Practitioners' Family Members Expose the Underhanded Dealings of a Detention Centre Shop in Harbin

The Seventh Division of the Harbin Police Department is a detention centre. No detainee's family members are allowed to visit, including the family members of Falun Gong practitioners illegally detained there, nor are their families permitted to send them things from home.

Family members came to the shop to learn news about the practitioners being held there. They paid the clerks for their items and got a receipt. Then they asked the shop clerks to send the items to the practitioners. When the practitioners got the items, they would sign the receipts. When the receipts with practitioners' signatures were brought back, the family members sometimes were lucky enough to see several extra words. Many times, however, the extra words were cut out.

The shop's prices are extremely high. Apples are 3.5 yuan¹per Jin (1.1 pound) and the small watermelons are 6 yuan each. A toothbrush set is 15 yuan and clothes are very expensive. A box of instant noodles costs 20 yuan at a regular shop but is marked 60 yuan there. Some items are 50 percent more expensive than regular prices and some are twice as much as the regular price.

Some family members asked the clerks if their family members were still detained here. The clerks told them, "Yes," so the families bought several things and asked the clerks to send them in. But when the clerks came back, they did not give the family members any receipts. When the family asked for the receipts, the clerks said that the practitioners had been transferred. However, when the family members asked them to return the things they had bought, the clerks were unwilling to do so. On the day I visited, there were two cases like this. The clerks locked the door and went for lunch. When the door was reopened for the afternoon, the two families started to argue with the clerks. In another case the family got most of their purchased items back, but some items--the toothbrush set and the detergent--were missing. They confronted the clerks, who then brought out the missing items and said that they had forgotten them. Did they really forget? Practitioners had often told their families that they did not have these daily necessities. Their family members thought it could have been the large number of cellmates, which resulted in a shortage of these items. Actually, the clerks did not deliver to the practitioners the items that their family members had purchased. This was the situation in the Spring of 2003.

Most of the clerks working at the shop are family members of the police officers in the detention centre. Their families have good incomes, but still they embezzle, extort, and deceive practitioners.

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://minghui.ca/mh/articles/2005/9/10/110130.html