1,219 Falun Gong Practitioners Arrested or Harassed for Their Faith in July and August 2024
(Minghui.org) According to information collected by Minghui.org, a total of 1,219 Falun Gong practitioners were arrested or harassed for their faith in July and August 2024.
The 1,219 cases included 579 arrests and 640 harassment episodes. The 579 arrest cases include 167 that took place in the first half of 2024, 277 in July, 112 in August, and 23 with unknown months. The 640 harassment cases broke down to 242 in the first half of the year, 259 in July, 112 in August, and 27 with unknown months. The delay in reporting is mostly due to information censorship in China under the communist regime, which makes it difficult for Minghui correspondents to collect, verify and send the data to the website. The practitioners who have suffered persecution themselves also face the danger of being retaliated against when reporting the persecution accounts with their real names.
The 1,219 targeted practitioners hailed from 20 provinces, 4 centrally controlled municipalities (Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Chongqing), and 2 autonomous regions (Inner Mongolia and Ningxia). Hebei reported the most combined arrest and harassment cases of 296 (24.3%), followed by 180 (14.8%) cases in Liaoning, 147 (12.1%) in Shandong, and 112 (9.2%) in Jilin. These four provinces accounted for 60.3% of the total persecution cases. Thirteen other regions registered double-digit cases between 10 and 83. The remaining nine regions had single-digit cases between 2 and 9.
Among the arrested practitioners, at least 130 were 60 or older at the time of their arrests, including 61 in their 60s, 56 in their 70s, 12 in their 80s, and one practitioner being 91. Sixty-nine of the harassed practitioners were 60 or older, with 24 practitioners in their 60s, 30 in their 70s, and 15 in their 80s (with three of them being 88 years old).
I. Persecution Across the Country
a) Group Arrests
Several group arrests took place in July 2024. In Kunming City, Yunnan Province, 25 locals were arrested on July 6. According to insiders, this mass arrest was dubbed the “6.6 Project.” The police monitored the targeted practitioners and collected evidence against them for at least six months before the operation.
On July 12, two group arrests happened in Chengde City, Hebei Province, and Qingyuan County, Liaoning Province, where nine and ten practitioners were arrested, respectively.
Mr. Wang Zexing, of Qingyuan County, was awakened by a loud bang on his door at around 5 a.m. on July 12. He opened the door, only to be pushed aside by two black-clad officers to make way for another eight officers. When his wife came to the living room to check the situation after hearing the commotion, she was shocked to see her husband being restrained by several officers, while the rest of the police were ransacking their home. Upon seeing her, they shouted at her and ordered her to freeze. After finishing the raid in haste, the police took Mr. Wang away, leaving behind a mess.
When Mr. Wang’s family told his 83-year-old father about his arrest on August 1, the grief-stricken man insisted on going to the police department to demand his only child’s release, but to no avail. After spending two restless nights, the elderly man suddenly died on the evening of August 3. Mr. Wang’s wife applied to have her husband released on bail to attend his father’s funeral, but was denied by the police.
b) Arrests by Out-of-Province Police for Raising Awareness about the Persecution
Ms. Qiu Hongmei and Ms. Li Hongli, two retired workers from Shengli Oil Field in Dongying City, Shandong Province, vacationed together in Longsheng County, Guangxi Province, on May 13, 2024. They talked to people about Falun Gong while they were there and were arrested as a result. They were held in a detention center near Longsheng and denied family visits. The Longsheng police traveled more than 1,200 miles to their homes in Dongying City on May 21 and raided their places. They are now facing prosecution in Longsheng.
Also in southwest China, Ms. You Quanfang, a native of Pengzhou City, Sichuan Province, was arrested in late July 2024 and taken to a detention center in Lijiang City, Yunnan Province. Her ordeal stemmed from an earlier arrest on April 21, 2023, while visiting her daughter’s family in Lijiang. The police suspected her of distributing Falun Gong materials and detained her for 15 days. They continued to monitor her daily activities and didn’t allow her to go out unsupervised after releasing her on bail on May 5, 2023. She soon returned to her own home in Pengzhou. Due to continued harassment, she was forced to live away from home, only to be arrested again months later.
II. Attempts to Silence Those Who Speak Out
As mentioned above, Falun Gong practitioners often face retaliation for exposing their persecution accounts. Such was the case with Ms. Xie Xiaoting, an undergraduate student at the Zhongshan City campus of Guangdong Pharmaceutical University. She was arrested earlier this year on January 9, for removing a poster smearing Falun Gong from a bulletin board on campus. The police worked with the school leadership to interrogate her and ordered her to renounce Falun Gong, threatening to expel her if she didn’t comply. After she was released, the authorities frequently harassed her.
Ms. Xie noticed herself being followed by the staff of her dormitory management office and campus police officers, when she went to the cafeteria and the library on June 4 and 5, 2024. When she was attending a morning class the next day, she was summoned to the school counselor’s office and then taken to the local police station. The police produced the Minghui article about her earlier persecution and asked her who wrote the report. She said that it was the police who arbitrarily arrested her in the first place, and why they were afraid of her exposing it. Different police officers, school leadership and “brainwashing experts” took turns talking to Ms. Xie, still attempting to force her to write a statement to renounce Falun Gong. She remained firm in her faith. The police threatened to arrest her again if they saw reports on Minghui.org again about her with them listed as the perpetrators.
In another case, Ms. Liu Cong, a resident of Huludao City, Liaoning Province, was targeted for seeking justice for her husband, Mr. Luan Changhui, a senior marine engineer who is serving a four-year term for practicing Falun Gong. She represented her husband as a family defender in his trial, and also worked tirelessly on his appeal after he was convicted.
Ms. Liu filed a motion to reconsider her husband’s wrongful sentence after his appeal was rejected. While awaiting a result, she was arrested on July 12, 2024, after the police deceived her into opening the door by pretending to be her downstairs neighbor. When raiding her home, the police didn’t only take away her Falun Gong related items, but also took the legal materials that she had prepared for her husband’s case. She is now facing prosecution herself. Her parents and older sister, who currently live in Japan, are calling for her immediate release.
III. “Defame Their Reputation, Bankrupt Them Financially, and Destroy Them physically”
a) Police Violence During Arrests
With “destroying them physically” being one of the three persecution policies, the police often bragged that if the practitioners were tortured to death, they could just report their deaths as suicide. As a result, the police don't hesitate to use torture to try to make the practitioners submit after arresting them.
Ms. Xu Qingyan, a 66-year-old Jinzhou City, Liaoning Province resident, held a hunger strike in protest of her arbitrary detention after being arrested on April 13, 2024. The guards took her to the hospital to be force-fed every day. She is now emaciated, incontinent, and paralyzed. The head nurse in charge of her warned that she did not have many days to live.
Instead of releasing her, the police attempted to have her operated on so that they could detain her longer. Her family refused to sign the consent form for surgery. The police hired an aide to care for her in the hospital and also submitted her case to the procuratorate to seek prosecution of her.
A day after Ms. Xu’s arrest, also in Jinzhou, Ms. Meng Chunying was arrested and taken to a hospital for a physical examination as required by the local detention center. When she refused to give a urine sample, three male officers pulled down her pants and pushed her down on a toilet seat, before using a catheter to collect her urine sample. Her right inner thigh was also badly bruised after being kicked by the police during her arrest.
In Xiangtan City, Hunan Province, a 71-year-old woman reported being roughed up by seven male officers, after being arrested on May 21, 2024. In order to collect Ms. Li Mengjun’s blood sample, fingerprints, footprints, and body temperature, seven officers forcibly grabbed her arms and legs and pressed her fingers onto the biometrics machine. It took the police several hours to collect everything they needed. They also took two small tubes of blood from her against her will.
Police from Chaoyang City, Liaoning Province showed up at Mr. Lan Qingzhong’s print shop in Chifeng City, Inner Mongolia on May 11, 2024, after finding he had been providing Falun Gong materials to a married couple in Chaoyang City, Mr. He Hongjun and Ms. Fu Wenhui. The police ransacked Mr. Lan’s shop, confiscating four printers, two computers, 320,000 yuan in cash from Mr. Lan, and 120,000 yuan in cash from Mr. He and his wife. When two customers came during the raid, the police ordered them to verbally abuse Falun Gong’s founder. The two customers refused to comply and were detained for a few hours.
While taking Mr. Lan to Chaoyang (about 100 miles from Chifeng) in the afternoon, the police kept his hands tied up. One officer hit him about the head and face until blood came out of his mouth. They wiped off the blood to cover up the beating. When Mr. Lan called his family in the afternoon, they noted that he had slurred speech and struggled to express himself. He said that he felt very uncomfortable, especially in his head. He also lost partial mobility of his limbs.
The police didn’t only use Mr. Lan’s money to pay for the physical examination, but also for the highway toll on their way to Chaoyang. He was found to have suffered a stroke and a systolic blood pressure at 195 mmHg (when the healthy level is no more than 120 mmHg). The doctor who performed the checkup still declared that he was fit for detention. He was admitted to the Chaoyang City Detention Center and is now facing prosecution.
b) Denied Pension, Low-income Subsidy and Opportunity to Work
Since the Chinese communist regime began to persecute Falun Gong in July 1999, Ms. Gao Jie, a 66-year-old former elementary school teacher in Chongqing, has been arrested for her faith around ten times. Her husband feared being implicated and divorced her. Their daughter struggled to put herself through college. Ms. Gao’s parents were harassed by the authorities and died in distress.
When Ms. Gao was released on January 3, 2024, after completing her second prison term, she was denied a low-income subsidy and also faced constant police harassment when she tried to find odd jobs to make a living.
In early March 2024, only a few days after she began working as a personal care aide for a retired teacher, the authorities harassed her at her employer’s home. She had no alternative but to quit her job. She then landed another personal care aide job for a family in Chengdu City, Sichuan Province, more than 200 miles away, only to be arrested again two weeks later and ordered to leave Chengdu. She returned to her home on March 31, 2024.
Ms. Gao found another job as a home aide in Chongqing in mid-July 2024. After the police found out about it, they began to monitor her.
Ms. Gao was arrested on July 24, 2024, as soon as she took out a 20-yuan bill to pay for her groceries, when the police monitoring her noticed a Falun Gong-related message printed on the bill. Her current whereabouts are unknown.
Ms. Zhao Xianchang, a 54-year-old resident of Guanghan City, Sichuan Province, has served two forced labor camps totaling five years (2000-2002 and 2004-2007) since the persecution of Falun Gong started in 1999. Her employer, the Guangshan Third Middle School, terminated her shortly after her arrest in June 2004. They also set to zero her years of service in her future retirement benefit calculation formula, essentially leaving her with no pension.
After Ms. Zhao completed her second forced labor term in 2007, she began her uphill battle to get her job back and reinstate her years of service in her pension calculation. The board of education not only denied her repeated requests, but also revoked her teacher’s license. They even reported her to the police when she asked for her job back again in 2022. The police installed a surveillance camera and arranged for people in cars or on foot to monitor her, which continues to this day.
Ms. Zhao wrote to the Guanghan City Appeals Office on January 16, 2024 and the Sichuan Province Governor on May 9, 2024, requesting a low-income subsidy and retirement benefits [as she was approaching the retirement age of 55 for female teachers in China]. Her letters were forwarded to her local Xiangyang Town Government, which replied to her in a text on July 3, 2024.
The government text reply read, “We have received your letter from the governor’s office and are now responding to your concerns. After you were released from the labor camp, the board of education had multiple talks with you to try to help you break your addiction to practicing Falun Gong. You refused to be helped and the board of education proceeded to revoke your teacher’s license. Before the restructure of the local street committee, you applied for low-income subsidy with the then director Yin Daxiang. Director Yin explained that you must write a statement to renounce Falun Gong. You refused to comply and were thus denied subsidy. Because you were fired and had your years of services wiped out after you were given forced labor, we could not process your retirement application. Since you have not lost your ability to work, we cannot grant you disability benefits either.”
No law in China criminalizes Falun Gong. Ms. Zhao should never have been given forced labor in the first place, much less have her job terminated and years of service in pension calculation wiped out. She now struggles to get by.
c) Families of Practitioners Persecuted Together; Non-practitioner Family Members Implicated
After Falun Gong was introduced to the public in China since 1992, it quickly spread across the country, with many members of the same families practicing it. After the persecution started, these family members were often targeted together for upholding their shared faith. Some of their other family members who don’t practice Falun Gong were implicated.
Mr. Wei Yingxin, 85, is a retired medical scientist from the Baiyunshan Pharmaceutical Company in Guangzhou City, Guangdong Province. He also once worked as a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Management Science. Both he and his wife, Ms. Wan Mengying, have been repeatedly targeted over the past two-plus decades for practicing Falun Gong. He was previously sentenced to four years after an arrest in 2005 and suffered brutal torture at the Yangjiang Prison. He was not allowed to see his mother one last time when she died at 97 in 2008. His younger son struggled to cope with his imprisonment and developed clinical depression.
The elderly couple were harassed again on June 19, 2024, when four officers pounded on their door for one hour. As soon as the police came in, one of them began to videotape and photograph the couple.
The couple learned from their daughter, who visited them around 8 p.m., that the police had showed up at her home before harassing her parents. They ordered her son to take them to his grandparents’ home. The teen was terrified and called his father, who warned the police on the phone that he’d sue them should anything happen to the boy.
The couple’s daughter then said her brother would come pick them up in just a bit, as the police had also called the elderly couple’s older son and ordered him to take his parents to the police station by 9 p.m. Mr. Wei immediately texted his son asking him not to comply with the police, as his parents broke no law in exercising their constitutional right to freedom of belief. He also advised his son to refer the police to him if they called again. His son heeded his advice, only to get another call from the police the next day, again urging him to take his parents to the police station. Mr. Wei tried to contact the police himself, but to no avail.
Mr. Wei’s daughter and son-in-law visited him on July 16, 2024, and said the police harassed them again the night before. The police threatened to jeopardize their jobs and their son’s future college education if they refused to work with them to get Mr. Wei and his wife to renounce Falun Gong.
In Xingning City, Guangdong Province, another married couple, Mr. Li Zhuozhong and Ms. Liao Yuanqun, were arrested on April 19, 2024. The police sawed open a side door, replaced the original lock and sealed the front door. For a long time after their arrests, the police kept coming back to search the place. The police also denied the couple’s family visits and didn’t allow their family to deliver clothes to them.
The couple only have one daughter, who had just landed a job after graduating from college. Over the past 25 years she has witnessed multiple arrests of her parents and grew up in fear. She had to stay with her relatives when both of her parents were detained. Following the couple’s latest arrest, the police kept pressing their relatives for the young woman’s phone number. They later called her and asked her whether her parents had contacts with other practitioners or even whether she had a boyfriend. She was terrified and lost weight quickly.
Mr. Li developed a serious medical condition in July and is currently held in isolation in a hospital. He is forced to take drugs for tuberculosis and diabetes three times a day.
d) Ongoing Surveillance and Harassment After 15 Years of Incarceration
Ms. Huang Zhenglan, a 61-year-old resident of Chongqing, has been subjected to ongoing harassment and surveillance since she completed her third prison term in July 2023 for practicing Falun Gong.
The local street committee installed two surveillance cameras facing Ms. Huang’s door in July 2023, right after she was released from prison. Liu Yi of the street committee also brought the police to her home numerous times to harass her.
On April 9, 2024, the local court garnished about 5,000 yuan from Ms. Huang’s bank account to cover the fine she was levied when she was given her third prison sentence after her arrest in December 2020. The fund was the subsidy accumulated during the past four years for parents with only one child. Because of this, Ms. Huang had to do odd jobs to make ends meet.
Ms. Huang attended her ex-mother-in-law’s funeral on July 20, 2024, when village officials and a grid manager followed her all the way there. The funeral guests were infuriated and one of them said, “These officials only know how to bully good people!”
The trio followed Ms. Huang back home after the funeral.
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2,714 Falun Gong Practitioners Arrested or Harassed for Their Faith in the First Half of 2024