(Minghui.org) A Harbin City, Heilongjiang Province resident in her 70s was sentenced to three years on January 17, 2023 for speaking up about Falun Gong, a mind-body discipline that has been persecuted by the Chinese communist regime since 1999.

The police first arrested Ms. Jiang Yifen’s husband, Mr. Kan Daping, on March 3, 2022, while he was on his way home from working at a local pandemic control center. He was fired from his work shortly after. The police then broke into the couple’s home and confiscated Ms. Jiang’s Falun Gong books, a photo of Falun Gong’s founder, and several cellphones. 

The couple’s arrests were ordered by Sun Chunhong, the director of Acheng District Domestic Security Office. 

While Mr. Kan was released soon after the arrest, Ms. Jiang was kept in police custody. After 40 days of quarantine at the Mulan County Detention Center, she was transferred to the Harbin City No. 2 Detention Center.

When the police submitted Ms. Jiang’s case to the procuratorate, they included in the prosecution evidence a street surveillance video showing her distributing Falun Gong materials near the Acheng District Post Office, her location data tracked by her cellphone and her fingerprints that matched the ones collected from the Falun Gong materials. The police also accused Ms. Jiang of being a repeat offender because she had been sentenced to four years before for practicing Falun Gong. 

The local court sentenced Ms. Jiang to three years on January 17, 2023. She has been taken to the Heilongjiang Province Women’s Prison at the time of writing.

Ms. Jiang took up Falun Gong in 1995. When the communist regime ordered the persecution in 1999, both she and her family were subjected to tremendous mental distress. The local police refused to issue an ID to her daughter and often took her from her classroom to the police station, where they interrogated her about which practitioners Ms. Jiang had contact with.

Ms. Jiang was arrested on December 29, 2001, by over 20 police officers. The police told her they arrested her to meet the quota of annual arrests in order to get the 5,000 yuan individual performance bonus. In April 2002, she was sentenced to four years in Heilongjiang Province Women’s Prison, becoming the first Falun Gong practitioner to be sentenced in Acheng District.

On the first day she was taken to the prison, the guards stripped her clothes to humiliate her. She was ordered to get up at 4 a.m. and not allowed to sleep until 10 p.m. Her hands became swollen and her feet festered as a result of the torture. The guards once handcuffed her to a heating pipe for eight hours in a painful position in which she was unable to squat or sit down, nor could she stand up straight. 

As soon as Ms. Jiang was released on December 26, 2005, the police took her to the police station to take her photo and collect her fingerprints, before allowing her to go home.