Teacher Who Donated 60,000 Yuan to Her Hometown Brought to Trial

Name: Lu Chunyun
Gender: Female
Age: Unknown
Address: Liaoyuan City, Jilin Province
Occupation: Teacher

Date of Most Recent Arrest: January 26th, 2010
Most recent place of detention: Liaoyuan Detention Centre
City: Liaoyuan
Province: Jilin
Persecution Suffered: Detention, home ransacked, extortion, electric shock, force-feedings, forced labour, brainwashing, fired from workplace, mental hospital, physical constraint, beatings

On the morning of January 26th, 2010, as Ms. Lu Chunyun, a Falun Gong practitioner, was distributing leaflets exposing the persecution and telling people the facts about Falun Gong at the Trade Building in Liaoyuan City, security guards arrested her. Police officers from Liaoyuan then ransacked her home and confiscated her personal computer. She is now being held in Liaoyuan Detention Centre.

On the afternoon of May 14th, Ms. Lu was brought to trial in the Longshan District Court in Liaoyuan City. When her family saw her, two people were helping her just to walk. No verdict was announced after the trial.

She Donated Half of Her Savings to Support the Building of a Bridge

Ms. Lu used to teach at Liaoyuan Health School in Jilin Province. Before she started practising Falun Gong, she had many illnesses, including rheumatism, heart disease, and postpartum rheumatism. She spent lots of money but was unable to regain her health. After she started practising Falun Gong in 1996, all her illnesses miraculously disappeared. Her health kept improving, as did her moral standards.

In 1996, when local officials were calling for donations to build roads and a bridge, she donated half of her total savings, 60,000 yuan¹ to the government to build the bridge. In addition, she did it anonymously. At the time, people from the Liaoyuan City municipal government held a press conference, where her generosity was highly praised, and her letter to Mayer Xu Zengli was read publicly. In her letter, she wrote: "I'm a student of Mr. Li Hongzhi. Through studying his work, Zhuan Falun, I came to truly understand that the purpose of one's life is to return to one's original, true self. It was Falun Gong that changed me from a selfish person to a good person, it is Teacher Li Hongzhi and Falun Gong that give me a new life." Both the "Anonymous" plaque on the bridge and the report in the Liaoyuan Daily of May 18th, 1996, are the witnesses of this fact.

Persecuted for Speaking Truth, Her Daughter Affected, and Detained in a Forced Labour Camp

However, for the past more than ten years, Ms. Lu has been subject to detention, thrown into forced labour camps, sentenced numerous times, and severely persecuted. From July 1999 to 2000, simply because she went to Beijing to speak the truth about Falun Gong, she was sentenced to one year of imprisonment. When she was held at the Heizuizi Forced Labour Camp in Jilin Province, she was shocked with electric batons, forced-fed, subject to forced labour for 17 to 20 hours at a time and forced to attend the brainwashing sessions. Under the cruel mental and physical torture, she renounced her belief and stopped practising. After she came home, her illnesses recurred. She came to understand that what she did was wrong. Therefore, she went to Beijing to appeal to the government for the fourth time. In order to escape the Beijing police, she jumped from the third floor of the place where she was held. Miraculously, she got away with no injuries. After she came home, she was taken against her will to a mental hospital to be tortured. At the same time, she was dismissed from her job by Principal Jiang Fengtian and Vice-Principal Wang Zhiguo from Liaoyuan Health School.

In 2001, Ms. Lu was forced to become homeless to avoid persecution. On March 14th, 2002, the head of Dongji Police Station, Jiang Yang; police officer Chen Yunpeng; and others broke into her home. They didn't find her. However, in order to meet the quota issued by their superiors concerning practitioner arrests, they ended up arresting her 19-year-old daughter, Ms. Shi Shuanglian. They took her to Dongji Police Station, where they began to cruelly torture her. Police officers took off her coat and made her stand on the cold, concrete floor in her bare feet. Then they poured cold water on her and shocked and beat her with electric batons in attempts to force her to tell them her mother's whereabouts.

The young woman couldn't stand such cruel torture, so she told the police officers, "I will stop practising." The reason the officers wanted her to admit that she practised Falun Gong was so that they would be rewarded by their supervisors. They kept torturing her until she finally gave in. In order to be eligible for their rewards, they had her pose for pictures where they placed Falun Gong books beside her to prove that she was a practitioner. After Ms. Shi was detained at Liaoyuan Detention Centre for one month, she was taken to Heizuizi Women's Forced Labour Camp, where she was sentenced to three years and detained at the No. 6 Team. She had to do hard labour everyday and was subjected to brainwashing and forced to declare that she would not practise anymore.

For Not Renouncing Her Belief, Ms. Lu Was Detained in a Forced Labour Camp Again and Sentenced

On June 18th, 2003, Ms. Lu was arrested in Dongliao County in Liaoyuan City. She was held in a secret place and cruelly tortured. On October 14th, 2003, she was sentenced to two years of imprisonment.

On the evening of April 22nd, 2006, when Ms. Lu was handing out exposing the persecution of Falun Gong, she was arrested by a group of police officers led by Han Dong, who was the Director of the Dongji Police Sub-Bureau in Liaoyuan City. After that, she was bound to an iron chair for a day at the police sub-bureau. When police officers Lian Weihua and Jiang Yang asked her for the source of her materials, she refused to answer. At that time, a person in charge of the police bureau by the last name of Lian kicked her very hard four times in the chest (over her heart), and then left.

When Ms. Lu was detained at the Liaoyuan Detention Centre, she had 320 yuan in cash with her, which the police confiscated. When she went on a hunger strike to resist the persecution, she was force-fed a few times by the head of the detention centre, Hong Meidong, assisted by guard Luo Dongmei. At that point, she was emaciated and only weighed 35kg (77 lbs), yet prison doctor Zhang and guard Luo Dongmei still tried to put handcuffs on her and force-feed her.

On December 6th, 2006, Longshan District Court in Liaoyuan City put Ms. Lu and eight other practitioners on trial in a meeting room in Liaoyuan Detention Centre. They only allowed a maximum of two immediate family members per practitioner to attend the trial. Those attending had to bring an ID and were not allowed to have their mobile phones. About a dozen family members sat through the entire trial. Even though the trial went on for more than three hours, the court did not hand down a verdict. On the evening of December 15th, the verdict was finally announced: Ms. Lu was sentenced to three years imprisonment.

All nine practitioners appealed to the Liaoyuan City Intermediate Court, where the original verdict was upheld. On January 24th, 2007, the final verdict was issued. In accordance with the law, after a second verdict is issued, those practitioners should have been able to see their families; however, people from Liaoyuan Detention Centre worked with people from the Political and Juridical Committee to prevent them from seeing their families.

At noon on January 26th, 2007, the five male practitioners were taken to Shiling Prison in Jilin Province. On January 29th, the four female practitioners were taken to Heizuizi Women's Prison. After Ms. Lu was sentenced, as a result of torture, she developed serious heart diseases and was rejected by the prison. However, police officers from Liaoning City refused to release her and continue to detain her in their local detention centre.

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/2010/5/26/224357.html