The Persecution of Mr. Li Jian in Sichuan Province Illustrates the Scale, Severity and Pervasive Nature of the Suppression of Falun Gong

As of May 16, 2004, it has been nearly five years since Jiang Zemin and his followers started to openly persecute Falun Gong practitioners on July 20, 1999. In order to justify and sustain the persecution, they have been spreading propaganda against Falun Gong to the people in China, who are denied access to the facts about Falun Gong. The Head of the "610 Office"* in Dazu County, Sichuan Province has collaborated with Dazu County's Public Security Bureau in following Jiang's order to persecute Falun Gong practitioners. They have ransacked Falun Gong practitioners' homes, extorted their money in the name of fines, thrown them into detention centres and jails, given them illegal sentences, subjected them to forced brainwashing programs which used violence and torture, and implicated their families and relatives in the persecution. They have sent out a large police force to hunt down Falun Gong practitioners and filled Dazu County with terror.

The following is but an example of the persecution against Falun Gong practitioners in Dazu County, but it illustrates the scale, severity and the pervasive nature of the persecution against Falun Gong practitioners.

Mr. Li Jian (over 40 years old)

Mr. Li Jian is a college graduate and worked as a section chief at the Dazu County's Centre of Disease Control before the persecution against Falun Gong began. Mr. Li was sentenced to 18 months in the Xishanping Forced Labour Camp in November 1999 for travelling to Beijing and appealing on behalf of Falun Gong. He ended up being incarcerated for 27 months because the staff at Xishanping detained him for an additional nine months. In February 2002, Mr. Li was sentenced to another two years in a forced labour camp for clarifying the truth about Falun Gong, distributing flyers and writing messages on the streets. On February 16, 2004, Chongqing First Intermediary People's Court sentenced Mr. Li to 13 years in a forced labour camp. His "crime" was helping to relay the facts to the world about a policeman from the Baihelin Detention Centre in Shaqu who raped Ms. Wei Xingyan, a graduate student at Chongqing University, in front of two female prison inmates. Chongqing First Intermediary People's Court sentenced the five Falun Gong practitioners, including Mr. Li Jian, to long prison terms on charges of "damaging the image of the Chinese government and slandering a Chinese government employee" for their righteous action of exposing the brutal rape.

*"610 Office" is an agency specifically created to persecute Falun Gong, with absolute power over each level of administration in the Party and all other political and judiciary systems.

Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2004/5/7/74062.html