(Minghui.org) After Ms. Lu Xiuli was diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer and had a mastectomy, she remained very weak and her face was pale. Years later, however, Ms. Lu’s doctor was amazed at how fit she was and how her complexion glowed when most of the other breast cancer patients she knew had all passed away.
The secret to Ms. Lu’s magical recovery wasn’t any form of medical treatment—it was from practicing Falun Gong, an ancient spiritual discipline that includes five exercises that can boost energy circulation and thus improve health.
Similar to Ms. Lu, many people who had cancer or other terminal diseases credit Falun Gong for giving them a new life. Within short seven years of its public introduction in 1992, nearly 100 million Chinese (one-fourteenth of the country’s entire population) had taken up Falun Gong, according to a government survey in 1999.
Falun Gong’s tremendous popularity and total independence from the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian rule seriously worried the regime. In July 1999, an unprecedented campaign of persecution against Falun Gong was launched. Overnight, the 100 million Chinese who strove to become better by following Falun Gong's principles of Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance became the communist state’s top enemies.
Victims of the persecution directives to “ruin their reputations, bankrupt them financially, and destroy them physically,” countless practitioners have been arrested, detained, imprisoned, and tortured. Many were killed for their organs while they were still alive. Hundreds of thousands of families were destroyed.
For upholding her faith, Ms. Lu was involuntarily held in mental hospitals 20 times, and each time she was tortured and injected with unknown drugs. Although she remained clear-headed after most of the detentions, her last detention in a senior facility turned out to be deadly. After a few months inside, she became mentally incoherent and incapacitated.
After struggling with mental disorder and other medical conditions, Ms. Lu passed away at the age of 72 in February 2021 during the Chinese New Year holiday, three months after the death of her husband from illness.
When the persecution began and propaganda slandering Falun Gong flooded the media, Ms. Lu felt compelled to tell her story.
She often went out and talked to people she met on the street about Falun Gong and how the communist regime has been persecuting it. To overcome the strict information censorship in China, she learned how to print messages on banknotes and used them to buy groceries or take taxis.
Due to her tireless efforts, many people understood the facts about Falun Gong. A street vendor selling books helped her distribute copies of the Nine Commentaries on the Communist Regime, which sheds light on the nefarious history of the regime. Others helped her circulate banknotes that had information about Falun Gong printed on them.
Some people were blessed after understanding the facts about Falun Gong. A man who struggled to quit smoking quickly overcame the habit and another terminally ill patient woke up from a coma. When the agents from the Shanghai 610 Office, an extralegal agency created specifically to persecute Falun Gong, discovered that some of the people Ms. Lu talked to had taken up Falun Gong, they were furious.
According to sources, whenever a new Falun Gong practitioner was arrested, the police often asked them if they knew Ms. Lu and if it was her who introduced Falun Gong to them.
Because Ms. Lu actively spread information about Falun Gong, she was arrested ten times and held in mental hospitals about 20 times between 2002 and 2018. She would be held anywhere from four months to over a year, although usually less than a year. Every time, she was force-fed unknown drugs.
Due to her arrest in 2002 after being reported for distributing Falun Gong pamphlets in the subway, she wasn’t able to attend her daughter’s wedding. Years later, on the day her daughter’s son was born, Ms. Lu was arrested again.
The director of a mental hospital once said to her that it was the police who were sick and forced them to detain Falun Gong practitioners. He said that as long as Ms. Lu didn’t “promote” Falun Gong, they wouldn’t treat her as a patient, but would keep her in a separate room on the top floor of the building.
When Ms. Lu was later discovered talking to patients’ families about Falun Gong, the doctor injected her with toxic drugs that made her face swell until she couldn’t open her eyes. One patient’s family was sympathetic to Ms. Lu and let her use her cellphone to call her family and tell them how she was being treated.
Every time the police took Ms. Lu to the mental hospital, they forced her husband, Mr. Xu Zhongzhong, to sign her hospital admission form. The police threatened Mr. Xu that if he refused to sign it, they would take Ms. Lu to prison and have her pension suspended. Fearing financial ruin, Xu was forced to cooperate with the police to have his wife admitted to the mental hospitals.
The persecution put Ms. Lu’s family under tremendous mental stress. Her husband once said to her, “I’m really scared. I’m afraid of having our home ransacked or losing our family.”
In late 2018, shortly after Ms. Lu was discharged from a mental hospital, she was arrested again and then taken to Songjiang Blue Harbor Senior Center on the outskirts of Shanghai.
According to local Falun Gong practitioners who visited Ms. Lu at the mental hospital, despite the persecution she suffered before, she remained clear-headed and could communicate clearly with them. But when they visited her at the senior center shortly after she was admitted, she was delirious and confused. The only thing she could express clearly was that she hoped to get out of there.
It was also reported that the police warned some local practitioners that they [the practitioners] wouldn't be able to find Ms. Lu anymore until she died.
When Ms. Lu was released from the senior center a few months later in the spring of 2019, she was completely confused. She was unable to cook or do laundry, nor did she remember what had happened at the senior center.
Those who had visited Ms. Lu at the senior center said it was a private facility, with conditions far worse than the other mental hospitals. Ms. Lu had been held in a big room with nearly 100 patients with mental disorders. Although the room was connected to a backyard so the patients could walk outside, the whole area was fenced in with wire mesh.
Two or three nurses were in charge of caring for the nearly 100 patients around the clock. Each patient had a very small bed. Because the nurses were unable to care for so many at one time, the patients often stole cash, fruit, or yogurt from each other. So each patient was also given a small cabinet with a lock to store their personal belongings.
The nurses told the practitioners who visited Ms. Lu that all of the patients there had been deserted by their families, who didn’t expect them to leave the facility alive.
Because no patients’ families ever visited, Ms. Lu was unable to borrow their cellphones to call her family. Whenever another practitioner went to visit her, that practitioner would then be contacted by the police, suggesting the police were still closely monitoring Ms. Lu.
When Ms. Lu’s husband was hospitalized in critical condition in November 2020, she was taken back to the senior center. She passed away in February 2021, three months after her husband’s death.