Woman Stripped of Her Pension Ordered to Sign Statement to Renounce Her Faith

(Minghui.org) A 65-year-old Chengdu City, Sichuan Province, woman was harassed by the authorities and ordered to sign a statement to renounce her faith in Falun Gong. When she refused to comply, the officers forcibly grabbed her hand and bruised a finger.

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

Ms. Wang Xiaoling received a call from a community worker on the evening of September 20, 2022, and was told to go to their office the next day to sign her low-income subsidy paperwork.

When Ms. Wang went the next afternoon, six officers from the Political and Legal Affairs Committee ordered her to sign a statement to renounce Falun Gong. Four refused to reveal their names, while two female officers said that their family names were Zhang and Li.

The officers claimed that this effort was to ensure stability ahead of the 20th Party Congress (which opened on October 16) and they were required to go after every Falun Gong practitioner on the government’s blacklist. When Ms. Wang refused to comply, the officers called Xu with the Xinjin Brainwashing Center and the police. They threatened to take her to the brainwashing center or the police station. They also took Ms. Wang’s purse and searched for Falun Gong materials.

At 7 p.m., after an entire afternoon of a standoff, several officers attempted to force Ms. Wang to sign the statement. They grabbed her hand and, in the struggle, bruised a finger. She still refused to sign the statement but was released at around 8 p.m.

Ms. Wang's finger bruised due to police violence

Previous Persecution

Ms. Wang, a former employee of Sichuan Geological Environment Comprehensive Monitoring Station, has endured repeated persecution over the past two decades for upholding her faith.

She was first arrested on September 28, 2006. She was arrested again in mid-April 2011. Her employer deceived her that they were going to host a retirement party for her only to have the police and 610 Office agents show up. She was held in the Xinjin Brainwashing Center for over two months and released on July 7. When a friend went to her workplace to look for her, her manager said she was attending a work-related training session.

Police officers and residential committee staff members broke into Ms. Wang’s home on June 1, 2014, and searched her balcony. They accused her of having a printer to print Falun Gong materials and began to monitor her after that.

While attending a gathering with 13 other practitioners at Mr. Liu Chenxue’s home on December 22, 2015, Ms. Wang was arrested again. Although she was released shortly after, the police harassed her on again on December 28. She was taken to the Pi County Detention Center the next day. A local court sentenced her to four years in Sichuan Province Women’s Prison in September 2016.

After Ms. Wang was released in December 2019, she was devastated to discover that her retirement account was empty—the authorities had withdrawn all the existing funds and stopped depositing any further retirement benefits. With no further pension payments, she was given a few hundred yuan a month as a low-income subsidy. But she was ordered to sign the paperwork at the residential committee every month before she could get the payment.