Ms. Meng Lijun is from Xifanliu Village, Zhangqiu City, which is located near Jinan, Shandong Province. At the age of 14 Ms. Meng contracted rheumatoid arthritis, which spread to her heart. She was unable to go to school and despite many rounds of treatment, she still had swollen joints all over her body. She couldn't do any housework or work on the farm.
In 1998, she was fortunate enough to get a copy of the book Zhuan Falun, the main text of Falun Gong. She finished reading it in four days, and all the pain in her body disappeared. She found Falun Gong to be miraculous. Her body felt light, and she could do housework and farm work from that point on. This also helped her to have a better temperament. Before she practised Falun Gong, Ms. Meng had frequent arguments with her mother-in-law. After practising, she got along well with both her mother-in-law and sister-in-laws. The whole family became more harmonious.
In 1999, the Jiang Zemin regime started the persecution of Falun Gong. On December 13th, 1999, Meng Lijun and fellow practitioners went to Beijing to appeal on behalf of Falun Gong. Before they even got to the Appeals Office, police from the Beijing Public Security Bureau arrested them in a hotel and then sent them back to Zhangqiu City. They were held at the detention station there.
The police tortured her using all sorts of methods. To start with, they instigated her husband to slap her in the face, and then they started assaulting her themselves. They forced her and several other practitioners to take off all their clothes except for their underwear, and then left those practitioners outside in the cold. They made the practitioners stand in the back of a truck with signs hanging from their necks while they were driven to various towns and villages to be paraded around and publicly humiliated. At the time it was eight or nine degrees below zero, and they were paraded around like this for more than six hours. When the truck got to Puji Town, they held what was called a "public trial." One day Deputy Director Ma of the detention centre spoke to Ms. Meng and then savagely beat her. Once, police handcuffed one of her hands and hung her from some metal wiring, leaving her feet barely touching the ground. She was hung like that for three or four hours. Her face, hands, and feet all changed colour. One young policeman came and put a charge of electricity into the metal wiring from the electric baton he held. When Ms. Meng was taken down, she couldn't stand and felt nauseas. When she and other practitioners did the Falun Gong exercises, the police discovered them. Policeman Yu Baohai and another policewoman took Ms. Meng to a small room and shocked her for a long time using an electric baton. Her neck and face got red and swollen. Finally, the local police station and the detention centre extorted 3,000 yuan1 from her for what they called "bail"and then released her.
At noon on June 27th 2000, Meng Lijun was at a practitioner's home when the local police showed up. They handcuffed the practitioners and took them to Guanzhang Police Station. They put her in a small room, where five policemen had her sit on the ground and handcuffed her hands together, with the backs of her hands facing each other. Then they hooked up electricity to her thumbs. She was trembling all over because of the electrical shocks and was unable to speak. They paused a while and then shocked her again. She sweated heavily all the way through and didn't know how long it went on. It wasn't until somebody from the city government came that they stopped shocking her. One director from the city government came and grabbed her hair and then proceeded to punch and kick her. He beat her for a long time and then took her out of the room and handcuffed her to some parallel bars in the yard. By this time it was dark and the policemen went to have dinner. After they came back, they took her to another room and sat her down on the ground, handcuffed her, took her shoes off, tied her feet and hands with electric wire, and began to shock her. The three policemen in the room were from the city government. They shocked her for a while, beat her, shocked her again, and then resumed the beating. They asked her where she got her truth-clarifying materials, but she refused to answer them.
It is not known for how long they beat and shocked Ms. Meng. They sent her to the detention centre in Zhangqiu City at around 11:00 p.m. At the detention centre, the police savagely tortured her. She went on a hunger strike to protest and was then force-fed. She was detained at the detention centre for over a month. The police didn't release her until they had extorted 11,000 yuan from her family.
When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was holding the two national conferences in March 2001, police from the 610 Office2 of the Public Security Bureau in Zhangqiu City arrested dozens of practitioners and sent them to the brainwashing centre in the City Militia Training Base. They were forced to watch TV programmes and read materials that slandered Falun Gong and were forced to write statements denouncing Falun Gong. Meng Lijun's husband wrote the statement for her and she was released.
In 2003, police from the Wangcun Police Station in Zibo City arrested a practitioner and then tortured her. She couldn't bear the torture and told the police that she got her materials from Ms. Meng. The police then forced their way into Ms. Meng's house after climbing over the courtyard wall. They took her to the police station in Wangcun. When she didn't cooperate with them at all, the police had to send her back home. Shortly afterwards, however, police from the Public Security Bureau in the Tianqiao District, Jinan Province, suddenly broke into her home and took her away, leaving her son at home. This time, she was detained at the detention centre in Jinan City. Police forced her to sit in a torture device called the iron chair for long periods of time. She went on a hunger strike to protest, but she was sent to the prison hospital and force fed. This led to life-threatening organ damage. The authorities didn't release her until they had extorted 5,000 yuan for what they called a "nursing fee" from her family. Her husband had to carry her on his back from the hospital.
Ms. Meng was still in recovery when police from the local police station and the public security bureau went to harass her repeatedly. Her family lived a life of fear. She was forced to leave home and became destitute to avoid further persecution.
In December 2004, she was arrested again by the Public Security Bureau in the Tianqiao District, Jinan City, and was later sent to the detention centre in Jinan City. She went on a hunger strike as soon as she got there, and she was even more severely persecuted. The police cuffed her arms and legs to the four corners of the bed, which was called the death bed3. She was left there like that for two days and nights. She was menstruating at the time but she couldn't go to the toilet at all. She was force fed. They inserted a tube through her nose into her stomach. If they couldn't insert the tube the first time, they would try a second or third time. She almost suffocated but the police said to her, "Don't you want to die? Then you could die now." When they took out the tube, the whole tube was full of blood and the blood splashed onto the prison doctor's clothes. They said to her mockingly, "This doctor is trying to save you, yet you splash blood all over her?"
Ms. Meng was on hunger strike for 46 days. A hospital examination revealed internal organ damage. She went from a weight of about 70 kilogrammes to 35 kilogrammes. After she came home, she recovered quickly through studying the Falun Dafa teachings and doing the exercises, but soon afterwards police from the public security bureau and the police station went to harass her again. She was unable to spend the Chinese New Year with her family and had to leave home again in a hurry.
On September 27th, 2005, Ms. Meng was arrested in Qihe County, and the following day she was sent to the 610 Office of the Public Security Bureau in the Tianqiao District. Yu Jinyuan, Director of the Brigade to Persecute Falun Gong, was in charge of her case. She was sent to the detention centre, and her mother and the rest of her family didn't get this news until after more than ten days. They requested to see her but were refused. Her family insisted, and finally the team leader of the Fifth Team Lu Ping and other medical staff told them that Ms. Meng had gone on a hunger strike in prison and had suffered a mental collapse due to all that she had had to endure. Her family then went to see Yu Jinyuan and requested to see Meng, but Yu sent them to get more approvals before being able to see her.
In order to see her daughter, Ms. Meng's 80-year-old mother travelled several hundred miles with her family again and again to the detention centre, but couldn't see her even once. Her mother fell ill over her daughter's plight and became emotionally distraught. She often sat up at night staring blankly.
Ms. Meng's case was transferred to the Tianqiao District Procuratorate and then to the courts. At the end of December 2005, the CCP's court secretly opened the trial and didn't notify her family. They only allowed her husband into the courtroom and barred anyone else from entering. Ms. Meng was incoherent at the time and was carried to the court. She was unable to defend herself. From the time she was arrested to the time she was secretly tried, police from the 610 Office and the local public security bureau used various means to threaten her husband, who didn't dare to speak out under such pressure. She was sentenced to ten years in prison.
It was not until March 2006 that her family was allowed to visit her in prison. She had swelling all over her body and suffered from amnesia. She didn't know how old her own child was and asked how a deceased relative was doing. She also didn't know how long she had been in prison. She kept asking the same questions again and again, and cried from time to time. After each visit, she would wail for quite some time.
The family learned that after Ms. Meng was put in prison, the police didn't stop torturing her. They put unknown drugs into her food and water. Later on she told her family that she didn't know if she could survive until her release date, but if she died, her family should find out why she had died. When her family questioned the police about why they used drugs on a healthy person, they didn't deny it and claimed that she had a mental problem because of practising Falun Gong and that she had contracted the mental illness before her imprisonment.
Telephone number of Yu Jinyuan: 86-531-85820446
Note
1. "Yuan" is the Chinese currency; 500 yuan is equal to the average monthly income of an urban worker in China.
2. "The 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.
3. "Death Bed" torture: A practitioner is tied to a bed with his hands handcuffed above his head to the bed rails, and his legs tied with thin nylon ropes. The rope is then tightly wrapped around the practitioner's body and the bed, from his legs to his chest. The rope is wrapped so tightly that the practitioner has difficulty breathing and eventually loses consciousness.
Chinese version available at http://minghui.ca/mh/articles/2007/4/5/152209.html
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