Jilin City Falun Dafa Practitioner Ms. Wang Minli Describes Her Story as a Victim of Persecution

My name is Wang Minli. I am a 40-year-old female Falun Dafa practitioner from Jilin City, Jilin Province. I was the Secretary of the Chinese Party Youth League Committee at the Jilin City Leather and Fur Factory, but now I have been forced to leave home and go into hiding in order to avoid arrest.

I started practising Falun Gong on February 26, 1996, and have been practising ever since then. I have been clarifying the truth about Falun Dafa since the persecution began in July 1999, and thus was repeatedly subjected to brutal tortures by the authorities. The latest round of persecution I suffered was far more severe than the previous times.

Around 9:00 a.m. on May 13, 2003, I suddenly heard someone trying to open the door with a key while I was printing Teacher's lectures and truth-clarification materials at a place where truth-clarification materials were made. The only other local practitioner that had the key to this place had been abducted by the police ten days before. I knew the police must have surrounded this place the moment I heard the noise at the door. I started to calmly destroy fellow practitioners' petitions to file lawsuits against Jiang Zemin, as well as the written facts about the persecution that took place in the forced labour camps and detention centres. I also destroyed all the contact information of the practitioners in our local area before the police broke in. The police tried for over an hour to use some key and then tried to pry the door open, but they did not succeed. The Chairman of the Political Security Office at the Changyi Precinct Branch of the Public Security Bureau, Du Xingze, then called the fire department and asked them to come to the scene right away. He asked them to use the scaling ladder to climb in through the window and to use a blowtorch to make a hole in the door. I started to lose my composure because I realized that I must manage to escape in order to inform my fellow practitioners that the police had compromised this materials production site. I immediately opened the window and jumped out (this materials production site was located on the sixth floor). I struggled to get up and walk, while clinging to the wall to support my weight. However, the police captured me after I had walked only about ten steps. I made an effort to shout at the top of my lungs, "I am a Falun Dafa practitioner! Falun Dafa is good! Falun Dafa is righteous!" Then the police officers knocked me down to the ground and covered my mouth, and restrained me with all their might as I struggled to get loose.

Finally, I met Du Xingze. I pointed a finger at him and said, "It is all your doing that I have been persecuted to this extent." Then they beat me until I lost consciousness. When I came to, I was lying on an operation table in a hospital, receiving an operation for the injuries I had sustained in my fall and from being beaten. I tried to say something, but I had lost my voice. As soon as the doctor finished the operation, Du Xingze interrogated me anxiously, "Tell me who you have been in contact with!" He also produced a list of names and asked me to identify the practitioners that I knew. The doctor intervened and said, "I have cut her trachea open. She won't be able to talk." But Du Xingze refused to leave me alone. He produced a pen and asked me to write down the names of the practitioners I knew. The doctor intervened again and said seriously, "She is still on the brink of death."

Later the policemen from the Dongdatan Police Station in Changyi Precinct divided into four groups, taking turns guarding me at the hospital around the clock. The doctor told them that I needed special medical care for my injuries. I had torn cartilage and also had costal cartilage fractures in my chest area and my back; three of my ribs were dislocated, and I had a fracture in my left shoulder. In addition, the doctor had to cut my trachea open. Some of the policemen who knew the truth about Falun Dafa brought me some daily necessities, while other policemen smoked in my hospital room. A nurse nicknamed Xiao Xiu asked them not to smoke cigarettes in the hospital ward, but they refused to stop smoking. They replied matter-of-factly, "We are here to watch her, not to provide medical care. It is none of our business if she dies." Xiao Xiu then reported their behaviour to the doctor, who then came in and gravely reprimanded them, "Go smoke outside! This is a hospital ward, not a detention centre. While you are in a hospital, you must comply with the hospital rules. If Ms. Shi Qing (the name that Du Xingze referred to me as, I could not correct him since I could not talk) dies, you will take full legal responsibility."

After staying at Jilin City Hospital for 23 days, I still had a fever of 102oF. It is unbelievable that, under the circumstances, the Changyi Branch of the Public Security Bureau in Jilin City would have the temerity and heartlessness to try to extort 30,000 yuan from my family in the name of paying for the medical treatment, for injuries that the police were responsible for [500 Yuan is the average monthly income for an urban worker in China]. My family was outraged by their demands and refused their extortion demand. Then the police became furious when they could not benefit financially from my family, so they tried to take revenge on me. They went to a supervisor in the hospital and pressured that person to discharge me from the hospital. The doctor in charge of my case objected. He said, "Her temperature is 102oF. Beside, she needs follow-up surgery for her fractures." The police told the doctor that my family could not afford the medical care and hoped that they would discharge me from the hospital right away. The true reason behind their action was fear: I began to talk after 23 days, so they were afraid that I might reveal their crimes and clarify the truth about Falun Dafa and the persecution. Besides, they were anxious to interrogate me under torture.

Around 3:00 p.m. on June 4, 2003, the police imprisoned me inside my apartment. This was not just house arrest, because they had welded iron bars outside the windows and locked the door from outside. The police took turns watching me around the clock. The head of Dongdatan Police Station, Wang Zhongren, ordered his henchmen to make it impossible for me to sleep in every conceivable way. They kept the lights on around the clock, turned up the TV all the way, watched pornography, played cards, kept the windows open to let the mosquitoes in to bite, among other torments. They even continuously smoked in the room, although I had not recovered from my trachea surgery, causing me to cough incessantly. The smoke from the cigarettes also caused me to suffer severe headaches and shortness of breath. With the rotating shifts of police harassing me in my apartment around the clock, I could barely get any sleep. It was only when those police officers who knew the truth about Falun Dafa were on duty that I could get some rest. Moreover, I was given only half a bowl of clear porridge daily. Then Wang Zhongren threatened me, trying to make my family pay him 30,000 yuan within three days. He said, "Otherwise, I will put an ad on the newspaper and sell you as a mail-order bride for 30,000 yuan." Wang Zhongren also cursed Falun Dafa and Teacher. One of Wang Zhongren's henchmen, Zhang Shouyi, cursed Falun Dafa and threatened me fiercely, "I could suffocate you with a pillow and declare it as a suicide." He made a lot of similar death threats to pressure me to get money for them.

On June 5, 2003, Du Xingze brought two journalists to my apartment to videotape and audiotape me. I knew, if I let them do it, that all the footage would be heavily edited and made into programmes that slandered Falun Dafa. I solemnly told Du Xingze, "Get out of my apartment! Don't even think about it!" I refused to cooperate with them in any way, so they were unable to get any recorded speech from me, nor any footage of my lips moving in certain shapes that they would purposely interpret as different words with similar sounds, or certain facial expressions that they could add captions to, to slander Falun Dafa. Because I refused to cooperate with the journalists, Du Xingze took revenge by cutting off all of my communication with the outside world. Further, although I had not recovered from my injuries, they stopped all my medical treatments.

Du Xingze was running rampant with his crimes. He would not leave my family alone. He repeatedly tried to extort money from my family in the name of medical expenses, but my family refused to give in to their coercion. The police would not give up. They used a master key to open my mother's apartment, and took away my second eldest sister and her daughters' IDs, 3,000 yuan in cash, and a VCD player. Moreover, because they were going to be abducted, my mother and my second eldest sister, who are both Dafa practitioners, had no choice but to leave home and go into hiding to avoid persecution. My sister's two children were thus left at home alone, and they had to go and stay with relatives. The police have thus ripped apart a family. My sister's two children were originally given 122 yuan of poverty relief per month as children in extreme poverty. But because the police suspended the poverty relief, the children could no longer afford to go to school.

My 16-year-old son and my eldest sister had asked four times to see me, but each time Du Xingze refused their request. He even pounded the table and barked at them, "If you don't give me the money, you can forget about seeing your mother ever again!" My eldest sister tried to reason with him, but Du stared at my sister and said, "You have reported me to Clearwisdom.net. Now my name appears on many overseas web sites. I really want to push you all down the stairs!" After this encounter, my son was overcome with worries for me and anxiety arising from Du's blackmail attempts, and he was soon taken ill. Later the police abducted my mother and my second eldest sister three times, and then posted a reward for the arrest of my second eldest sister. They also harassed my eldest sister at her home repeatedly.

If it were not for the rescue efforts of fellow practitioners, it is likely that I would have been persecuted to death. Because of my steadfast faith in Dafa, I resolve to continue to clarify the facts of Falun Dafa as long as I am still alive. On July 7, 2003, I successfully walked out of the apartment building and escaped right under the policemen's noses.

Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2004/1/31/66242.html