Having Lost His Wife to the Persecution of Their Faith, Shandong Man Dies One Day After Arrest

(Minghui.org) A Mengyin County, Shandong Province, man died one day after he was arrested while working on his family farm on June 17, 2021.

Officers from the Mengyin County Police Station informed Mr. Sun Pijin’s family of his death on June 18. They said that Mr. Sun refused to have the coronavirus test at the Mengyin County Chinese Medicine Hospital and that he jumped from the building and died instantly. The police cordoned off the scene and didn’t allow anyone to get close.

When Mr. Sun’s family saw his body at the Mengyin County Funeral Home, they found that he was leaking brain fluid, one of his eyeballs was missing, and his abdomen was sunken.

Prior to Mr. Sun’s arrest, his daughter (nicknamed Jiaojiao), was also arrested at home and is now held at the Linyi Detention Center. 

With Mr. Sun’s death, Jiaojiao is now parentless, as her mother, Ms. Yu Zaihua, died six years ago following eleven years of displacement to avoid being persecuted for the family’s shared faith in Falun Gong.

Since the Chinese communist regime began to persecute Falun Gong, an ancient spiritual discipline, in 1999, the Sun family has been arrested, detained and tortured multiple times. 

On December 10, 1999, Ms. Yu went with two local practitioners to Beijing to appeal for the right to practice Falun Gong, but was arrested and detained for a month.

Both she and her husband were arrested on February 22, 2000 and forced to attend brainwashing sessions every day from 8 a.m. to noon for two months. When they still refused to renounce Falun Gong two months later, the police kept them at the brainwashing center for entire days. They were forced to stand under the scorching sun for long hours, savagely beaten, or forced to bend over at a 90-degree angle with their hands touching the floor. 

The police arrested Ms. Yu one more time on September 23, 2000. They kicked her so hard during the interrogation that they broke her collarbone. She was released after 19 days of detention. 

Ms. Yu was later given three years of forced labor, when she was arrested one more time on January 16, 2001 for returning to Beijing to appeal for Falun Gong. Due to her poor health, the labor camp refused to accept her and the police took her back. 

Ms. Yu and Mr. Sun lived away from home in February 2002, when they heard that the police were about to arrest Ms. Yu for making banners about Falun Gong. 

A year later, on March 12, 2003, Mr. Sun was arrested and sentenced to five years in Weifang Prison.

Ms. Yu was arrested again on January 31, 2004. She was beaten, force-fed and injected with toxic drugs. Her legs atrophied as a result and she almost died. Only then did the police release her.

Ms. Yu was forced into displacement when the police attempted to arrest her again on July 2, 2004. She lived a destitute life for eleven years. She developed whole system edema in July 2015 and died on August 19, 2015. She was just 47.

During the “Zero-out” campaign last year (a concerted effort to force all Falun Gong practitioners on the government’s blacklist to renounce Falun Gong), a group of police officers went to Mr. Sun’s home on October 25, 2020 and attempted to take him to a brainwashing session at the Wenhe Hotel. 

As he wasn’t home, the police threatened that they would force him to go. When Mr. Sun’s daughter tried to prevent the police from taking pictures of her father’s automobile license plate and then took pictures of the police officers herself, an officer grabbed her by the neck and said, “I dare you to try again!” 

Related report:

Husband Illegally Sentenced to Five Years in Prison, Wife Destitute and Homeless