(Minghui.org) It was recently learned that a 54-year-old woman in Changchun City, Jilin Province, had been sentenced to four and a half years for her faith in Falun Gong, a mind-body practice that has been persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party since July 1999.

Ms. Liu Liying was arrested on July 19, 2023, and sentenced by the Kuancheng District Court at an unknown date. Details of her indictment, trial, and sentencing remain to be investigated. It is also unclear where she is being held.

This is not the first time that Ms. Liu has been targeted for practicing Falun Gong, which she credits for restoring her health. Before she took up Falun Gong in May 1996, she often fell ill and her migraine headaches were especially debilitating. Every time she had a flare-up of migraine, she would feel so dizzy that she could not walk, eat, or drink, on top of vomiting all the time. Her suffering ended with her practice of Falun Gong, but she became a target after the persecution began in 1999. The local police and street committee harassed her both at home and at work. To not implicate her employer, she quit her job and struggled to make ends meet.

Ms. Liu went to Beijing to appeal for Falun Gong in mid-June 2000 and was arrested. Her local police took her back to Changchun and detained her for 15 days and fined her 2,000 yuan.

The Gongnong Police Station officers seized Ms. Liu on September 28, 2001, and held her at a brainwashing center for an unknown amount of time.

The Changchun police carried out a group arrest of local Falun Gong practitioners one night in early March 2002. More than ten officers scaled Ms. Liu’s fence and jumped into her courtyard. They pounded on the door and she let them in. They searched everywhere and Ms. Liu’s mother, who lived with her, was so terrified that she had an episode of her heart condition.

The police did not arrest Ms. Liu that night for some unknown reason, but she decided to live away from home to avoid being harassed again.

Ms. Liu was arrested again at around 7 p.m. on November 26, 2002, by five officers from the Jiutai District Domestic Security Office. They took her to the Jiutai District Detention Center, where they interrogated her with torture. They forced her to sit on a long bench with her legs resting on it, her back straight, and her arms tied behind her back. They next blindfolded her and covered her head with a plastic bag. They then pressed her head down hard and tightened the plastic bag. She almost suffocated. In the meantime, the police pulled her arms as far as possible causing excruciating pain. They ordered her to tell them the names of fellow Falun Gong practitioners. She refused to comply and they slapped her in the face and punched her on the head, all the while verbally abusing her.

The Jiutai District Court sentenced Ms. Liu to nine years on January 9, 2004, and she was soon transferred to the Heizuizi Women’s Prison. The guards there forced her to watch anti-Falun Gong videos and subjected her to various forms of torture, including sitting on a small bench for long periods, electric shocks, solitary confinement, the death bed (her four limbs would be tied to bed posts in a spread-eagle position suspended in the air as the guards pressed down on her), sleep deprivation, and no restroom use. She lived in fear every day.