A retired Chinese teacher who endured more than eight years of brutality in detention for her faith in Falun Gong has been sentenced to three years behind bars for practicing the meditative discipline.
Despite being released on bail the following day due to a diagnosis of severe anemia, Wei faced relentless harassment in the months that followed.
She was subjected to physical examinations at least three times. Local detention facilities rejected her on each occasion because of her frail health. That changed on June 24, when police invaded her home, dragging the 61-year-old woman into the Xuchang City Detention Center.
Details of her time there remain shrouded in mystery, but when her lawyer finally managed to visit her on Nov. 11, Wei was in a wheelchair and hospitalized, according to Minghui.
It’s not the first time Wei has been incarcerated for her faith. She had already been jailed twice in the past 25 years. In total, she has spent more than eight years behind bars because she refuses to renounce her belief in Falun Gong.
Falun Gong is a traditional spiritual practice that combines meditation with moral teachings centered on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. The discipline gained popularity in China in the 1990s, and official estimates indicate that at least 70 million were practicing it by the end of the decade.
From a Healthy Woman to Wheelchair-Bound
Once a teacher at the No. 2 Petroleum Base School in Hami City, Xinjiang region, Wei had her life upended in 2005 when police took her from her office. In 2006, in a closed-door trial, she was sentenced to five years in Xinjiang Women’s Prison, a term that was later extended by 20 months in 2010.In the complaint, Wei briefly recounted what she had experienced in Chinese detention facilities. She wrote that she was punched, slapped, kicked, thrown to the ground, shocked with electric batons, and dragged down staircases by her hands.
“Every part of my body that touched the stairs was injured,” she wrote in the legal complaint.
She also endured cuffing torture methods, freezing temperatures, scalding heat, hunger, pinching, and exposure to the sun. Prison authorities punished her by taping her mouth shut, denying her sleep, and denying her the use of a toilet.
She was also placed in solitary confinement several times by authorities, and on one occasion, she was locked up in a small cell for a year.
Escalated Persecution
In 2023, CCP courts sentenced 755 people to prison or other forms of detention for practicing Falun Gong, nearly seven times more people than the previous year, according to data collected by Minghui. Many of the convicted received lengthy sentences.The suppression of Falun Gong in China has drawn condemnation from the United States.