(Minghui.org)
Name: Liang HepingChinese Name: 梁和平Gender: FemaleAge: 69City: BeijingProvince: N/AOccupation: retired machinery factory employeeDate of Death: winter of 2023Date of Most Recent Arrest: August 10, 2022Most Recent Place of Detention: a police case processing center
Minghui.org recently learned that a woman in Beijing died in the winter of 2023, after suffering years of persecution for practicing Falun Gong. She was 69.
Ms. Liang Heping was a retired employee of the Huairou District Plant Protection Machinery Factory. She began practicing Falun Gong after the persecution started in 1999. Between 2016 and 2022, she was repeatedly arrested and harassed. She lived alone. The mental distress took a toll on her health and she passed away at home.
Ms. Liang was first arrested on April 20, 2016. As she failed the required physical exam, she was denied admission to the local detention center and was later released on bail. The police threatened to arrest her again the next day. They also harassed her and her family members, including her daughter who was about to give birth.
Ms. Liang was arrested again on April 4, 2020, after she was reported for passing out information about Falun Gong. Guo Haofeng, the chief of Quanhe Police Station, searched her and took seven flash drives from her pocket. They pushed her into the police car and took her to the hospital for a physical exam. She was found to have dangerously high blood pressure (238/128 mmHg), but the police refused to release her. They held her at a police hospital for several months. She was not allowed to contact anyone. They didn’t release her until her condition deteriorated.
The police continued to harass Ms. Liang, especially during major holidays or political events. She and her family lived in fear.
Police chief Guo attempted to arrest Ms. Liang again on November 2, 2020. When he couldn’t find her, he went to her daughter’s workplace. He said that they weren’t done with Ms. Liang’s arrest from April 2020 and threatened to put her on the wanted list if she didn’t come to the police station to fill out the case document.
Two officers broke into Ms. Liang’s home around 6 a.m. on March 25, 2021, and took her to the Huairou Town Police Station. They claimed that her bail condition from the arrest in April 2020 expired and needed to be processed. She went with them, only to be taken to the Shunyi District Lockup to serve a 15-day detention. She refused to undergo the required physical exam but the police forced her after several hours. When she was found to have extremely high blood pressure the police released her.
Ms. Liang’s fourth and last arrest was around 7:20 a.m. on August 10, 2022, during a police sweep. At least 25 other practitioners in Huairou District were also arrested.
Ms. Liang was held at the police case processing center for two days. When the police took her to the local detention center, she was denied admission again due to her high blood pressure. Although the police released her, they kept coming back to harass her.
The repeated arrests and harassment caused Ms. Liang to live in tremendous fear. To avoid implicating her family, she lived alone, which only worsened her mental distress. In November 2023, she told a local practitioner that she felt very depressed. A few weeks passed and local practitioners lost contact with her. When they went to visit her, no one answered the door. They contacted her family, who hired a locksmith to open the door. But she had already died.