(Minghui.org) A 59-year-old Chongqing resident was sent to the Yongchuan Prison in mid-January 2025 to serve a one-year-two-month term for practicing Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline that has been persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party since July 1999.
Mr. Yang Zuolin was arrested on April 30, 2024, after he was reported for distributing Falun Gong informational materials. His home was raided afterwards. He was sentenced by an unknown court in October 2024 and sent to prison in mid-January 2025. Other details of his case are unknown.
Mr. Yang began practicing Falun Gong in 1997 and was repeatedly targeted for upholding his faith after the persecution began two years later. Prior to his latest sentencing, he was detained for 15 days in July 2000 for going to Beijing to appeal for Falun Gong. After another arrest in March 2001, he was given two years of forced labor and suffered brutal torture at the Xishanping Forced Labor Camp.
From September 18 to December 9, 2001, Mr. Yang and 78 other detained Falun Gong practitioners held a group protest by refusing to wear the inmates’ uniform, answer roll calls, or squat when ordered. Labor camp director Long, education section chief Tian Xin, and team lead Tian Xiaohai established a strict management team to persecute the practitioners. They separated the practitioners into groups of four and each group was watched by 13 drug addicts.
The practitioners went on a group hunger strike in protest, and two or three drug addicts “worked on” each of them. The drug addicts forced each practitioner to bend at a 90-degree angle with a bowl of water placed on their head. The practitioner was kicked and punched if the water flowed out or the bowl fell off their head. One practitioner, Mr. Wang Zhengrong, was beaten so badly that he had to be hospitalized three times.
After he was released, Mr. Yang had to live away from home to avoid further persecution. The police tracked him down and arrested him at his rental place on December 7, 2004. The arrest was so violent that there was blood on the floor. After more than one and a half years of detention at the Jiangjin Detention Center, he was sentenced to eight years and admitted to the Yongchuan Prison.
Mr. Yang survived the brutal torture and forced labor in prison, but he faced endless harassment and threats from the police after he was released. Yang Peng, vice director of the local community office, summoned Mr. Yang in the summer of 2023 and ordered him to sign statements to renounce Falun Gong. He refused to comply despite Yang’s threats to not allow him to live in Chongqing or hold a job there.