(Minghui.org) A man in his 70s has had his pension suspended for over a year for his faith in Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline that has been persecuted by the Chinese communist regime since 1999.
Mr. Jin Dejun of Yanji City, Jilin Province, was arrested in early September 2001 for putting up banners with information about Falun Gong and distributing Falun Gong flyers. He was tortured and interrogated at the Longjing City Detention Center. Without informing his family, the authorities secretly sentenced him to nine years in Jilin Prison.
Unable to bear the pressure of the persecution, his wife divorced him while he was incarcerated. When he was released, he was homeless and destitute.
While Mr. Jin has managed to make ends meet over the past decade, the suspension of his pension since July 2020 has left him devastated and struggling to get by.
The authorities claimed that, according to a new policy, no Falun Gong practitioners serving time for their faith are entitled to any pension payments. Anyone who received pension funds while they were imprisoned is now being ordered to pay it all back.
When Mr. Jin went to the social security office in June 2021, director Gao Shigang said that, because Mr. Jin wasn’t to able repay the specified amount, they would suspend his pension until it was paid back. He said that Mr. Jin should consider himself lucky that the local authorities still let him apply for the low-income subsidy when practitioners in other regions weren’t even allowed to do that.
Perpetrators’ contact information:
Gao Shigang (高世刚), director, Yanji City Social Security Office: +86-433-2706059Kang Fang (康芳), secretary, Yanbian Prefecture Political and Legal Affairs Committee: +86-13843333399, +86-433-2751850Jin Xiushan (金秀山), deputy secretary, Yanbian Prefecture Political and Legal Affairs Committee: +86-433-2519522, +86-13704435816Piao Chunjie (朴春杰), deputy secretary, Yanbian Prefecture Political and Legal Affairs Committee: +86-433-2536867
(More perpetrators’ contact information is available in the original Chinese article.)
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