(Minghui.org) The pension of a retired middle school teacher in Chengdu City, Sichuan Province, has been suspended since December 2019 because she has refused to give up her faith in Falun Gong.
Since the Chinese communist regime ordered the persecution of Falun Gong, an ancient mind-body discipline in 1999, Ms. Zhan Min has been arrested and detained several times for upholding her faith. She served more than two years in a forced labor camp and eight months in a brainwashing center. She almost died several times as a result of being tortured in custody.
Her school fired her in 2000 because of her faith and she didn’t find another job for five years, a significant financial loss.
In March 2012, Ms. Zhan was arrested for distributing informational materials about Falun Gong and sentenced to three years in Jianyang Women’s Prison by the Gaoxin District Court.
She retired from the Xinjin District Education Research and Training Center in March 2018 and started to receive her pension, to which she had contributed all her working life. In late 2019, the Human Resources and Social Security Bureau in Chengdu informed Ms. Zhan that, according to a new policy, Falun Gong practitioners wouldn’t be entitled to any salary or pension while serving time for their faith. As a result, they demanded that Ms. Zhan return the salary she had been paid while she was incarcerated from March 2012 and March 2015.
The Human Resources and Social Security Bureau also contacted the Xinjin District Education Research and Training Center to ascertain exactly how much they had paid her during those three years.
The Xinjin District Procuratorate also provided a document, confirming Ms. Zhan’s prison term and ordering her to repay her salary.
When Ms. Zhan refused to return the salary she had been paid during her wrongful imprisonment, the Human Resources and Social Security Bureau, a centralized agency that acts on behalf of employers to dispense retirement benefits, withheld Ms. Zhan’s pension to repay her salary.
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Torture of Falun Gong Practitioners in Xinjin Brainwashing Center
