(Minghui.org) Minghui.org reported in July 2024 that at least seven Wuhan City, Hubei Province, residents have been arrested since late 2023 for their shared faith in Falun Gong and that their families have been kept in the dark of their whereabouts or case status.
One more local resident has also been arrested in 2023 for practicing Falun Gong, Minghui.org learned in recent days. Ms. Zhang Huaqing, in her 70s, was first arrested on April 4, 2023, after three officers from the Laodong Police Station, two of whom in plainclothes, broke into her home that day. Her family was never told where she was taken. The police released her at the end of July 2023, only to take her back into custody in less than three weeks. This time they told her family that they were taking her to the E’touwan Brainwashing Center (located in Qiaokou District, Wuhan). One year has since passed and her loved ones have never received any additional updates. They suspect she is still held at the same brainwashing center.
Wuhan authorities are notorious for following the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s policy to persecute law-abiding Falun Gong practitioners for their spiritual faith. Since the beginning of 2021, at least ten new brainwashing centers have been established to detain and torture local practitioners.
To carry out the CCP’s “Zero-out” campaign aimed at forcing every Falun Gong practitioner on the government’s blacklist to renounce their faith, the city mobilized the police in various districts to arrest local practitioners and place them in brainwashing centers. The city’s Political and Legal Affairs Committee (PLAC) and 610 Office signed contracts with “collaborators” (former practitioners who had quit the practice or jobless people) to torture and “transform” the practitioners in brainwashing centers, with handsome pay. The authorities also hired a retired police officer who had a record of torturing practitioners to work in the brainwashing centers in different districts.
Many of the brainwashing centers, including the E’touwan Brainwashing Center where Ms. Zhang is likely being held, have surveillance cameras both inside and outside the buildings like high-security prisons.
The practitioners are isolated from the outside world and cut off all forms of communication with their families and friends. They are forced to study materials smearing Falun Gong and ordered to write statements to renounce their faith. Anyone who held firm to their faith would be subjected to various forms of torture. Even those who buckled under pressure and were later released were threatened to not disclose what they went through at the brainwashing centers. For more details on the persecution of practitioners at the brainwashing centers, see the related reports below.
Related Reports:
Wuhan, Hubei Province: Seven Falun Gong Practitioners Remain Detained, Whereabouts Unknown
Wuhan City: At Least Ten Arrested in One Month and Eight Still Detained in Brainwashing Centers
A Dozen Falun Gong Practitioners Held in Brainwashing Centers in Wuhan
Wuhan Authorities Build New Brainwashing Centers in Bid to Eradicate Falun Gong
Wuhan Opens Nine New Brainwashing Centers to Incarcerate Steadfast Falun Gong Practitioners
Wuhan Brainwashing Center Unlawfully Detains and Tortures Falun Gong Practitioners
Copyright © 2024 Minghui.org. All rights reserved.
