(Minghui.org) Shortly after a nurse was taken to prison to serve a seven-year term for her faith in Falun Gong, she was fired by the hospital where she worked.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual discipline that has been persecuted by the Chinese communist regime since 1999.
Ms. Liu Xiaohong, 53, of Dalian City, Liaoning Province, was arrested on November 24, 2020, in a police sweep. The Political and Legal Affairs Committee gave the orders for the police to arrest the practitioners on their list.
Both Ms. Liu and her husband, Mr. Wu Qi, were arrested, although it’s not clear if Mr. Wu practices Falun Gong. The couple was held in the basement of Baishanlu Police Station for over 30 hours and not given anything to eat or drink. Mr. Wu was later released, while Ms. Liu was transferred to the Dalian City Detention Center, also known as the Yaojia Detention Center.
The police convinced two supermarket employees to make false accusations against Ms. Liu and then submitted her case to the Ganjingzi District Procuratorate.
Ms. Liu was sentenced to seven years by the Ganjingzi District Court in early June 2021. Her family wasn’t allowed to attend the hearing. The court also refused to give them her verdict.
Ms. Liu’s appeal to the Dalian City Intermediate Court was turned down. She was later taken to the Liaoning Province Women’s Prison. Because she refused to renounce Falun Gong, prison officials didn’t let her family make a cash deposit for her to buy daily necessities.
On January 30, 2022, the Dalian City No.4 People’s Hospital announced that she was fired.
Prior to her latest sentencing, Ms. Liu was given one year of forced labor in 2008 for distributing informational materials about Falun Gong. She suffered intensive torture and was forced to work without pay at the Masanjia Forced Labor Camp.
In addition to what Ms. Liu suffered for upholding her faith, her husband, a former professor at Dalian University of Technology, was targeted for protesting the forced demolition of their property in 2008.
Mr. Wu went to the residence of Gary Locke, the then United States ambassador to China, in 2012 and attempted to talk to him. The Chinese police intercepted and arrested him. After eight days in the Chaoyang District Detention Center in Beijing, he was taken back to Dalian and given one year of forced labor.
When the discipline inspection team from the central government went to Dalian, Mr. Wu also made two attempts to appeal to them, but the police harassed him.
The Dalian City Appeals Office called Mr. Wu on October 22, 2020, and promised to solve his property issue. But only a month later, he was arrested with his wife and their home was ransacked.
Mr. Wu’s mother was devasted by the couple’s arrests, and she passed away on December 20 without seeing her daughter-in-law for the last time.