Chinese police harassed or arrested nearly 2,000 Falun Gong followers in the recent two months, according to Minghui.org, a U.S.-based website that documents the Chinese communist regime’s persecution of Falun Gong.
Among the 1,963 individuals, 764 were arrested, and 1,199 were harassed. Some of them suffered house raids, brainwashing, financial extortion, and forced blood tests.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is an ancient Chinese spiritual practice that features three core tenets of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance, along with five slow-moving exercises. After it was made public in 1992, its following in China surged to between 70 million and 100 million people by 1999. Then, the Chinese regime, deeming the practice’s popularity a threat, launched a nationwide persecution campaign to eradicate it.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continues to intimidate, harm, and imprison Falun Gong believers for their continued faith.
On Oct. 10, police in Shanghai arrested Falun Gong practitioner Xu Yongqing, an expert in electrical engineering, at the railway station of Longquan city, eastern China’s Zhejiang Province. Officers justified the arrest because Xu had one Falun Gong book in his bag, according to Minghui. The following day, he was transferred to a local detention center.
Before his arrest, Xu was forced to move three times in the past year due to Chinese authorities’ continued surveillance and harassment.
In 2017, the senior engineer was sentenced to two years in jail for his faith and served the term in Hongzehu Prison in neighboring Jiangsu Province until Nov. 28, 2019.
Another case of persecution was Zhou Ailin, a resident of Wuhan city, Hubei Province. Police detained her on Sept. 29 for her adherence to Falun Gong, her ninth arrest since the CCP began its oppression of the belief in July 1999. Six police officers from the Qiaokou District branch of the city’s public security bureau transferred her to an indoctrination center in Etouwan village.
Notably, there were 196 elderly adherents, aged 65 and older, out of the total at the indoctrination center.
In Changsha city, Hunan Province, several plainclothes police raided the house of Zhou Weiqun, 85, on Sept. 24. The police showed no permits, yet made a thorough search and confiscated more than 40 of Zhou’s Falun Gong books. They took him to Juzizhou Police Station and forcibly gathered his personal information, including fingerprints and blood sample. However, their attempt to transfer him to a local detention center failed because the center authorities deemed his age a risk, and denied the police request.
Moreover, at least one Falun Gong practitioner in detention was persecuted to death in the past two months, according to Minghui. Su Yunxia, 67, from Daowai District in northeastern China’s Heilongjiang Province, died in a provincial women’s prison on Sept. 4, 2021, two days away from the end of her 5-year term.
