About a week before the celebrations of the Lunar New Year, Lin Suzhen invited four friends to her home in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong. Little did the friends know that their peaceful gathering would turn into a harrowing ordeal.
They settled in on Jan. 21 to read Zhuan Falun, the text of Falun Gong’s moral teachings that expounds on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance.
Then, without warning, the door burst open and police stormed in, dragging all four to a police van. Except for one practitioner who was released after two weeks’ detention, Lin and two others have been held in Jieyang City Detention Center ever since.
Lin is the latest victim of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) nationwide campaign to eradicate Falun Gong.
The self-cultivation practice, consisting of both meditative exercises and moral teachings, has been subjected to brutal persecution since 1999.
The CCP, after promoting the practice for several years for its health benefits, changed course and announced a ban, likely perceiving the popularity of Falun Gong, which attracted an estimated 70 million to 100 million practitioners in China at the time, as a threat to its atheist ideology and totalitarian control of the country.
Minghui believes the actual number of Falun Gong practitioners subjected to arrest and harassment is much higher than those recorded, due to the CCP’s strict censorship of the internet and telecommunication networks in China.
Injections With Unknown Drugs
Many practitioners documented in Minghui’s reports have endured torture and abuse over the past 26 years. Among them was 73-year-old Song Huilan, who was most recently re-arrested on Jan. 16.More than a dozen police officers broke into Song’s residence in Jiamusi city, northern China, without showing any identification or a search warrant. According to Minghui, Song was reading a book in bed when several police officers grabbed her by the arms and shoulders and dragged her out. Her clothes, including her underwear, came off as the police dragged her around, exposing her chest and buttocks. The police dragged her down the stairs to the police car.
The police then drove Song to a local hospital for a physical examination. After the checkup, the doctors found that she had high blood pressure but the police refused to release her and instead injected her with an unknown drug. According to Minghui, the drug made Song feel pain in her heart and left her in a very weak state.
This is not the first time that unknown drugs have been forced on Song. According to information obtained by Minghui, Song has been repeatedly in and out of the CCP’s detention centers over the last two decades.
Song said the detention was for visiting another Falun Gong practitioner’s home in Jiamusi city. She was arrested and first kept in Huachuan Detention Center and then later sent to Tangyuan Detention Center.
On Feb. 23, 2011, police officers at Tangyuan Detention Center secured her to a bed, handcuffed her, and connected her to a drip with an unknown drug. Immediately, she felt a grueling pain and lost mobility below her knees. Her brain became slow to respond and her memory was intermittent. Soon, Song’s right foot began to blacken and swell, and the surface of her right foot and her toes were necrotic and black, and dripping with blood.
To avoid being blamed for Song’s condition, the police called her family and asked them to take her home in March 2011. In less than two months, her blackened and hardened right foot fell off, resulting in a lifelong disability.
Pushback
The CCP’s brutal campaign targeting Falun Gong has raised concerns in Washington and around the world.“Our administration believes we must stand for religious freedom—not just as a legal principle, as important as that is, but as a lived reality, both within our own borders and especially outside,” Vance said on Feb. 5.
Two U.S. lawmakers—Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.)—are co-introducing the Falun Gong Protection Act to impose sanctions on Beijing’s systematic forced organ harvesting that has been targeting the persecuted faith group Falun Gong.
