(Minghui.org) A 64-year-old woman in Harbin City, Heilongjiang Province, completed a 14 year prison term on November 13, 2025. Ms. Tian Xiaoping was incarcerated because she practices Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline that has been persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party since July 1999.
Ms. Tian was arrested on November 13, 2011, and put in the Harbin City Second Detention Center. After she was sentenced to 14 years on May 31, 2012, she was admitted to the Heilongjiang Province Women’s Prison on August 1st that year. Minghui.org previously reported on the details of her arrest, sentencing, and abuse in custody. This report presents newly available information about her persecution in the prison.
Not long after she was admitted to prison, against her will Ms. Tian was forced to write a statement to renounce her faith. She felt tremendous shame afterward because she recovered from severe cervical spondylosis (wear and tear affecting the spinal disks in the neck) and migraine headaches after she began practicing Falun Gong.
On top of her mental anguish, Ms. Tian faced continued abuse. She was no longer able to care for herself. She felt dizzy all day, often vomited, and felt anxious. Her body twitched and she felt exhausted. She had to use a wheelchair.
The prison guards took her to an outside hospital, and a neurologist diagnosed her with anxiety and depression. Throughout the next two years, her health kept declining, and she was examined at outside hospitals four more times. She was diagnosed with high blood pressure, irregular and fast heart beat (tachycardia and arrhythmia), reflux gastritis, reflux esophagitis, descending duodenal ulcer, multiple lacunar infarcts, type 2 diabetes, and diabetic ketoacidosis.
Ms. Tian was also hospitalized after she fell and she was unable to eat for five days. The prison hospital didn’t even dare to give her IV drips as her heart rate was abnormally fast. Her complexion turned gray. Only then did the guards call in an ambulance. The monitor inside the ambulance showed her heart rate was as high as 280-290 beats per minute (when a normal range is 60-100). The ambulance driver dared not drive too fast, fearing she might have a heart attack.
The outside hospital gave Ms. Tian seven days of insulin infusions. Her condition stabilized after she was hospitalized for a week, and she was brought back to the prison. She still vomited every day and was unable to care for herself.
Thinking about how she recovered from her neck problem when she took up Falun Gong in 1996, Ms. Tian decided to start doing the Falun Gong exercises. The guards initially did not stop her. She gradually was able to get out of bed and stand steadily on her own. As she got better, head inmate Li Xiaowen stopped her from doing the exercises in the cell. When she did the exercises in the hallway Li reported her to guard Wu Zhiyan.
Wu said she was okay with Ms. Tian doing the exercises as long as she did not do it in the hallway. Ms. Tian did the exercises again in the cell, and her cellmates reported her to team leads Wu Hong, Jiang Ting, and Yu Huidan.
The three team leads had a talk with Ms. Tian. She expressed her determination to keep practicing Falun Gong. They asked her to write a statement to indicate so. She then wrote a solemn declaration in August 2014 to nullify the statement she was forced to write to renounce her faith back in 2012. She made two copies of the declaration and pressed her fingerprints.
Ms. Tian was reassigned from the division for the elderly and the infirm to a regular division in April 2015. In the next ten plus years, she held firm to her faith and never wore uniforms and badges, underwent required physical exams, or signed any paperwork again.
Around 2016, the prison built a computer database and ordered everyone to have their pictures taken to upload into the system. Ms. Tian refused to comply. She lay in bed and covered herself with the bedsheet. A guard then took pictures of the bedsheet. As a result, the prison database did not have Ms. Tian’s picture. They only had certain personal information of her transferred from the detention center.
While the guards allowed Ms. Tian to do Falun Gong exercises, they put her on strict management in her last decade of incarceration. A typical phone call with families was ten minutes, but she was only given five minutes to talk to her loved ones. The guards also denied her family visits and only allowed her one visit in the last three months of her term. She could only spend 100 yuan each month on daily necessities when other inmates had a spending limit of 300 yuan.
Ms. Tian was severely malnourished as a result of the lack of sufficient and quality food intake. She suffered vitamin and calcium deficiencies, and her gums often bled. She also lost a few teeth.
The prison also never mailed out the motion Ms. Tian wrote to reconsider her wrongful conviction.
Ms. Tian’s term ended on November 13, 2025. An inmate asked her to sign the certificate of release. When she refused the inmate reported it to the guard on duty. The guard threatened to keep her in detention if she dared defy the order. She was not intimidated, and the guard released her.
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