Mr. Xu Huijian Contracted Tuberculosis While Imprisoned--His Parents Not Allowed to Visit

In 2001, Mr. Xu Huijian from Jilin Province was secretly sentenced to ten years in prison. He spent the first part of his sentence at the Jilin Province Prison and the Changchun City Tiebei Prison. He was later transferred to the notorious Gongzhuling Prison.

Because Mr. Xu refused to give up his faith in Falun Gong, he was brutally tortured by the prison guards and became very emaciated. One year ago he contracted tuberculosis. In order to the news of his illness from leaking out, the guards tried to prevent his parents from visiting him. But eventually his parents found out. The guards told Mr. Xu that if he did not give up practising Falun Gong, he would not be released even when his ten-year term expired.

Mr. Xu Huijian, 32, a resident of t he Jiangyuan District in Baishan City, Jilin Province, was enrolled in a training programme at the Changchun Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics back in the 90s. After he began practising Falun Gong, he started to excel in every research project that he was assigned and always conducted himself according to the principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance. The company administrators even told him that they would hire him as a teacher after he graduated.

Prior to Mr. Xu's graduation, Jiang Zemin's , [former leader of China and instigator of the persecution] regime started the unprecedented persecution of Falun Gong and Falun Gong practitioners. One day the company administrators visited Mr. Xu and told him that if he continued to practise Falun Gong they would be forced to fire him. Mr. Xu firmly replied that he would not give up his faith in Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance, then walked out of the Changchun Institute.

In March 2001, Mr. Xu was suddenly reported missing. In March 2003, his family happened to read in the daily newspaper that Mr. Xu had been arrested and was sentenced to ten years in the Jilin Province Prison.

When his family went to the prison to visit him, they were alarmed at how emaciated he was. They knew that he had suffered a great deal. Shortly after, Mr. Xu was transferred to the Changchun City Tiebei Prison. A few months after that he was transferred to the notorious Gongzhuling Prison, where he was brutally tortured.

According to Tielong Prison rules, if a family wants to visit a relative, they must first obtain a recommendation letter from the local 610 Office¹. However, the 610 Office told the parents that they first needed to get a recommendation letter from both the local and the township governors.

In this way, the parents were kept very busy dealing with layer after layer of Chinese Communist Party bureaucracy. Finally when the family did have the opportunity to visit their son, they found him in an extremely emaciated state. Mr. Xu didn't intimate to his parents that he was being regularly tortured at the prison as he did not want them to worry too much about him.

Early in 2008, Mr. Xu's family found out that he had been tortured to the point of near death. That is when he contracted tuberculosis. He was later transferred to the hospital section of the prison. When the family went to visit him, the prison officials turned them away, saying that they did not have the required 610 Office letter in hand.

The family went back to the local 610 Office and asked the personnel there to write a recommendation letter for them. Instead of writing the letter, they intentionally lied to the family, telling them that there was no specific rule preventing them from seeing their sick son.

Some practitioners wrote an article exposing the brutal torture of Mr. Xu Huijian, Mr. Zhang Yinsen, and Mr. Shi Chengbin. They also revealed the fact that the guards said that if these three practitioners didn't voluntarily give up practicing Falun Gong, their prison terms would continue indefinitely. The article was later published on the Clearwisdom.net website.

Mr. Xu has now been imprisoned for over eight years. We hope that international human rights organizations and people will pay close attention to Mr. Xu's situation.

An Ping, director of Gongzhuling Prison
Zheng Haifeng, section chief

Address of Gongzhuling Prison:
P.O. Box 1002
Gongzhuling City, Jilin Province
China 136100

Note

1. "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.

Chinese version available at http://minghui.ca/mh/articles/2009/3/7/196694.html