(Minghui.org) For practicing Falun Gong, Ms. Chen Junjie has been arrested seven times and imprisoned for more than three years in Beijing Women's Prison. She was forced to undergo blood tests and medical exams that she feared were related to the Chinese regime's harvesting of organs from prisoners of conscience.
Ms. Chen's husband and her teenage son, who do not practice Falun Gong, were also arrested and detained in connection with her. The son was detained for more than a month, while the father was sent to two years of forced labor.
Ms. Chen has lived away from home since April 2015 to avoid further persecution.
In August 2015, Ms. Chen filed a criminal complaint against former Chinese president Jiang Zemin, who ordered the violent suppression of Falun Gong in July 1999.
Ms. Chen formerly relied on painkillers for arthritis affecting her spine and joints, as well as heart disease. After she started practicing Falun Gong in 1995, however, her health completely recovered, and she has not needed a single pill in the past 19 years.
Owing her newfound health to the practice, Ms. Chen actively spoke out for Falun Gong when the communist regime launched its persecution campaign in 1999. She petitioned at the national appeals office on July 21, 1999 and was arrested and detained for one day. The next day, she went back to the appeals office and was again arrested and detained for a day.
More than a year later, in September 2000, Ms. Chen was arrested for the third time when she protested the persecution of Falun Gong on Tiananmen Square. She was detained for one day, but local police visited her six months later and threatened to send her to a brainwashing center.
Ms. Chen left home and went from place to place, but was arrested in April 2002 and held in a detention center for 45 days. Police then took her to a brainwashing center, from which she escaped nine days later. At the time, she already been on a hunger strike for 50 days and had been subjected to force-feeding.
While Ms. Chen continued living away from home, police arrested her on September 27, 2003, tortured her using a “small stool,” and held her in solitary confinement to coerce her into renouncing her belief in Falun Gong.
Ms. Chen was then sentenced to three years in prison, most of which she served in Beijing Women's Prison.
On July 21, 2010, four years after her release, police broke into Ms. Chen's home and arrested her again. They held her for more than five months in detention centers before sending her to two and a half years of forced labor. However, no labor camp would admit Ms. Chen because she was in poor health at that time. She was thus released for treatment. Months later, on June 29, 2011, police re-arrested her at her home and detained her for another 55 days.
Police made an unsuccessful attempt to arrest Ms. Chen on April 21, 2015, but she was not at home. She has been forced to live away from home since then, to avoid further persecution.
In April 2005, after Ms Chen was sentenced to three years in prison, she was taken to a police station. There, all of the Falun Gong practitioners were forcibly taken for medical exams, including blood tests and electrocardiograms, before they were assigned to prison wards.
Ms. Chen underwent more detailed exams in Beijing Women's Prison. In addition to blood tests and electrocardiograms, she had chest x-rays and gynecological exams. She was never told the results of these tests.
The same exams were forcibly administered to every Falun Gong practitioner in the prison. None were given the results.
At the same time, the prison tortured practitioners and forced them to do manual labor. Ms Chen was made to knit sweaters, package disposable chopsticks, and assemble gift boxes.
In 2002, when Ms. Chen was living away from home to avoid harassment by police, her husband refused to disclose her whereabouts to the authorities. After her arrest in 2003, her husband and school-aged son were also arrested. Her son was detained for more than one month, and her husband was sentenced to two years of forced labor “re-education.”
Police officers forced Ms. Chen's husband and son to pressure her to give up Falun Gong. The father and son were assaulted by police and made to wear thin clothes in cold weather. Her husband could not stand the torture and attempted suicide by banging his head against a wall, causing head injury.
Ms. Chen's husband was fired from his job after he was released from the labor camp. He found another job to support himself and his son. However, the police harassed his new workplace before the Beijing Olympics in 2008, causing him to lose his job again.
When police arrested Ms. Chen at her home in July 2010, her husband and son were also arrested and detained for one day.
In 1999, Jiang Zemin, as head of the Chinese Communist Party, overrode other Politburo standing committee members and launched the violent suppression of Falun Gong.
The persecution has led to the deaths of many Falun Gong practitioners in the past 16 years. More have been tortured for their belief and even killed for their organs. Jiang Zemin is directly responsible for the inception and continuation of the brutal persecution.
Under his personal direction, the Chinese Communist Party established an extralegal security organ, the “610 Office,” on June 10, 1999. The organization overrides police forces and the judicial system in carrying out Jiang's directive regarding Falun Gong: to ruin their reputations, cut off their financial resources, and destroy them physically.
Chinese law allows for citizens to be plaintiffs in criminal cases, and many practitioners are now exercising that right to file criminal complaints against the former dictator.