Name: Ni Yingqin (倪英琴)
Gender: Female
Age: 61
Address: Kaiping District, Tangshan City, Hebei Province
Occupation: Small business owner
Date of Death: December 8, 2009
Date of Most Recent Arrest: August 22, 2000
Most Recent Place of Detention: Kaiping District Forced Labor Camp/Ankang Mental Hospital (开平劳教所/安康医院)
City: Tangshan
Province: Hebei
Persecution Suffered: Electric shock, sleep deprivation, forced labor, brainwashing, illegal sentencing, forced injections/drug administration, beatings, imprisonment, solitary confinement, torture, forced-feedings, extortion, physical restraint, confinement in mental hospital, home ransacked, interrogation, detention
Key Persecutors: Detention Center Director Zhang Xin (看守所所长张新); Kaiping Community Administration CCP Secretary Zhao Wen (开平街道办事处书记赵文); Kaiping District Police Department Director Li Guojun (in change persecution, 开平公安分局主管迫害法轮功副局长李国君); Political Security Office Chair Chen Yongwen (政保科科长陈永文); Kaiping District 610 Office Chair Yang Jinshan (开平六一零主任杨金山)
(Clearwisdom.net) (By a correspondent from Hebei Province) On December 8, 2009, Falun Dafa practitioner Ms. Ni Yingqin passed away after a long period of harassment and torture. She had been taken to Ankang Hospital (a mental hospital, used as a facility to persecute Falun Gong practitioners) and subjected to severe persecution because of her steadfast faith in Falun Dafa. She was injected with toxic drugs, tortured with electric batons, brutally beaten and fed by force. In the end, Ms. Ni was tortured so severely that she suffered a stroke after she was released. She could no longer take care of herself and passed away after three years of illness.
Ms. Ni owned a small clothing business, and had previously owned a factory. Before she began to practice Falun Gong in 1998, she suffered from high blood pressure, dizziness and fatigue. Practicing Falun Gong solved all her health problems. Ms. Ni was highly regarded among her relatives and colleagues.
After the persecution of Falun Gong started on July 20, 1999, Ms. Ni went to Beijing many times to appeal for Falun Gong and talked to the local people about the great benefits of the practice. She distributed printed materials and posted Falun Gong banners. She even went to police stations to talk to the staff there. She visited people door to door to persuade them to quit the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its affiliates. At the beginning of the persecution in 1999, Ms. Ni went to the Kaiping District Community Administration Office to ask for her Falun Dafa books, which the authorities had confiscated from her. She was held there for twenty days. In the summer of 2000, Ms. Ni was in custody in the Community Administration office again and was forced to pull weeds under the baking sun.
On August 22, 2000, Ms. Ni again went to Beijing to appeal for justice for Falun Gong. She sat on Tiananmen Square in the meditation position. When police officers grabbed her, she cried out, "Falun Dafa is good! Stop slandering Master!" She was locked in an air vent for a whole day. At 9:00 p.m., Ms. Ni was picked up by police officers from her local police station and transferred back to the Kanshan First Detention Center at around 1:00 a.m. She was beaten because she refused to tell the police her name and her family was coerced into paying 4,000 yuan as a "guarantee deposit not to go to Beijing any more."
On October 1, 2000, CCP officers from the Kaiping Community Administration Office went to the detention center and asked Ms. Ni to choose between the CCP and Falun Gong. She firmly decided in favor of Falun Gong, which caused her to be tortured at the detention center. Among the abuse she suffered, she was shackled and was forced to run outside, which injured her ankles and caused them to bleed. Once, she was repeatedly lifted up and thrown to the ground.
Ni Yingqin and other practitioners who persisted in practicing Falun Gong were locked into small cells at the detention center and deprived of their rights to go out for fresh air. Two people were shackled together even while they slept or used the bathroom. Ms. Ni Yingqin and Ms. Liang Zhiqin were shackled together for up to ten days. At one point the practitioners did the Falun Gong exercises together at the detention center and the director, surnamed Xu, beat Ms. Ni personally. When one practitioner shouted, "Falun Dafa is good!" the guards started using electric batons to shock them, including Ms. Ni.
Criminal intimates were ordered to watch Falun Dafa practitioners and were told that they would be released early if they did well. They had to make sure that the practitioners did not study the teachings of Falun Gong or do the exercises. Liu Jie (female) and Wang Xiuyu (female) were especially vicious to practitioners. They tried to force Ms. Ni to write a guarantee statement. They hit her in the face until she was bleeding from the mouth and nose, pulled her hair, tore her clothes to shreds, and beat her until she was covered in bruises. Some practitioners were beaten many times because of studying the Fa or doing the exercises. They went on a hunger strike to protest and were then forced to run outside, do chores and sweep the floor and restrooms. At night, they were required to be on 2-hour duty to watch the sleeping inmates. If the hunger strikes continued, they were taken to Ankang Hospital, where they were further tortured.
One day in 2001, Ms. Ni Yingqin was taken to Ankang Hospital because she was on a hunger strike. At the hospital, she saw that some of her fellow practitioners were shackled to a bed and being injected with a harmful drug, and she tried stop it. The doctor regarded her as a trouble maker and gave her an injection, too. She immediately felt cold and dizzy and started to tremble from weakness. She could not walk anymore or grasp anything with her fingers. Despite this, she was forced to work. She had severe neurological seizures and heart problems following the injection. She also felt sleepy for days.
After Ms. Ni was taken back to the detention center from the hospital, she continued the protest hunger strike. Her longest continuous hunger strike lasted twenty-one days. She was often brutally force-fed, which made her throat bleed.
More than a dozen people were held in a damp, small room. Sixteen people slept head to feet with only eight blankets to share. There was not enough space for anyone to turn around. They slept on the floor with a plastic sheet underneath them. The next day, when they got up, they would find the bedding and plastic wet with water. The food was also very poor: there was a thin gruel for breakfast; lunch was typically a soup made from rotten cabbage that contained maggots, and a steamed bun made from corn powder for dinner. The food was so bad that it was hard to swallow and sometimes it contained flies and mouse droppings. Practitioners were forced to do hard labor such as peeling beans from 6:00 a.m. to midnight. Often, their fingertips would bleed or their fingernails even fell off entirely.
Ms. Ni was tortured at the detention center for almost a year, although her blood pressure was dangerously high.
After returning home from the labor camp, Ms. Ni was constantly harassed by agents from the Kaiping Police Station and the Kaiping Community Administration Office. Once, police officer Han Zhimin stopped her in the street, held her by the waist and grabbed her bag. He then asked passers-by to call police, saying that she was a Falun Gong practitioner. None of them called the police but rather, they urged Ms. Ni to run away and she escaped. Han and some other officers then went to her home to arrest her, but she did not comply with the illegal arrest. Four or five large men tried to lift her and take her away but failed, although some of her clothes were torn.
The police officers threatened her family and told them that they needed to take her to the hospital. Ms. Ni's husband and son were under great pressure from their employers and other officials. Ms. Ni was again taken to Ankang Hospital by her family, and her family was forced to go to a lot of trouble and expense before she was released.
After Ni Yingqin was released from Ankang Hospital, she was put under house-arrest and her family no longer allowed her to communicate with fellow practitioners. They were afraid that police would come and take her away again. Ms. Ni subsequently suffered a stroke and was very sick for three years. She passed away on December 8, 2009.