(Minghui.org) A 68-year-old resident of Shenyang City, Liaoning Province suffered various forms of abuse while serving time for her faith Falun Gong, a mind-body practice that has been persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party since 1999. After she was released on March 14, 2024, Ms. Wang Qiuping recounted what she went through, which was covered in a previous Minghui.org report.
Ms. Wang recently told her family more of her suffering. Below is a quick summary of her prosecution process and the latest information she revealed.
Ms. Wang was arrested on February 27, 2020 for distributing informational materials about Falun Gong. She was tried by the Heping District Court on December 9, 2020, and sentenced to four years on December 28 that year. She appealed with the Shenyang City Intermediate Court, which ruled on April 21, 2021 to uphold her original verdict.
For nearly three years after Ms. Wang’s arrest in February 2020, the authorities didn’t allow her family to visit her. After she was transferred to the Liaoning Province Women’s Prison on January 9, 2022, the prison also barred her from calling her family. When her family was finally allowed to see her in early January 2023, her hair had turned gray; she was emaciated and couldn’t straighten her back when she walked. The guards closely monitored the visit, which only lasted ten minutes.
Ms. Wang was assigned to Team Five of Division 3 when she was admitted to the Liaoning Province Women’s Prison on January 9, 2022. Team heads Yu Lu and Wang Yan (no relation) ordered her to renounce Falun Gong. She refused, and they had her stand in a corner out of sight of the surveillance cameras in the prison’s workshop.
It was deep in the winter, but they stripped her of her winter coat and opened the window to freeze her. She was forced to stand barefoot on the cement ground from 6:35 a.m. to 6:35 p.m. for two straight days. She couldn’t stop shivering and eventually wrote statements against her will to renounce her belief. She was also forced to record a video saying she had decided to give up practicing Falun Gong.
After that, Ms. Wang was forced to do manual labor for more than ten hours every day. She was already 66 at the time, but still had to meet the daily production quotas with no leniency. Falun Gong practitioners like her were only paid 5 or 10 yuan per month for doing hard labor when other inmates were given 70-100 yuan. The non-practitioners were also given bigger and fresher fruits and other privileges.
To make her suffer more, the guards also mandated that Ms. Wang could only use the restroom when the head inmate in her cell (Rm. 106), Tian Feng, also needed to go. Tian sometimes used the restroom stealthily without Ms. Wang’s knowledge, leaving her without restroom breaks.
Having been denied family visits for three years since her arrest, Ms. Wang made a request to see her loved ones to guard Zhang Jia’nan. Zhang referred her to another guard, Zhao, who directed her to talk to head inmate Tian first. Tian declined to pass on her family visit requests to relevant supervisors.
One day guard Gao suddenly allowed Ms. Wang to call home. She then learned from her loved ones that they had hired a lawyer who was coming to visit her the next day. Gao warned her to not say anything about the abuses she suffered; otherwise the meeting with the lawyer would be canceled.
Guards Jin Yu and Fan monitored Ms. Wang’s meeting with her lawyer the next day. Her loved ones had written a letter to her, but Fan stopped the lawyer from reading the letter. The lawyer asked how she was doing in the prison, and she did not dare to tell him about the abuse. Jin threatened her to not have any further meetings with any lawyer.
Ms. Wang was later ordered to write thought reports. She refused to comply and was summoned to an office by guard Kan Kai the next day after working more than ten hours in the workshop. She was ordered to stand and then squat. She refused.
Another time Ms. Wang was reported for talking to another practitioner, and Kan forced her to stand motionless for more than two hours. On a different occasion, Kan again forced her to stand after more than ten hours of manual labor. She almost fainted.
When Ms. Wang refused to write yet another thought report, guard Zhang Jia’nan ordered inmate Dai Wen to abuse her. She was not allowed to wash herself or drink water. She was also only given meager amounts of food to eat.
Ms. Wang also witnessed similar abuse of other jailed practitioners. Ms. Zhang Xiaona was not allowed to wash herself for more than three months. Another practitioner faced the same predicament and smelled terribly. Only then was she allowed to clean herself. The same practitioner was later forced to stand barefoot without a winter coat after working long hours each day.
For ten months, Ms. Wang was not allowed to purchase daily necessities. She felt dizzy on several occasions, as she was not given enough food to eat and had nothing to snack on. In order to meet the quotas, team leads often did not allow people to eat breakfast as it would take up work time. While other inmates ate what they bought from the prison store for breakfast, Ms. Wang had nothing to eat and was pushed to finish the work quickly.
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