After Being Persecuted for 25 Years for Practicing Falun Gong, Liaoning Man Has a Stroke and Dies
(Minghui.org)
Name: Du HuaChinese Name: 杜桦Gender: MaleAge: 63City: DalianProvince: LiaoningOccupation: Retired engineer of China UnicomDate of Death: January 13, 2024Date of Most Recent Arrest: October 16, 2000Most Recent Place of Detention: Dalian Forced Labor Camp
After enduring 25 years of persecution for practicing Falun Gong, Mr. Du Huaa from Dalian City, Liaoning Province, had a stroke and passed away on January 13, 2024. He was 63.
Mr. Du, a retired engineer from China Unicom, took up Falun Gong in 1995. He credited the practice for helping him recover from dry eye condition. He lived by the principles of Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance and tried his best to help others.
After the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ordered the nationwide persecution of Falun Gong in 1999, both Mr. Du and his wife, Ms. Yuan Xiaoman, were repeatedly targeted for their faith. Mr. Du was given a three-year labor camp term in 2000 and subjected to brutal torture. In addition to the physical torture, he was also forced to work without pay, including packing toothpicks in January 2001, sorting beans in February 2001, and making diodes between April 2001 and October 2003. After he was released, the local police kept harassing and intimidating him. Ms. Yuan was arrested in 2016 for filing a criminal complaint against Jiang Zemin, the former head of the CCP who ordered the persecution. She was later sentenced to 3.5 years in prison.
Arrested for Not Renouncing Falun Gong
Mr. Du was arrested at work around 2 p.m. on October 16, 2000. After taking him to the Xinggong Street Police Station, the police questioned him as to whether he still practiced Falun Gong. They said that if he said no, they would release him; otherwise, they would keep him in custody.
Mr. Du pointed out that he didn’t violate any laws in practicing Falun Gong or trying to be a good person. In response, the police took him to the Yaojia Detention Center that afternoon, without providing any paperwork to his family.
As Mr. Du was his mother’s main caregiver (she had been incapacitated for the last three years), her situation was dire.
Officers Song Yuchen and Chen Xin often deprived Mr. Du of sleep for days on end and interrogated him. He was only given one bag of instant noodles each day during the interrogation sessions. His cellmates were sympathetic and shared their food with him.
Tortured During the Three-Year Term at the Dalian Forced Labor Camp
After 50 days at the Yaojia Detention Center, Mr. Du was transferred to the Dalian Forced Labor Camp in early December 2000 to serve a three-year term.
Upon arrival, he was held in the new admits group in the fifth team for nearly two months. The food was extremely poor and the practitioners weren’t given enough water; some were forced to drink non-food grade water used for laundry or flushing the toilet.
The guards didn’t allow the 50 practitioners detained there to wash themselves or brush their teeth. They only occasionally gave them a basin of water that they all had to use to wash up. The room smelled so badly that the guards all covered their noses and mouths when they walked by. The inmates also ordered the practitioners to do laundry for them and the guards. The practitioners’ own clothes and shoes that were new or of good quality were often “borrowed” by the inmates and guards, who never returned the items. Mr. Du lost his new snow boots that way.
After the Tiananmen self-immolation hoax was broadcast on TV in January 2001, the guards made the practitioners watch it. Knowing the broadcast was a propaganda stunt, the practitioners strongly resisted and some held a hunger strike to protest.
On March 19, 2001, the guards and inmates ordered the hundreds of practitioners detained there to renounce Falun Gong one by one. Those who refused to comply were dragged into the hallway, beaten with a rubber club, and shocked with electric batons. The perpetrators’ shouted threats, the sound of the electrical batons crackling, and the practitioners’ desperate screams terrified everyone detained in the building. After hours of this horrific torture, many practitioners were forced to renounce Falun Gong against their will. It was almost night but the guards did not stop.
The guards kicked Mr. Du’s legs and lower back. He sweated heavily in pain, but they continued shocking his head, neck, and hands with electric batons. He repeatedly collapsed to the ground.
As Mr. Du remained firm in practicing Falun Gong, guard Wang Jun kicked his head. He fainted and collapsed to the floor. When he came to, the guards forced him to bend over, while pulling his arms up against the wall. The same torture was repeated two days later on March 21.
Torture illustration: “flying an airplane”
On the evening of March 22, 2001, guard Wang Jun summoned Mr. Du to his office. Together with several other guards, they attempted to force him to sign a statement renouncing Falun Gong. He refused to comply. The guards pulled his arms, split his legs, hung a poster board with defaming words about Falun Gong on his neck and placed a piece of paper written with the name of Falun Gong’s founder under his feet.
When he tried to argue with them, they stripped his top and socks, handcuffed him behind his back, pressed him on the ground face down, and then stepped on his head and neck. He was suffocating and had to turn his head in order to breathe. The guards then placed a chair above his back and hips and another chair above his calves and ankles and had two people sit on the chairs—he was not able to move. Next, they poured water over him and shocked him with four electric batons, mostly on sensitive parts such as his soles of the feet, neck, back, armpits, and inner arms.
Mr. Du was in excruciating pain and screamed, which was miserable to hear. One guard threatened to place the electric baton in his mouth if he shouted again. But he couldn’t help it when they started the next round of electric shocks.
A guard placed an electric baton inside his armpit. His skin was severely burned and smoke came out. After he fainted in pain, they kicked his head and removed the clothes that had been stuffed into his mouth earlier on. After he came to, they continued to shock him with electric batons.
The next day Mr. Du still had difficulty moving his legs. He did not recover for a month. The swelling in his arms didn’t go away until ten days later. Pus often oozed from the wounds. His also suffered a severe heart condition as a result.
During his labor camp term, his family was only allowed to visit him a few times. By the time he was released on October 15, 2003, his body was covered with scabies and bruises. All his bottom teeth were loose.
Long Term Harassment and Financial Persecution
Mr. Du started to work for the Dalian Post and Telecommunications Bureau after he graduated from the Liaoning Post and Telecommunications College in August 1981. By the time he retired in February 2021, he had worked for 39 years and 6 months. While calculating his pension, the authorities removed three years of service (due to his labor camp term) from his record, which caused his monthly payments to be much lower than his coworkers who started working at the same time.
During the Davos International Conference that was held in Dalian in 2007, the police attempted to arrest Mr. Du at work, but were stopped by the workplace security staff, who knew the persecution was illegal.
Prior to the Beijing Olympics in 2008, Mr. Du’s workplace arranged for him to go out of town on a business trip. They may have known that the police planned to return and arrest him. The police came but he was not there.
On May 12, 2016, Mr. Du’s wife, Ms. Yuan, was arrested at home, after the police found out about her criminal complaint against Jiang Zemin the year before. Despite her high blood pressure, the local detention center still admitted her. She appeared in the Zhongshan District Court on November 16. Her lawyer entered a not guilty plea for her and demanded her acquittal. The judge still sentenced her to 3.5 years with a 5,000-yuan fine on December 23, 2016. She appealed with the Dalian City Intermediate Court, which ruled to uphold her original verdict on April 26, 2017. Mr. Du filed a motion to reconsider his wife’s case with the appeals court in July 2017, but to no avail.
During the CCP’s 20th Party Congress in October 2022, community workers stayed outside the couple’s home every day to monitor their daily activities and take their photos when they went out.
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