26 Oct 2012

NEW YORK—A 65-year-old woman from southern China is dead after three weeks of physical abuse at a brainwashing center. Police abducted her from her home in advance of the 18th Communist Party Congress, announcing that she “had some learning to do,” according to sources in China.

Ms. Jiang Meilan (蒋美兰), a retired transportation company worker from Hunan Province, was taken away on September 7, 2012. Her family searched frantically for her whereabouts, but local authorities concealed her location, giving false addresses and phone numbers at least twice.

After several days, Ms. Jiang's son located her at a brainwashing center run by the 610 Office, a Party-based security force leading the campaign against Falun Gong. He was prohibited from contacting her until October 1, by which time Ms. Jiang was in critical condition. He rushed her to an emergency room where doctors identified bruises throughout her body, bleeding, and deteriorated organ function.

Ms. Jiang died the next day.

“It is now routine for Falun Gong practitioners to be targeted for ‘re-education’ before sensitive political dates,” says Levi Browde, Executive Director of the Falun Dafa Information Center. “The viciousness with which an elderly woman was beaten to death is a sobering reminder that there remains a fundamental and systemic problem within the communist regime.”

The Hunan Province 610 Office has operated the Laodaohe Brainwashing Center in Changsha, Hunan since 2002. According to reports from China, hundreds of Falun Gong practitioners have been abused there.

Ms. Jiang, a “healthy and strong-willed woman,” according to her family, had survived at least three years of forced labor in the past for practicing Falun Gong. When five police officers came to abduct her on September 7, her husband in his seventies, along with several neighbors, attempted to dissuade the police, but they were unsuccessful.

Additional information

Xintian County 610 Office: 011-0746-4718610
Mr. He Xin, 610 Office Leader: 011-0746-4718610, 011-18907466777
Xintian County Police Department: 011- 0746-4712459 

Jiang Chuntie, Department Chief: 011-07464999668, 011-13607469028

Essential Background

In July of 1999, China's autocratic Communist Party launched an unlawful campaign of arrests, violence, and propaganda against Chinese citizens practicing Falun Gong (or "Falun Dafa") with the intent of "eradicating" the apolitical practice. Former Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin launched the persecution fearing the practice's growing popularity among the Chinese people (70 to 100 million) was overshadowing his own legacy (article). Since then, the Falun Dafa Information Center, based in New York, has reported over 3,500 deaths from abuse and over 80,000 cases of torture. The United Nations, Amnesty International, Chinese human rights lawyers, and foreign media have also documented Falun Gong torture and deaths at the hands of Chinese officials (samples). Hundreds of thousands of Chinese who practice Falun Gong remain in captivity, rendering them the single largest group of prisoners of conscience in China (article). Falun Gong is a traditional Chinese spiritual discipline that is Buddhist in nature, but not part of the religion of Buddhism. It consists of slow-moving "qigong" exercises, meditation, and teachings for daily life centered on the tenets of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance (about Falun Gong).