Imprisoned Five Times, Ten Hard Years

Name: Qu Xinlian
Gender: Female
Age: 62
Address: Fujin City, Heilongjiang Province
Occupation: Unknown

Date of Most Recent Arrest: October 1st, 2009
Most recent place of detention: Unknown
City: Fujin

Province: Heilongjiang
Persecution Suffered: Detention, forced labour, home ransacked, extortion

Ms. Qu Xinlian has been detained five times in the past 10 years, including two years of forced labour, simply for her belief and wanting to be a better person. The police often went to her home to harass her child and husband and both were even detained. There are eight in her family and their average income is about 200 yuan¹ per month. Despite their meagre income, regime officials have extorted more than 7,000 yuan from them.

After she started to practise Falun Gong, Ms. Qu became healthier, more optimistic, and kinder, and her entire family benefited from this.

In July 1999, Jiang Zemin's, [former leader of China and instigator of the persecution] regime started a brutal, nationwide persecution of Falun Gong. When Ms. Qu once met with several practitioners to share their experiences, officers from the Fujin Police Department arrested and detained them. The police also extorted from 10,000 to 20,000 yuan from them and never issued any receipts. Seeing that Ms. Qu was too poor to pay anything, the police incarcerated her at a detention centre for more than 20 days.

In 2001, Ms. Qu and another practitioner were arrested on their way to Beijing, where they wanted to appeal for Falun Gong. Following her arrest, she was detained for more than five months. Not long after that, one evening at about 9:00 p.m. when she was already asleep, Pei Xiaodong, the then Domestic Security Division head, and five or six other police officers broke into her home. They ransacked the house and took away many Falun Gong books. In addition, they even took her eldest son with them for a so-called interrogation. The next day, police officers took Ms. Qu's husband to a detention centre for an investigation, yet they totally ignored him during his 18 days of detention. This time the police sent Ms. Qu to the Xigemu Forced Labour Camp in Jiamusi in an attempt to forcibly "transform" [forcibly renounce Falun Gong] her. She was detained there for nearly two years, and every day she had to perform hard labour for long hours, including gluing match or medicine boxes, selecting toothpicks or beans, etc.

On October 1st, 2009, officers from the Dongping Police Station, led by Chief Pei Xiaodong, went to Ms. Qu's home again and arrested her. They also arrested her second son. Since he could not find any valuables at her house, Pei Xiaodong took an MP4 player for himself. He then claimed that the player contained Falun Gong material and used it as an excuse to detain Ms. Qu once again.

The police attempted to have Ms. Qu sent to the Jiamusi Forced Labour Camp but it was not approved. They claimed that her case would be prepared again and resubmitted. During that time, Ms. Qu went on a hunger strike while she was being held. Her husband heard about it and went to the police station and appealed for one week in front of the station, holding a sign with the word "Wronged" on it. One day, Yu Xinglu, the deputy head of the police department in charge of persecuting Falun Gong practitioners, got out of a police car with several others and asked Ms. Qu's husband why he was standing there with that sign. He answered that his wife had been arrested and detained for more than 40 days. Yu Xinglu told his henchmen to take the sign away from him and swore at him. Ms. Qu's family had no choice but to borrow 6,000 yuan and give it to them. She had been detained for more than two months before they released her and she could return home. This poor family is having a very difficult time.

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://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2010/1/14/216216.html