Heilongjiang Woman Arrested Again for Her Faith After Having Served Ten Years

(Minghui.org) A Qiqihar City, Heilongjiang Province resident was arrested on July 30, 2022 for talking to people about Falun Gong in a residential area. She has been detained incommunicado since.

Ms. Zhang Dexiang took up Falun Gong, a spiritual and meditation discipline, on April 25, 1999. Many of her ailments disappeared three days later. She held firm to her faith after the Chinese Communist Party launched the persecution of Falun Gong three months later. She has since endured repeated arrests and incarceration.

In July 1999, the local police found her and ordered her to write a statement to renounce Falun Gong.

Ms. Zhang went to Beijing to appeal for the right to practice Falun Gong on December 18, 2000. She was arrested half way there and held at the Qiqihar City No. 2 Detention Center. The police demanded 3,000 yuan from her family in exchange for her release. Back then, her husband was working out of town and she only had their ten-year-old son Li Yan and her mother-in-law in her 70s at home. With the help of local Falun Gong practitioners, she was released on March 30, 2001.

The police in Qiqihar ordered a group arrest of local practitioners on December 30, 2001. Ms. Zhang was arrested at home in the morning, after the police found Falun Gong exercises tapes there. She was held at the Qiqihar City No. 2 Detention Center for 17 days, on charges of “disrupting social order.” When she returned home, her mother-in-law told her that the police searched her home again four days after her arrest and they attempted to deceive her son into telling them where she kept her Falun Gong books.

The local police chief Zhang and two other officers scaled the fence and broke into Ms. Zhang’s home in the wee hours of December 9, 2003. She and another practitioner, who happened to be staying at her home, were taken to the police station and interrogated. Her Falun Gong books and materials were confiscated.

Ms. Zhang was transferred to the Qiqihar City No. 1 Detention Center on December 11. She was beaten for doing Falun Gong exercises there. The guard handcuffed and shackled her for two days. They also kicked her in the back over 50 times.

Ms. Zhang was later sentenced to ten years. Her appeal was rejected by the higher court. She was taken to the Heilongjiang Province Women’s Prison on October 20, 2004. The inmates kept verbally abusing her.

When her term ended on December 10, 2013, the authorities took her to a brainwashing center and didn’t release her until twenty days later.

Ms. Zhang and her son were forced to live away from home after they escaped an arrest on November 25, 2015 for filing a criminal complaint against Jiang Zemin, the former head of the communist regime who ordered the persecution.