(Minghui.org) A 72-year-old woman in Hangzhou City has been repeatedly pressured to give up her spiritual belief over the past several months. When she refused, the local authorities ordered her former employer to suspend her pension.
This is not the first time that Ms. Dong Xiangru has been targeted for her faith. She was arrested in May 2006 and sentenced to three years in prison for refusing to renounce Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline being persecuted by the Chinese communist regime. Her 82-year-old husband, a former president of Zhejiang Ocean University, wasn’t notified of her arrest or trial, and it took him months to find out where his wife was detained.
Guards at Zhejiang Province Women’s Prison tortured Ms. Dong on a regular basis, and her health deteriorated. She was rushed to the prison hospital for emergency rescue on multiple occasions.
Her ordeal didn’t end after she was released from prison. Zhu Xijun and another officer of the local Xixi Police Station showed up at her home on June 7, 2017 and tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade her to stop practicing Falun Gong.
Ms. Dong refused. The police returned eight days later to ransack her home. They took her to Mishi Police Station, where they interrogated her for six straight hours. Around 11 that night, they drove her to Hangzhou Detention Center for a medical examination. Because her blood pressure was unusually high, she was taken back to Mishi Police Station at 5 the next morning. She was then released on bail around noon.
The local police kept harassing Ms. Dong at home, but she held firm to her faith.
Officers Yuan Jiabao and Wang Miao came to harass her again on November 2. She still refused to renounce her faith, and they soon pressured her employer, Zhejiang Provincial Ocean and Fisheries Bureau, to suspend her pension.
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