69-year-old Woman Taken to Brainwashing Center for Practicing Falun Gong

(Minghui.org) A 69-year-old Chongqing woman was doing Falun Gong exercises at home on the morning of March 9, 2022, when the police broke in and arrested her. After being held at the local police station for three days, she was taken to a local brainwashing center on March 15 and detained incommunicado.

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

Ms. Yang Qin worked at the Tongnan Refractory Material Factory before she retired in April 2008. She suffered severe lead poisoning due to the nature of her job and subsequently developed multiple ailments, including kidney and stomach problems, a blood clot in the brain, and low blood pressure.

Just as she became desperate about life, she was introduced to Falun Gong and soon recovered. She also became a better person and a more conscientious worker. She never received kickbacks and the factory director, Pu Entan, often said to people, “If every worker is like you Falun Gong practitioners, my job as the factory leader would be much easier.”

After the persecution began in 1999, however, her workplace ordered people to follow her, didn’t allow her to take the weekend off, and withheld her annual bonus because she held firm to her faith. She was detained three times, given two labor camp terms, and sentenced to 1.5 years in 2015. Her husband, a retired director of the armed forces, couldn’t bear the pressure from the persecution and divorced her.

In January 2020, the local social security bureau suddenly ordered Ms. Yang to return the 139,000 yuan that she received during the prison sentence in 2015 and the period after she was released, without providing any reason. The financial extortion caused her life to become very difficult and she had to get by having congee and pickles.

Ms. Yang was followed while distributing informational materials about Falun Gong on May 13, 2020, and then arrested. When she was taken to the Hechuan Detention Center the next day, the guards refused to accept her due to her high blood pressure. She was then released on bail.

The police submitted her case to the Tongliang District Procuratorate, which indicted her and moved her case to the Jiangbei District Court on November 19. To avoid the persecution, she lived away from home, only to be arrested again on August 17, 2021. The police attempted to take her to a detention center three days later, but she failed the physical examination after being found to have high blood pressure, tuberculosis, and hardening of the blood vessels. She began to have severe coughing, sweating, and difficulty breathing on August 23 and the police had to release her.

Prior to her latest arrest on March 9, 2022, the police had ordered her to report to the police station on February 14. She didn’t go and was harassed at home.