(Minghui.org) For practicing Falun Gong, a 70-year-old man in Jiamusi City, Heilongjiang Province, was detained three times over the past 25 years as part of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) campaign of persecution. He served a three-year labor camp term between 2002 and 2005 and a 14-month prison term between 2017 and 2018. In addition, Mr. Guo Yuzhu, who retired from the municipal agricultural machinery department in 2016, also had his pension revoked in 2023.
Mr. Guo Yuzhu in his younger years
In this article, Mr. Guo recounted the persecution he has suffered in recent years.
Brief Recap of Earliest Persecution
I took up Falun Gong in 1997. In less than six months, my heart problem, numbness in my fingers, and other conditions disappeared. Once a bad-tempered man, I learned to be considerate and understanding. My relationship with my family and coworkers also improved significantly.
On October 16, 1999, three months after the persecution of Falun Gong began, I went to Beijing to appeal for the right to practice my faith. I was arrested and detained for two months. My wife was forced to pay the police 3,000 yuan.
I went to Beijing to appeal again in 2001 and was arrested a second time. I held a hunger strike at the Jiamusi City Detention Center and was force fed. I was detained for another two months and had 3,000 yuan extorted from me.
I was arrested at work in April 2002 and given three years of forced labor. I held a hunger strike at the Jiamusi Forced Labor Camp. The guards force fed me with saline water mixed with small portions of milk powder. I was also forced to sit on a small stool without moving for long hours every day.
I suffered a heart condition and was taken to the hospital for emergency care. The guards constantly ordered me to renounce Falun Gong. Because I remained firm in my faith, they restrained me in a metal chair for days. My buttocks festered, and my legs became so swollen that I couldn’t even stand up. I also had bloodshot eyes and was delirious due to lack of sleep.
After I was released, my employer almost fired me, but relented when I protested.
Arrested for Suing Jiang Zemin
In May 2015, the Supreme People’s Court announced that they would accept all the cases submitted to it. After that, Falun Gong practitioners across the country filed complaints against Jiang Zemin, suing him for ordering the persecution in 1999 as the then head of the communist regime.
On October 27, 2015, I helped print the persecution accounts of 14 practitioners who were once detained in the Qinglongshan Brainwashing Center. After the police found out, they planned to arrest everyone involved.
I was arrested on the evening of January 21, 2016, while visiting another practitioner, Ms. Chen Jing. I later learned that the police had been monitoring her for over a month before the arrest.
Officers Wu Bin and Li Qiang dragged me by my clothes into Ms. Chen’s home. They pushed my face into the sofa until I almost suffocated. Then they removed my shoes and tied my hands behind my back with my belt. I protested that neither Ms. Chen nor I did anything illegal. Officer Wu went up to the bookcase and threw Ms. Chen’s Falun Gong books on the floor, shouting “This didn’t violate the law?”
Wu later called Zhang Weiming, the Jiao District Domestic Security Division director, who took me to the Changhong Police Station and interrogated me while restraining me in a metal chair.
When I refused to renounce Falun Gong, Li Zhongyi, the director of the Jiamusi City Domestic Security Division, tried to persuade me by pretending to be nice to me. He said things like, if I didn’t renounce my faith, I would lose my job and that my family would be implicated. I told him that I didn’t violate any law by practicing Falun Gong and urged them not to participate in the persecution. He refused to listen.
The Changhong Police Station chief shouted at me and commented that I’d lost my mind by practicing Falun Gong and that, as a government employee, I should be fired.
After interrogating me for several hours, the officers left around midnight. One person remained behind to watch me. I was handcuffed to the metal chair overnight and not allowed to drink water or use the restroom.
Officer Wu returned the next morning and took me to another room. He lifted my handcuffs in front of many others to humiliate me. The cuffs cut into my flesh and really hurt. I was taken to the Jiamusi City Lockup in the afternoon after a physical exam.
When I didn’t return home that night, my family was very worried and went to the Changhong Police Station to look for me. The police lied to them and said that they didn’t know where I was, when I was right there, restrained in the metal chair.
When my family returned home, they couldn’t get in. It turned out that the police had entered with the key they’d confiscated from me and locked the door from the inside while they raided the place. My computer, hard drive, cell phone, and portrait of Falun Gong’s founder were confiscated. When they heard my family at the door, they opened up and surrounded my wife and my nephew and his wife.
My wife was terrified and her face turned pale. The police accused me of causing trouble for my family and even suggested that my wife divorce me. My nephew and his wife were very frightened. His wife later came to her senses and accused the police of trespassing. Only then did the police soften their attitude a bit.
Both my nephew and his wife were taken to the Changhong Police Station and searched. The police also checked their cell phones for Falun Gong content. Although they were released after the police confirmed that they didn’t practice Falun Gong, they were followed on the way home.
Police Force My Family to “Work on” Me
While I was held at the lockup, Yang Bo, the director of the Heilongjiang Province Domestic Security Division, interrogated me. He slandered Falun Gong and told me that a practitioner who wouldn’t renounce Falun Gong would be beaten to death in prison.
The interrogations continued after I was transferred to the Jiamusi City Detention Center two weeks later. Because I held firm to my faith, the police pressured my daughter to “work on” me. She had to travel over 800 miles from Dalian to Jiamusi. Her son was only eight months old, so her entire family traveled with her and she even brought the baby to the detention center. The baby got sick that evening and the entire family panicked.
Deceived by the Police
Seeing they couldn’t make me submit to them after my daughter’s visit, Yang Bo and Li Zhongyi of the Domestic Security Division changed their tactics. They claimed that Ms. Chen, outside whose home I was arrested, and Ms. Sun Yanhuan, whom I knew, had confessed about my Falun Gong activities. I believed the police and told them how we helped other practitioners prepare their criminal complaints against Jiang. Office Yu Haiyang of the Jiao District Domestic Security Division recorded what I said.
Yang and Li showed me a video clip of me driving and had me identity the other practitioners in the car. I confirmed one practitioner that the police already knew about. Not wanting to implicate any other practitioners who might have not been on the police radar yet, I mentioned Ms. Zhang Liyan of Shuangyashan City, because I remembered reading about her being admitted to prison. The fact was that she and I had never been in the same car together. I could only hope that my false testimony didn’t cause her any additional suffering.
Yang and Li also pressured me to dismiss the lawyer my family had hired for me. They promised to release me on bail and hold my job for me if I complied. They said the lawyer wouldn’t be of any help anyway and might even convince the judge to give me a heavier sentence, not to mention the legal fees my family would have to pay him.
Yang added that he’d already met with the secretary of the Political and Legal Affairs Committee, the police, the prosecutor, and the judge to discuss my case, so he was the one who would decide the outcome. If I signed a statement to renounce Falun Gong, I might just be able to leave the detention center a free man. I believed them and dismissed the lawyer. I was taken to the Jiao District Police Department and signed the statement to renounce my faith. My wife paid the police a 10,000-yuan bail bond and I was released.
I realized that I’d made a grave mistake after I returned home. So when Yang and Li attempted to have me persuade Ms. Chen to confess or to sign a fabricated witness account against her, I firmly refused. I also condemned them for hanging her up by her wrists and torturing her. Yang and Li initially denied being aware of the torture, despite their presence at Ms. Chen’s torture session. When I asked them about it later, they again completely denied that Ms. Chen was ever tortured. The police fabricated other witness accounts against her. I also heard that half of the 8,000 yuan cash she had at home was missing after the police raid.
Ms. Chen was later sentenced to five years at the Heilongjiang Province Women’s Prison, the exact same length of time the police threatened her with when she was arrested.
Arrested Again
Because the police still harassed me over the phone from time to time, my wife and I moved out of town and went to live with our child. Zhang Weiming, the director of the Jiao District Domestic Security Division, tried to get me to return home, claiming I needed to sign paperwork to close my case. I was determined not to follow their orders ever again, so I continued to live away from home.
Worried about me, my wife gave Li Zhongyi, the director of Jiamusi City Domestic Security Division, 2,000 yuan, hoping that he would stop persecuting me. Although Li promised at the time that they wouldn’t put me on the online wanted list, he still did not long after. When my wife asked him about it, Li said, “You shouldn’t get hung up on this.”
In June 2017, I accidentally broke a downstairs neighbor’s window at my relative’s home and was reported to the police. They quickly found out that I was on the wanted list and arrested me.
In the Jiamusi City Detention Center, I shared a room with over 20 inmates. The ragged comforters smelled bad and the food was terrible, often mixed with sand and dirt. I had to spend a lot of money to buy better food. I was tortured and had my blood drawn against my will. A guard, Wang Gang, once said that anyone who practiced Falun Gong was mentally ill and should be “straightened out.”
Tried and Sentenced
My case was tried in the detention center, and I was charged with “undermining law enforcement with a cult organization,” the standard pretext used to criminalize Falun Gong practitioners in China. I argued that it was Jiang Zemin who violated the law by persecuting good people and destroying China’s morality, as well as giving away land to Russia and ruling the country by corruption.
I was later sentenced to 14 months and fined 2,000 yuan. The 10,000 yuan bail bond my wife paid the police was never returned.
After over a year in poor conditions and not being allowed to do the Falun Gong exercises, my health declined significantly. By the time I was released from the detention center on May 11, 2018, I even had trouble going up and down the stairs.
Because of the persecution, my wife has lived in fear all these years. Her heart beats rapidly whenever the phone rings or someone knocks on the door. She also has panic attacks if I am late returning home.
Pension Revoked
On June 1, 2023, five years after my release, the Jiao District Supervisory Committee announced that my pension would be revoked. They cited the “Interim Provisions on Punishment of Staff of Public Institutions,” which was issued by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and Ministry of Supervision on September 1, 2012. The document said that retirees serving time in prison shouldn’t be entitled to retirement benefits. But that document had expired by the time they revoked my pension, and there is no such stipulation in Chinese labor law.
There is no law in China that says practicing Falun Gong is a crime, so I shouldn’t have been sentenced for my faith in the first place. I demand that the authorities stop persecuting Falun Gong and my pension be reinstated.
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