few years has added up to a total financial loss close to one hundred thousand Yuan. Now, the family owes a huge debt and has trouble maintaining a normal life.

Cheng Rulin was arrested in July of 2001 because of his truth-clarification efforts and illegally detained for nine months. During his detention the police used various cruel torture means on him. For example, he was tied to a "tiger bench" [The practitioner is forced to sit on a small iron bench that is approximately 20 cm (6 inches) tall. He has to sit straight up with his eyes looking straight ahead. His hands are placed on his knees] for eight days and nights and was deprived of sleep. He was hit, cursed, beaten and shocked with electric batons, and was interrogated while being severely tortured, all of which was extremely difficult to endure. However, the police failed to get any information from him. This made the police extremely angry and they shackled his hands to a metal pipe, forcing him to stand on his tiptoes.

He was then put on a "Dead Person's Bed" [The four limbs of the practitioner are stretched out and tied onto the four corners of an icy-cold metal bed. The practitioner cannot move at all. Neither is he allowed to get up to eat, drink, or go to the bathroom. This treatment can last from several hours to more than a dozen days. This type of cruel torture causes severe damage to the practitioner both mentally and physically.] To protest his cruel and inhumane treatment, Cheng went on a hunger strike, causing him to be sent to a hospital because he started vomiting blood. He remained shackled during his entire hospital stay and was watched over by four policemen. Since he had been severely mistreated and injured, he no longer responded to intensive medical treatment. Feeling pressured by this emergency, hospital officials released him from the hospital. Afraid of the consequences, the policemen sent him home during the night of May 2, 2002, while it was dark and designated personnel to take turns watching over him. The next day when the villagers saw that Cheng Rulin was hardly able to breath and was so emaciated, they couldn't help but exclaim angrily, "Is this what the people's government has done? Are they the guardians of the people? What crimes has he committed that they have to treat him like that? They are just meaner than the bandits and gangsters of the past."

Cheng Rulin continued with his hunger strike at home to protest the injustice. His family members also made righteous statements and took pictures for evidence. The personnel of the "610 Office" from Cangzhou City had no choice but to leave his home, although they mobilized thirty vehicles, police cars, over one hundred city government personnel and policemen to surround the whole village. They hid and kept the whole village under surveillance during the night, set up checkpoints and roadblocks to search people during the day and blocked news sources. They unreasonably declared that as long as you were a Falun Gong practitioner, you could only get in and could not get out. The villagers' way of life was severely disturbed. When villagers went out to work they were interrogated. The basic human rights of Falun Gong were taken away. After keeping the village under surveillance for about two weeks, the "610 Office" of Cangzhou City continued to harass villagers, forcing family members to write so-called "guarantee statements" [renouncing Falun Gong] and restricting their freedom. In order to escape the constant harassment, and the relentless persecution and to resume a normal family life, Cheng Rulin was again forced to leave home.

In July of 2002, somebody reported Cheng to the police when he visited home. Policemen from Huanghua City, Shi Jinzhu and others, arrested him by force, without showing their badges, and later detained him in the Cangzhou Detention Center. Without the benefit of any legal procedure, family notification or a trial, Cheng was secretly sentenced to fourteen years in Baoding Prison.

Chinese version available at: http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2004/1/12/64671.html