What Happened after an Excellent Teacher Got Arrested

Ms. Ma Qin, an excellent teacher from the Development District Experimental School in Pingdu City, has been practising Falun Gong for over five years. After she started practising, all her illnesses disappeared. She also followed the principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance, earning her a very high reputation among students and their parents. Below is her own account of how she was arrested and what happened afterward.

On August 9th, under orders from the politics and law committee in Qingdao, Shandong Province, deputy director Hou Jiarui from Pingdu Police Department, Zhao Hongwu and Liu Jie from the Pingdu 610 Office (an organisation of special agents just for persecuting Falun Gong), and others arrested me.

In the morning, they sent two plainclothes officers to my home to check our IDs. Without finding me at home, they asked my husband several questions and then left. However, they waited below our building. After lunch, they did not see me go back home, so they went to Pingdu Development District Experimental School and told the principal to call me. At around 2:30 p.m., Deputy Principal Yu Deshao called me and asked me to go to return to work and go to his office. Because I trusted the deputy principal, I returned to school, where Hou Jiarui and the others were waiting for me and arrested me.

At school, Zhao Hongwu from the 610 Office said they wanted some information from me. Because I started practising Falun Gong in 2004 and had not revealed this before, I did not know what they wanted to learn. They took me to Taishanlu Police Station. Liu Jie grabbed my handbag, which contained my keys and mobile phone, and then took my watch. When I asked him why he took my watch, Zhao Hongwu said, "Give it back to her; it's just a watch." Liu Jie then returned it. Zhao Hongwu told the police to put handcuffs on me and wanted to take me away. I resisted, but they forced me into their car and took me to the Appeals Office, which was where they persecuted Falun Gong practitioners. Hou Jiarui and others used my keys to get in and ransack my home.

The police returned after ransacking my home, and most of them went outside to move my belongings, leaving only one policeman, Yang, with me. At around 2:30 a.m., I successfully left the room where at least two policemen were watching over me and climbed up a three-metre high wall with my hands still cuffed together. I jumped off and disappeared in the dark.

Deputy Director of Pingdu Police Department Hou Jiarui, Zhao Hongwu, and others went to my home and started to ransack it without showing any documentation to my family. They also threatened my family members, who were not practitioners. Liu Jie was especially rude and coarse. When they found cash, they were delirious and acted like buffoons. When they noticed that we had a lot of things at home, they called for another five or six officers. Over a dozen ransacked my home for over three hours, searching everywhere, including the garage, and took away anything they found. They even took several of my new notebooks and my husband's bank book. My husband is a businessman, and the money was for him to do business.

After ransacking my home, Hou Jiarui called the Politics and Law Committee and reported that they had arrested me and had also ransacked my home, confiscating lots of things. A committee representative responded that they would send someone the next morning to interrogate me. Hou Jiarui then took the dozen policemen who had just ransacked my home to a restaurant.

I escaped after midnight. My escape apparently shocked them. They immediately deployed police and tried to arrest me again. They sent people to monitor the area near my home. They sent six police officers in two shifts to follow my husband 24 hours a day. In the morning, the people sent by the Politics and Law Committee in Qingdao found out about my escape, so they returned empty handed.

Around 11:20 a.m., Director Dai Yugang of the 610 Office brought about 15 people to another practitioner's home near mine to try to arrest him. That practitioner noticed them after purchasing lunch, so he escaped, too. Those people chased me for a long time but failed to catch me. Then they went to every practitioner's home in Xiangdian to harass them but still did not find me. They still would not give up and went to all my relative and friends' homes to harass them as well. They even went to the home of my parents-in-law, but still did not find me. They then planned a ploy. Zhao Hongwu went to our principal and told him to talk to my mother and others to get them to ask me to return to school, guaranteeing there would not be any problem. They promised not to dismiss me or arrest me again. I did not believe them.

After my escape, they immediately listed me as wanted online, even as they they spread rumours that I would not be arrested if I went back. One of my best friends at school sent me a message and told me there was no problem and asked me to go back to work. They exhausted all their tactics but still could not find me. They said in the end, "If we had known it would be like this, we would not have arrested her in the first place."

They deliberately launched a campaign to try and arrest me. They once went to my school to investigate me, but found that everyone--including the principal, teachers and students--was in agreement that I was a good person and had high praise for me. The authorities apparently knew that I was a good person, an excellent teacher, but they still tried everything they could think of to persecute me.

Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2010/11/14/232371.html