(Minghui.org) For upholding their faith, Falun Gong, a married couple in their 60s in Beijing were jailed a total of 15.5 years and the wife’s pension, their only source of income, was stopped in November 2025 as the authorities began to use her future benefits to pay the “debt” she “owed” them.
Shortly after the Chinese Communist Party ordered the persecution of Falun Gong in 1999, Mr. Wang Zicheng, a former employee of the Panfeng Hotel, was fired from his job and was not allowed to apply for retirement benefits. He and his wife, Ms. Zhang Aiping, were both arrested in 2003 and sentenced to 5 years and 4 years, respectively. Their two young children were left to fend for themselves while the couple were detained.
Mr. Wang was arrested again on November 29, 2009 and sentenced to 3.5 years.
The couple were seized on October 29, 2013, while distributing informational materials about Falun Gong. Mr. Wang was sentenced to five and a half years and Ms. Zhang was sentenced to four and a half years in August 2014. Only a year after Mr. Wang was released, he was arrested again on June 8, 2020 and was sentenced to another five and a half years and fined 11,000 yuan.
While Mr. Wang was imprisoned, the authorities kept harassing Ms. Zhang, ordering her to return the 161,886.84 yuan pension issued to her between 2014 and 2018 (the majority of her prison term). The authorities also canceled the cost-of-living adjustments to her pension, reducing her monthly benefit from over 3,000 yuan to over 2,000 yuan.
Fearful of further persecution, Ms. Zhang was forced to sign an agreement to return the 161,886.84 yuan “debt” to the Pinggu District Social Security Center. She borrowed 56,000 yuan from her family as an initial payment, but struggled to make further payments due to financial constraints.
In early November 2025, Ms. Zhang received a call from the local court saying that the Pinggu District Social Security Center filed a lawsuit against her, demanding she pay off the remaining “debt.” She explained that she couldn’t afford to make any payments due to the persecution over the years. The social security center stop her pension payments days later. The court claimed that they reached the decision after a hearing, but Ms. Zhang said she was not notified that a hearing would be held.
Mr. Wang, who was just released on December 7, 2025, applied for low-income subsidy, but was rejected, also because of his faith.
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