(Minghui.org) “Whenever I despair, I remember that the way of truth and love has always won. There may be tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they may seem invincible, but in the end, they always fail...” With this quote from Mahatma Gandhi, Philadelphia resident Nancy Wang described her experience in China when she was sent to a brainwashing center for practicing Falun Gong.
Behind her was a banner reading, “Bring Jiang Zemin and his followers to justice for persecuting Falun Gong.” This was the afternoon of July 25 in Philadelphia's Chinatown, where practitioners gathered holding banners and telling passersby about the persecution of Falun Gong in China.
More than 100,000 criminal complaints against Jiang have been submitted to court authorities in China as of July 23. Among them, 11 were from Philadelphia.
Ms. Wang started to practice Falun Gong in 1998 when she was student at renowned Tsinghua University. “After Jiang began to persecute Falun Gong, school officials stopped my education.” Although her academic excellence allowed her to go to graduate school without taking an entrance exam, that privilege was suspended by the school. “Later when I worked at the Chinese Academy of Science, officials sent me to a brainwashing center twice to try to force me to give up my belief.”
She was not alone in her experience. Thirty-five Tsinghua alumni currently living outside of China filed criminal complaints on July 10, 2015. Coming from five countries, they sued Jiang for depriving them of freedom of belief, for torture, murder, and persecution. Their lawsuits have been submitted to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Procuratorate, and the Ministry of Public Security in China.
Arrested in March 2006 for distributing Falun Gong materials, Tian Zhongfeng from Anhui Province was first kept in a local detention center. A month later, she was sent to a labor camp with a term of 18 months. Two days later, she was transferred again and almost became a victim of organ harvesting.
“I was handcuffed to a bed and a doctor checked me every morning, saying my health was all right. Although the doctors and nurses refused to talk to me, they kept injecting me with drugs, hurting me terribly. When I overhead a phone conversation between a security guard and her family, I knew it was a operating room for heart surgeries, making me suspect I would become a victim of organ harvesting.”
Her suspicion was later confirmed. Although dizzy from the drugs, Ms. Tian woke up and saw a man studying her. She asked who he was. The man—who clearly did not expect her to be conscious—said he was a volunteer. “When I told him I was detained for practicing Falun Gong, the security guard asked him to talk with him out on the balcony. The guard said, 'Her body is very good, just her head was injured once in the past.' When the man left, he looked at me again, without talking to me. The way he looked at me was special, as if he was looking to buy me.”
Ms. Tian decided to rebel. When the doctor undid her handcuffs the next morning for her daily checkup, she started to struggle and yell. This caught the attention of patients and their family members in other rooms. After hearing her explain what has happening, a doctor whispered to her, “Don't go anywhere today, even if someone tries to take you. It's my shift today, and I will ask the nurse to help you.”
Before they were able to talk more, guards came and forced Ms. Tian back to her bed. Another nurse came later and injected something different from her previous daily injection, because it did not hurt. During her routine checkup the next morning, the doctor who examined her every day was disappointed: “She was all right yesterday. How come her condition has now changed?”
More doctors and guards rushed in the room. Another doctor checked her and was also surprised: “That's strange.” He examined her eyes and said, “There is no hope.”
That afternoon Ms. Tian was returned to the labor camp.
But the nightmare did not stop. Right after arriving at the labor camp, a doctor and injected her with something special and her arms and legs quickly swelled. A guard said, “The doctor said your internal organs were damaged, and we have notified your family to pick you up.”
Her condition got worse after she returned home. “My bones felt like they were freezing, while my skin felt like it was on fire. My legs were stiff and I had sharp pains from time to time.”