(Minghui.org) Since July 2020, the authorities in Jiansanjiang, Heilongjiang Province have been harassing Falun Gong practitioners on a large scale and used various means in attempts to force them to renounce their faith.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is an ancient spiritual and meditation discipline that has been persecuted by the Chinese communist regime since 1999.
The harassment was part of a nation-wide “Zero-out” campaign, which is a concerted effort to force every single practitioner on the government's blacklists to renounce Falun Gong.
It’s been reported that the police officers visited each practitioner on their list in groups of three or four. Some tore off the practitioners’ wall decorations containing information about Falun Gong. Some practitioners were brought to the police stations and ordered to sign statements to renounce their faith. When they refused to comply, the police continued to detain them.
Some practitioners were harassed through phone calls by residential committee staff members. Even those in their 90's weren’t spared from the harassment.
The police didn’t only threaten to target the practitioners themselves, but also threatened to block their children or grandchildren from attending colleges or finding jobs.
Two practitioners’ children work for a local residential committee. They were threatened that if their parents haven’t signed the statement to renounce Falun Gong by the end of August 2020, they would be fired. This caused tremendous distress to the practitioners’ families.
Some police and residential committee staff revealed to the practitioners that they know the practitioners are good people and they didn’t want to participate in the harassment, but were still forced to do so by their superiors.
