(Minghui.org) A woman in Guiyang City, Guizhou Province, is still awaiting a verdict, six months after her hearing by the Nanming District Court on September 19, 2020, for practicing Falun Gong.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual discipline that has been persecuted by the Chinese communist regime since 1999.
Ms. Zhao Yue, a retired lecturer from Guizhou University, was arrested at home on March 12, 2020, when several officers from the Beijinglu Police Station deceived her into opening the door. The officers ransacked her home and confiscated her Falun Gong books and a computer.
In the same month, many practitioners in Guiyang City were arrested, detained, and had their homes ransacked for going to Qianlingshan Park to talk to people and distributing materials about Falun Gong.
Ms. Zhao was taken to the Sanjiang Women’s Detention Center and released on bail a month later. The police said they would continue to investigate her and gather criminal evidence. She was not allowed to leave home.
The police went to her home on May 10, 2020 with an arrest warrant issued by the Procuratorate. She was taken to the Sanjiang Women’s Detention Center again and has been held there since.
Previous Arrests and Detention
This was not the first time Ms. Zhao has been persecuted for refusing to renounce her faith in Falun Gong.
In her criminal complaint against Jiang Zemin filed in 2015, Ms. Zhao wrote that she was persecuted twice for going to Beijing to appeal, arrested six times, had her home ransacked twice, detained at the brainwashing center twice for a total of 118 days. She was also given two labor camp terms for two and three years.
The police imposed residential surveillance on Ms. Zhao after she refused to be transformed while detained at the brainwashing center and forced labor camp. When she was being monitored at home, the authorities often came to harass her and monitored all her mail, phone calls, and QQ (a social media app). She couldn’t communicate normally and her family was also implicated.
After Ms. Zhao was released from the forced labor camp in April 2007, she wasn’t allowed to go back to work and was forced to retire early in March 2009. Between the 96 months spanning from March 2001 to March 2009, there were 53 months when she didn't receive any salary, let alone annual salary increases. During the 23 months between April 2007 and March 2009, before her retirement was finally finalized, she received no furlough subsidies usually given out by the school.
Ms. Zhao said, “My husband was implicated when our home was ransacked the first time. The police went to my husband’s workplace and he was criticized. Afterwards for more than ten years, he was never considered when there was a promotion.
“The first time I was released from the forced labor camp in March 2003, he told me that the most painful thing he had to do during those two years was to visit me at the labor camp, as he had to suffer humiliation and also get approval for his visits. He said he would feel worried if he didn’t visit me, but when he spent time coming to visit me, our young child was left without care.
“The second time I was released from the forced labor camp in April 2007, my child told me that my husband often lay on the couch in a daze without speaking a word. My child once asked him if he had eaten (my child had just returned home from school military training), he extended two fingers after a long time. My child later realized that his dad had eaten only two sweets the whole day.”
Trying to Be a Good Person
Ms. Zhao started practicing Falun Gong in 1995. Shortly after she took up the practice, her chronic stomach pain and other illnesses disappeared. She has not gotten sick once since then. Her temperament has improved a lot as well.
Ms. Zhao was dedicated to her work. She always let her colleagues pick the classes they wanted to teach first, and she then covered those that remained.
In China, many companies and institutions build houses and then sell them to their employees at a deep discount as a benefit to be in their employ. However, the supply of apartments is often limited, so apartments are allocated to people based on their service records. Ms. Zhao had bought such an apartment from her university.
Later her husband’s employer also gave him an apartment. She saw that many young lecturers in her university didn't have apartments, so she returned her apartment to the university. Many people said that she was stupid, since she lost the equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars from the school’s subsidy on the house sale. But she had no regrets, as she felt that thinking of others first was the right thing to do.
When the Yangtze River flooded in 1998, Ms. Zhao donated several thousand yuan to those who were affected, even though she wasn’t doing well financially herself.
One of her students was once in the hospital for surgery, and the student’s family could not pay the medical bills. To help the family, she cashed in her fixed-term deposit (which lost interest because it was not due yet) and gave it to the student.
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Category: Accounts of Persecution
