Name: Pei Shanzhen (裴珊珍)
Gender: Female
Age: 68
Address: Nanyang Road, Jing'an District, Shanghai
Occupation: Former teacher at Xiangqun High School
Date of Most Recent Arrest: June 14, 2012
Most Recent Place of Detention: Jing'an Detention Center (静安看守所)
City: Shanghai
Persecution Suffered: Illegal sentencing, beatings, hung up, imprisonment, torture, force-feedings, home ransacked, interrogation, detention
Key Persecutors: Zhou Feng(周峰) and Shi Xiafeng (石夏峰)

(Minghui.org) Sixty eight-year-old Falun Gong practitioner Ms. Pei Shanzhen is a retired teacher living in Jingan District, Shanghai. She was arrested on June 14, 2012, for writing letters to her neighbors to introduce them to the facts about Falun Gong and the persecution. After she was illegally detained for six months, she was once again sentenced to a four and a half year prison term. This is Ms. Pei's fifth illegal arrest and detention. She was previously unjustly sentenced to four years in 2005.

Ms. Pei's family received a notice concerning her detention on June 15. They hadn't received any other information or notices about Ms. Pei or her whereabouts. Her family submitted an appeal letter on December 6 via the Internet to the Letters and Appeals Office in Shanghai and the State Letters and Appeals website. The letter was transferred to Jing'an Court on December 13. Ms. Pei's family was told to inquire to the court about the investigation results. It was then that her family learned that Ms. Pei had been sentenced in August.

Persecution of Ms. Pei and Her Family

Ms. Pei Shanzhen began practicing Falun Gong in 1995. She had suffered from many kinds of illnesses before, but within three months after she began the practice, her health improved and all her illnesses miraculously disappeared.

However Ms. Pei's ordeal began after the Chinese Communist regime started the persecution of Falun Gong in July 1999. She was arrested and held in Jing'an Detention Center for a week in June 2000 for traveling to Beijing to appeal for justice for Falun Gong. She was arrested again about one month later, on July 13, 2000, for distributing informational materials about Falun Gong in a residential area. She was placed under criminal detention in Jing'an Detention Center for 35 days before she was officially arrested and tried at Jing'an Court in November 2000. She was later released.

Ms. Pei's third arrest was in March 2001 for lending a video tape of Master Li Hongzhi's Fa lecture to a person. Her home was ransacked and she was charged with “disrupting the social order.” Without going through any legal procedure, four police officers forcibly took her away from her home and sent her to the Jing'an Detention Center. Ms. Pei refused to give up her belief in Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance and persisted in doing the exercises. The guards handcuffed her to metal fence and stuffed her mouth with a towel. Ms. Pei nearly passed out several times. She held a hunger strike to protest the persecution, but the guards and inmates force-fed her. They pinched and hurt her cheeks, and injured her nasal cavity and trachea, which caused her to vomit blood. She suffered serious physical weakness and emaciation. She was later sent to Shanghai Women's Forced Labor Camp for a two-year term.

After being illegally arrested in March 2005, Ms. Pei's was given a four-year prison term by Jing'an Court officials on June 3, 2005.

Ms. Pei was persecuted for more than six years, causing her son, Shi Yi to suffer severe mental trauma. He recovered only after he practiced Falun Gong for more than two years. Mr. Shi Yi was arrested at 2:00 p.m. on March 29, 2012 on his way to West Nanjing Road Police Station to clarify the facts about Falun Gong to the police chief. Police officer Shi made the arrest and informed Mr. Shi's family that he had been taken to Jing'an District Center Hospital of Mental Health, because he had distributed Shen Yun Performing Arts DVDs and computer cards that could circumvent the Internet blockade in China.

While Mr. Shi was incarcerated in the hospital, doctors Zhu Renjie and Chen Fang tried to force feed him medication by blindfolding him and pinching his nostrils to force him to open his mouth to breathe. But when they tried to give him the medication, Mr. Shi kept vomiting. They then tied him down on a bed and injected him with unknown drugs. Mr. Shi immediately felt unbearable pain. On April 13, after 16 days of persecution, Mr. Shi, originally a healthy young man, was in a terrible state. He had a fever, and could not eat or sleep. He had a hard time having a bowel movement and when he did there was blood in his stool. He was very restless, and his hands and feet kept shaking involuntarily. He was mentally unresponsive.

Ms. Pei's most recent and fifth arrest took place at 3:30 p.m. on June 14, 2012, because she wrote letters to her neighbors to introduce them to Falun Gong so that they would learn the truth and not be deceived by the residential committee's so-called “pledge cards” drive, under the instruction of 610 Office agents. Six police officers ransacked her home and took her to the Jing'an District Detention Center. She is still detained there.