(Clearwisdom.net) Ms. Gu Xiaohua, a 58-year-old Falun Gong practitioner from Beijing, was recently sentenced to four years of imprisonment in the Beijing Women's Prison, following more than a year in detention.

Ms. Gu Xiaohua was an employee of the Beijing Snowflake Refrigerator Factory and lived in Beijing's Anhuili Region. She started practicing Falun Gong in 1995, quickly gaining good health, an open and clear mind and overall well being.

On July 20, 1999, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) began to persecute Falun Gong. Because Ms. Gu started practicing Falun Gong very early on and often taught others, the police regarded her as a key Falun Gong practitioner and continuously harassed her. Ms. Gu treated these policemen with a warm and friendly heart. She talked to them about daily life, history and the current political situations, which made them good friends.

Unfortunately, Ms. Gu was still detained many times. She went to Tiananmen Square to appeal for justice for Falun Gong. This led to her arrest and incarceration in the Chaoyang District Detention Center. She thought that Dafa practitioners' legal appeals were not wrong, so she firmly requested to be released. The guards in the detention center stripped her of all her warm clothing, leaving only her underclothes, and tied her with tape to a cross made from a snow-covered door plank. They then deliberately placed her in a windy spot where it was freezing cold. In addition, they immobilized her mouth with tape in order to prevent her from crying for help.

One of the guards was filled with elation and said, "I like to see the female Falun Gong practitioners being tied to the cross, especially menses flowing down the door plank. I force-fed Mei Yulan to death! Another dead practitioner is no big deal."

The young guard was later diagnosed with cancer and died suddenly.

The guard ordered specific inmates to watch over Ms. Gu and then went into another room to warm himself. Ms. Gu was freezing and numb from the cold.

Soon after her return home, during the first six months of 2005, the policemen in Beijing started to implement a wide range of brainwashing sessions. All the Falun Gong practitioners whose names were on a police list were forcibly put into a brainwashing class. While in one of these classes, the criminals there prevented Ms. Gu from sleeping. They called this torture, "stewing the eagle." At the same time, collaborators verbally barraged her continuously in attempts to brainwash her. Ms. Gu came to have a clear mind about the meaning of "reform" after she saw the reformed collaborators’ fierce and insane behavior.

Because she determinedly persisted in her belief, the brainwashing class supervisor made her group leaders work on persuading her to give up. The leaders told her that her employers would lose the honor of "Outstanding Enterprise" due to her Falun Gong practice. Ms. Gu was deeply touched by their words and then wrote the guarantee statement against her better judgment, thinking these leaders were her old friends and she didn’t want to hurt them. After returning home, Ms. Gu clearly realized that the people who ordered the persecution and launched the persecution were guilty; not those who practice "Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance" and benefit from cultivation. She thus published a solemn statement on the Clearwisdom website to declare her guarantee statement null and void.

Due to this solemn statement, the policemen again started to harass her. As a result, she opted to go into exile. Around the 2002 Chinese New Year, the police detected her cell phone signal and illegally arrested her on the outskirts of Beijing.

Ms. Gu was sentenced to one and a half years in a forced labor camp. In March 2002 she was incarcerated in the No.2 Team of the No.4 Division in the Beijing Women's Forced Labor Camp. She went on a hunger strike to protest. In order to persecute her, the deputy head of the No. 4 Division, Xu Yanling, incited a criminal to make Ms. Gu squat as punishment and slap her in the face.

Even though life at the forced labor camp was very hard, Ms. Gu still kept optimistic. Sometimes she sang an opera tune for everybody around her.

When the SARS epidemic broke out in 2003 in Beijing, the forced labor camp did not dare to keep so many people detained there; therefore, a group of Falun Gong practitioners were released ahead of their terms. The local police took Ms. Gu home from the labor camp in April. All the released Falun practitioners were transferred from the forced labor camp to the local police stations. The local policemen asked Ms. Gu if she had made progress in her development in the labor camp. She replied that a compassionate human being is full of love. The policeman said with a smile that Ms. Gu was still the same.

As soon as she returned home, Ms. Gu received a hospital notice indicating that her 80-year-old mother was close to death. She went to Shanghai to visit her mother and told her what she had suffered over the years, having never told her mother anything about it before. Her mother was very angry with the CCP’s evildoings and berated them loudly, which resulted in the old woman’s recovery! She then left the hospital very quickly.

After her mother became healthy, Ms. Gu Xiaohua again returned to Beijing. Unfortunately, she was suddenly arrested in 2005. She was originally detained in the 7th division of the Beijing Police Department, where the most steadfast Falun Gong practitioners were held for over two months. The policemen ransacked her home and seized her computer. Due to a lack of evidence they had to return the computer. Later, they transferred her to the detention center of the Chaoyang District Police Department, and detained her there for nearly one year. The responsible deputies claimed that they had transferred the case to the court and were awaiting sentencing; however, she was prevented from meeting with her attorney, and also could not get any information from the court.

The policemen said that someone quoted something she was supposed to have said, but Ms. Gu Xiaohua never acknowledged such unsubstantiated "evidence." Regardless of these facts, Ms. Gu was sentenced to four years in prison and detained in the Beijing Women's Prison. Furthermore, the court rejected her appeal and upheld Ms. Gu’s original verdict.

At present we cannot get any more specific details about Ms. Gu’s arrest and sentencing.