(Minghui.org) Ms. Li Chunying, a former award-winning senior engineer, was fired from her job in 2000 for appealing for the right to practice Falun Gong.
In the years that followed, the 56-year-old woman from Langfang City, Hebei Province found herself in and out of detention for refusing to give up her belief in Falun Gong. She was arrested six times and tortured while in detention.
Under pressure by local authorities, Ms. Li's husband divorced her and even forged documents so he could take full possession of the couple's community property and transfer her legal residency permit from Hebei to Shanxi Province without her consent.
The Langfang Petroleum Pipeline Bureau refused to reinstate Ms. Li's position and refused to process her retirement application. Unable to claim her pension and without a residency card, which is needed to gain employment, she is now working odd jobs and experiencing great financial distress.
Ms. Li is suing former Chinese dictator Jiang Zemin for launching the suppression of Falun Gong that cost her her job and family.
She mailed her criminal complaint against Jiang to the Supreme People's Procuratorate and the Supreme People's Court on June 10.
Police arrested Ms. Li in January 2001 while she peacefully protested in Beijing for justice for Falun Gong. She was held in the Huairou Detention Center, where she was beaten. Despite the cold winter, there was no heat in her cell. When she refused to have her photo taken and be strip-searched, guards forced her to stand in the snow with her bare feet.
In May 2002, Ms. Li was riding on a bus when a crew member ordered all the passengers to curse at Falun Gong. She refused and was arrested. Officers at the Zhenglanqi Police Department in Inner Mongolia interrogated her around the clock for seven days.
She was taken to a detention center and tortured for over 40 days. She was force-fed with her hands and legs tied. When she was on the verge of death, Zhenglanqi police released her on medical parole.
Ms. Li asked her employer to reinstate her position multiple times in August 2005. They demanded that she give up Falun Gong to have her job back. She refused, and her employer called police to arrest her. She was sentenced to two years in the Kaiping Forced Labor Camp without due process.
The guards held her in solitary confinement, because she went on a hunger strike to protest the illegal incarceration. The labor camp doctor pried open Ms. Li's mouth and force-fed her while prisoners held her down.
After a month of torture, Ms. Li was again at the brink of death. She was injected with unknown drugs, after which she began to twitch and feel intolerable itchiness. Officials released her when she fell into critical condition.
While Ms. Li was incarcerated, her ex-husband worked with authorities to move her legal residency to Jishan County in Shanxi Province and cancel her residency in Langfang, Hebei in July 2008.
In 2013, her workplace denied her retirement application and pension.
In 1999, Jiang Zemin, as head of the Chinese Communist Party, overrode other Politburo standing committee members and launched the violent suppression of Falun Gong.
The persecution has led to the deaths of many Falun Gong practitioners in the past 16 years. More have been tortured for their belief and even killed for their organs. Jiang Zemin is directly responsible for the inception and continuation of the brutal persecution.
Under his personal direction, the Chinese Communist Party established an extralegal security organ, the “610 Office,” on June 10, 1999. The organization overrides police forces and the judicial system in carrying out Jiang's directive regarding Falun Gong: to ruin their reputations, cut off their financial resources, and destroy them physically.
Chinese law allows for citizens to be plaintiffs in criminal cases, and many practitioners are now exercising that right to file criminal complaints against the former dictator.