Hubei Resident Sentenced by Out-of-Province Court for Sending Information about Falun Gong on WeChat

(Minghui.org) A 68-year-old Macheng City, Hubei Province resident was arrested by the police in Nanjing City, Jiangsu Province for posting information about Falun Gong online. Ms. Zou Guixiang was subjected to brutal torture and forced to renounce Falun Gong while serving a ten-month sentence.

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

Ms. Zou, a retired silk reeling factory worker, credits Falun Gong for curing her terminal disease. Because of upholding her faith in Falun Gong, she has been repeatedly targeted in the past two decades.

At 8 p.m. on December 10, 2021, the police from Nanjing and Macheng deceived Ms. Zou into opening the door. Her Falun Gong books, photo of Falun Gong’s founder, informational materials, seven cell phones and 7,000 yuan in cash were confiscated.

After a brief interrogation at the Nanhu Police Station in Macheng, she was taken to Nanjing overnight. The police held her at the Chunxi Police Station for a few more days of interrogation before taking her to the Nanjing City Detention Center, where she was held for ten days. She refused to answer the police’s questions about where she got the Falun Gong materials. The police later transferred her to a secret detention facility, where she was frequently interrogated during her five months of detention there.

Because Ms. Zou also sent information about Falun Gong on WeChat (a social media platform), the police and national security branch in Nanjing deemed her case to be significant and accused her of “colluding with anti-China foreign forces” and “spreading reactionary speeches.” They formed a special task force and kept interrogating her about how she “colluded” with “foreign forces.”

After months of investigation, the police confirmed that Ms. Zou bought all of her cell phones and sim cards without contacting anyone outside of China. Without sufficient evidence, the Nanjing Court eventually sentenced her to ten months for “spreading reactionary speeches.”

Even after Ms. Zou was sentenced, the national security officers still interrogated her. They kept the light in her room on around the clock and forced her to watch propaganda videos smearing Falun Gong and praising the communist regime for up to ten hours each day.

During Ms. Zou’s detention, the deputy director of Gaochun Police Department went to Macheng three times to harass her husband and their daughter. Even Ms. Zou’s brother wasn’t spared in the harassment. The police videotaped her family members and attempted to force them to provide information against her.

Ms. Zou also noticed that the guards added a crystal-like substance into her drinking water. She began to experience occasional high blood pressure. She once felt tight in her chest. Her body was cold and she had difficulty breathing.

In addition to the drug administration, the authorities also rationed the food given to Ms. Zou and starved her. Her weight dropped from 126 lbs to 99 lbs in five months. Only when she held a hunger strike, did the authorities begin to provide her with a regular amount of food.

For the five months she was held in the secret detention facility, the authorities only counted half of it towards her term. Her term was eventually extended for two and a half months and she was released on December 21, 2022.