(Minghui.org) Two Daqing City, Heilongjiang Province residents were recently sentenced to prison for their faith in Falun Gong.
Ms. Cheng Qiaoyun was sentenced to eight years and Ms. Du Chunxiang was given four years.
The two practitioners were arrested on July 12, 2022, during a police sweep of at least 135 Falun Gong practitioners. Another 89 practitioners were harassed and 156 had their homes ransacked.
The operation came eight days before the 23rd anniversary since the Chinese Communist Party began persecuting the spiritual discipline on July 20, 1999. This mass arrest was an attempt to force the targeted practitioners to renounce their faith and prevent them from speaking out ahead of the anniversary.
According to a police officer, the authorities had begun following and video-recording the practitioners as early as nine months before the operation. The date of the arrest operation was not announced until a week prior. The officers did not give out their names, precincts, or their contact information while making the arrests, claiming that such information was a state secret.
Most of the arrests were made early in the morning, between 5 and 7 a.m., when the practitioners were home. Many personal belongings were confiscated, particularly Falun Gong books, photos of Falun Gong’s founder, laptop computers, cell phones, and fliers that the practitioners used to raise awareness about the persecution. These items would be used as prosecution evidence for the police to pursue prison sentences against them.
In addition to Ms. Cheng and Ms. Fu, two other practitioners targeted in the police sweep, Ms. Tang Zengye and Ms. Li Dongju, have also been sentenced to 2.5 and 5.5 years respectively.
Ms. Cheng’s Past Persecution
Ms. Cheng, around 63, was a property management professional. On July 22, 1999, two days after the persecution started, she went to the Heilongjiang provincial government to appeal for Falun Gong, only to be arrested and detained for several hours. Her workplace held her in a brainwashing session for 28 days in October 1999. Her scheduled pay raise by the end of the year was canceled.
Ms. Cheng was arrested again when she went to Beijing to appeal for Falun Gong on February 28, 2000. She was held in a metal cage and taken back to Daqing. She was released after one month at the Daqing City Detention Center.
Ms. Cheng went to the provincial government to appeal the second time in June 2000 and had 4,000 yuan extorted from her. Days later on June 18, her workplace and the police ordered her to write a statement to renounce Falun Gong. As she refused to comply, they held her in another brainwashing session for three months and she was forced to pay 1,975 yuan for food and “tuition.”
As the authorities also kept pressuring her husband, he couldn’t bear the persecution and divorced her.
Ms. Cheng went to Beijing to appeal one more time in December 2000. As she refused to reveal her name, the police transferred her to the Jianping County Detention Center in Liaoning Province, where she was held for nearly two months. She held a hunger strike to protest and was force-fed. Her family had to hand over 1,700 yuan before being allowed to take her home.
Ms. Cheng’s workplace withheld her salary between February and November 2000 and still attempted to extort 7,500 yuan from her. When she was scheduled to receive a lump sum buyout (payment to employees who agreed to take an early retirement) in December 2000, the workplace’s Party secretary Miao Hongcai demanded she first make a 20,000 yuan deposit.
The payment of her provident fund (an employer-sponsored fund that can be used to purchase houses by employees, with any balance left to be dispensed to employees upon termination of employment) in April 2001 was also withheld and she was ordered to pay 5,200 yuan instead as the cost for her workplace’s staff members to travel to Beijing to take her back after her other trip there to speak up.
Only a month later, Ms. Cheng and several practitioners went to the countryside to raise awareness about the persecution of Falun Gong. They were arrested and held at the Daqing City Detention Center for over 30 days. When she held a hunger strike to protest the persecution, the guards force-fed her, from once every three days, to once every day, and then twice a day. She was emaciated and on the verge of death after 26 days of torture. Fearing that she might die in the detention center, the guards ordered her family to pick her up.
The police attempted to arrest her again only a few days after she returned home. Although she was forced to live away from home, she was arrested in her rental place not long after. The police beat her during the interrogation. She was later sentenced to two years at the Heilongjiang Province Women’s Prison and frequently held in solitary confinement for not renouncing Falun Gong.
When her term ended on May 27, 2004, the authorities transferred her between the brainwashing center, lockup, and drug rehab center. She was held in solitary confinement. The guards once tied her up so tight that she lost feeling in her limbs as a result.
In another torture, the guard cuffed her to a chair, pulling her feet into the shackles fixed on the chair and also cuffed her arms behind her back. She felt that her body was being torn apart, and she kept shaking and felt suffocated due to the pain. When she was let down from the chair, she was unable to move.
The torture caused her to lose all her senses and she didn’t feel hungry even when she didn’t eat. She was then released on the verge of death.
Ms. Du’s Past Persecution
Ms. Du, around 65, used to work at Daqing Drilling Research Institute. She used to suffer breast cancer, which led to the mastectomy of her left breast. She also struggled with cystitis, urethritis and uterine erosion. Only one month after she took up Falun Gong in March 1997, she completely recovered and the scheduled surgery to remove her right breast was canceled.
Because of upholding her faith during the persecution, she was detained four times and twice sentenced to prison. She developed tuberculosis and high blood pressure, and became incapacitated due to the torture in prison.
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