(Minghui.org) A 57-year-old police officer in Yuzhou City, Henan Province, was fired from his job on August 19, 2020, for practicing Falun Gong. He was due to retire in two years.

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is an ancient spiritual and meditation discipline that has been persecuted by the Chinese communist regime since 1999.

Mr. Zha Zhuolin joined the army when he was 19. He served in the army for the next 17 years and won many awards before becoming a police officer in 1999. He worked very hard and cracked many difficult cases involving drug trafficking, murder, and robbery.

Due to years of hard work, he developed many ailments, including high blood pressure, migraines, a frozen shoulder, and a herniated lumbar disc. When his rhinitis was bad, he couldn’t sleep. He was often exhausted from standing to question suspects. He sought many forms of treatment, but none of them did much good.

With no hope in sight, he decided to give Falun Gong a try in 2013. To his surprise, all of his symptoms soon disappeared and he returned to good health.

Mr. Zha strove to live by Falun Gong’s principles of Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance. He stopped taking bribes and putting himself above others. While investigating a fight involving a drunk, the person verbally abused and almost hit him. Some of Mr. Zha's colleagues lost their patience and were about to lock the person up. But Mr. Zha remained calm and peacefully resolved the issue. Those who witnessed the incident were impressed by his demeanor, as many police officers in China are known to be violent and corrupt.

In 2015, two years after Mr. Zha took up Falun Gong, he filed a criminal complaint against Jiang Zemin, the former head of the Chinese communist regime who ordered the persecution of Falun Gong in 1999.

Because of his complaint, the 610 Office, an extralegal agency created specifically to persecute Falun Gong, ordered the local police department to punish Mr. Zha. He was given a warning and never again given a bonus, which would have amounted to over 100,000 yuan by 2020. He was also ordered to write a statement to renounce Falun Gong, but he refused to comply.

His supervisor often talked to him and threatened Mr. Zha with both his and his wife’s jobs to try to persuade him to give up practicing Falun Gong.

In June 2020, Xu Wei, the police chief, and Wang Xiaowei, director of the Domestic Security Office, made a final attempt to pressure Mr. Zha to express his attitude about Falun Gong. Mr. Zha replied that he didn’t do anything wrong by following Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance and trying to be a good person.

Wang said, “You are a police officer. You are different [from the general public]. The first rule for a police officer is to be loyal to the Party.”

When Mr. Zha said that the constitution guarantees freedom of belief and that there is no law in China that says practicing Falun Gong is a crime, Wang stopped him and said he didn’t want to talk about the issue of freedom of belief or the law. Wang emphasized that he only cared about being loyal to the Party and that whoever still practiced Falun Gong would be deemed disloyal.

Shortly after that meeting, Mr. Zha was ordered to turn in all his police equipment and his job was put on hold. Two months later, he received a formal notice that he was fired.

Mr. Zha filed a motion to protest the decision. He said, “I’ve devoted most of my life to our country and its people. I’m proud of my career. Looking back on my life, I am not ashamed to face heaven or the people. If a society can’t tolerate the values of Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance, then it is a dangerous society. This is not a persecution against me personally—it is a suppression of universal values.”