Practitioner in Gansu Province Recounts the Persecution She and Her Family Have Suffered for the Past Eight Years

I used to work at Jinchuan Inc. in Gansu Province. I'm retired now. I started to practise Falun Dafa in 1998. During the past eight years of persecution by the Chinese Communist Party, I have suffered a lot. I was sentenced to forced labour camps and I was detained.

On October 1st, 2001, I went to a rural village to distribute leaflets exposing the persecution. Someone turned me in to the authorities. Police from the Hexibao Police Substation caught me and took my bag. There were three leaflets in the bag. The police took me to their substation. They interrogated me. In their report, they said they had found thirteen pieces of material in my bag. They ordered me to sign their report. I refused. They sent me to the Yongchang County Drug Rehabilitation Centre for detention. When I arrived, policeman Zhang Xianyi kicked my legs twice very hard. I had a large bruise on my leg for a month.

Liu Fuhai is the Director at the Police Station of Yongchang County. To have me sentenced, he changed the report to say they found forty pieces of Falun Gong material in my bag. Liu went to the Gansu Province Government to personally report my "case." One of my relatives went to talk to Liu and tried to ask him to be fair to me. Liu demanded ten thousand yuan. My relative didn't give him the money. Liu immediately ordered policeman Li Guoyu and three other policemen of the National Protection Squad to handcuff me and take take me to search my home. When they passed Hexibao on their way to my home, they picked up the policeman who arrested me. When they passed Jinchang City, they got another police car and four more policemen from the Municipal Public Security Bureau. Two police cars and eight policemen came to my home. Li Guoyu searched me and found the key to my home. They then searched my home. One of them proposed to dig up the floor and search underneath. Eventually, they didn't do this simply because they got too tired. A purse was hanging on a hook. Later I learned from my family that eight hundred yuan¹ was missing from the purse. They found and took my Falun Gong book. When they saw some wine, they wanted to drink it. I said the wine wasn't mine. They smelled the wine and eventually put it down.

After that, they took me back to the rehabilitation centre. Li Guoyu interrogated me another three times. Xing Fuqiang said, "We will sentence you to prison if you do not tell us where you got the materials." I didn't tell them. They continued to detain me. One of my relatives came to visit me and left one thousand yuan for me. My family also brought two hundred yuan to me. But the rehabilitation centre stole the money. When I came out of the centre, I got my keys, purse, watch, and belt back. I didn't get my money. Zhuang Xianyi said, "All the money was spent on your food."

When they had detained me at the rehabilitation centre for over four months, I started a hunger strike near Chinese New Year in February 2002. On the fifth day of my hunger strike, Cheng Yeshang, the Chair of the centre, came with a drug addict to force feed me. He told that person to put salt in the powdered soy milk. He then pulled my hair with one hand and used his other hand to force open my mouth with two chopsticks. Then he told that person to pour the food into my mouth. My gums were bleeding, yet he didn't stop. Later, I lost consciousness. When I woke up, I was on an IV. The doctor looked at my eyes and said to Cheng, "She won't die." The next morning, Li Guoyu and another female doctor took me and another Falun Dafa practitioner, Zhang Jufen, to the Lanzhou Forced Labour Camp. We were assigned to the second group of the seventh squad.

The first thing that they did when we arrived was search us. We had to take off everything except our bras and underpants. It was February and very cold. Yet we stood there almost naked for over twenty minutes. Some drug addicts searched through all of our things. They didn't provide enough water at the forced labour camp. They only provided two barrels of water for the eighty three people in our group. I was so thirsty that I drank water which was meant for washing dishes. When I saw some rain water on a plastic bag in the field, I was so thirsty that I drank that too. At the forced labour camp, two prisoners were assigned to monitor each Falun Gong practitioner. We were not allowed to walk around nor use the toilet when needed. They watched us no matter what we did. At night, they sandwiched me when sleeping. The workload was very heavy. They would beat us if we couldn't finish our work. At night, we were forced to memorise the rules of the forced labour camp. Those who couldn't recite the rules were not allowed to go to bed. They would have to stand outside in the cold. The environment was brutal. Eventually, I finished my term. The branch of Jinchuan Inc. at Longshou asked my family to pick me up. But the forced labour camp refused to let me go. The next day, my family gave Hu, the head of our group, a gift of four hundred yuan. Then they released me.

My family suffered a lot of financial loss because of the persecution. Police threatened my family and asked for three thousand yuan for a "guarantee fund." My family had to invite them for dinner at a restaurant twice, which cost four thousand yuan. They withheld my pay for a year, which added up to fourteen thousand yuan. When I came back in July, they still didn't pay me until October when they only gave me my base salary. I didn't start to get my bonuses until now. The benefits would have been twenty five thousand yuan at least. In total, we lost forty-eight thousand yuan. My husband was impacted as well. His coworkers ridiculed him. The secretary of his company criticised him at a big meeting. My husband couldn't stand all of this and retired early. We lost twenty thousand yuan of income every year due to his early retirement. My family irrationally blamed me instead of the persecutors. My husband has heart disease and cannot bear stress, yet the police harassed my family several times. Lai Yunzhong from the Security Department of my company harassed us three times. He asked me to write the so called "repentance letter²." People from the Community Office often harassed us as well.

On July 12th, 2006, I was studying Falun Gong teachings with fellow practitioners Zhang Wanwen, Chai Shixiu, and Chai Xiuying and someone reported on us. The police took us to the Jinchuan Road Police Substation. Policeman Dai Baoji, Xing Fuqiang, and another policeman from the Longshou Police Station took me home to search my home. Later, they took us to the Jinchang Drug Addiction Rehabilitation Centre and detained us for eight days.

Note

1. "Yuan" is the Chinese currency; 500 yuan is equal to the average monthly income of an urban worker in China.

2. Repentance Statement: In this statement the practitioner is forced to admit remorse for practising Falun Gong, promise to give up Falun Gong, and never again associate with other practitioners or go to Beijing to appeal for Falun Gong.

Chinese version available at http://minghui.org/mh/articles/2008/2/6/171885.html