81-Year-Old Mother Speaks Out After Son Targeted by CCP’s Repression of Faith

Her son, Qin Shuhai, has been detained since Jan. 18 for practicing the Chinese spiritual tradition of Falun Gong.

Liu Yuying. minghui.org

On Jan. 18, Liu Yuying witnessed her adult son being dragged away by the police, along with two other Chinese citizens targeted by the Communist regime in its unprecedented repression of faith.

Twenty-six days later, she lost her daughter-in-law, Xie Shuhua, who had been paralyzed for years when over a dozen police raided their home following the arrest. The fright and worries about her loved one worsened Ms. Xie’s condition, and she died on Feb. 13.

“My heart shattered” after seeing the death of her daughter-in-law, Ms. Liu said in a video, her voice cracking. “What wrongdoing had my son done? All he did was just being a good man.”

On Feb. 3, a procurator in Jinzhou city in the country’s northeastern province of Liaoning, formally arrested her son, Qin Shuhai, for practicing the spiritual tradition of Falun Gong.

Falun Gong is a spiritual discipline consisting of meditative exercises and moral teachings based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. Its benefits to mental and physical health led to its widespread popularity, with an estimated 70 to 100 million people practicing by the end of the last century.

However, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) deemed the discipline’s popularity a threat to its control and atheist ideologies, and in 1999, it initiated a nationwide persecution against Falun Gong, mobilizing the entire nation’s security apparatus to locate and arrest its adherents.

According to Minghui, a website dedicated to reporting on Falun Gong, Mr. Qin’s relatives had sought to request the police authorities release Mr. Qin, at least temporarily, to attend his wife’s funeral, but their efforts were in vain. Local police told them that it was no longer their business and directed them to the prosecutor.

Ms. Liu, 81, now relies on neighbors’ help for cooking meals and other basic daily tasks that she struggled to perform herself.

Her ordeal resulting from the CCP’s persecution is just one of the countless many where the elderly were left to fend for themself after their adult children were imprisoned or persecuted to death for persisting their faith.

Imprisonment and Abuse

Since 1999, millions of practitioners have been thrown in forced labor camps, brainwashing centers, and jails across the country, where they were subjected to torture and abuse in an attempt to force them to recant their beliefs. A large but untold number of adherents are believed to have been tortured to death or even killed for their organs.

In the first two months of this year, Minghui verified 178 Chinese citizens who were sentenced to prison for practicing Falun Gong or raising awareness about the persecution.

Among them was Hu Yurong, a middle school teacher and a Falun Gong practitioner living in Qu county, Sichuan Province. Local authorities have detained Ms. Hu since her arrest in April 2020. For years, they kept her case in secrecy, leaving her family worried about their loved one’s fate.

In mid-January, Ms. Hu’s family found out that she had been given a seven-year jail term for her faith, and is currently being held at the Chengdu Women’s Prison, they told Minghui.

Ms. Hu had endured multiple and lengthy stains in detention centers, forced labor camps, prisons, psychiatric wards, and other facilities for refusing to give up her faith. In total, she spent over 16 years behind bars.

While incarcerated, she withstood torture and abuse. Once, the police hung her up to the ceiling of a dark jail cell, with her wrists and ankles tied up. For six days and nights, the police kept her in the painful position while denying her access to food and drink. On another occasion, the guards forced her to wear only a thin layer of cloth and kneel outside in the winter for 24 hours.

Death

To enlist the public’s support for its brutal suppression, the CCP’s propaganda organs also launched a sweeping hate campaign. Xia Zhenglun, an insurance sales agent, had for years accepted the official narrative of the persecution. That changed in the spring of 2012 when he came across the practice’s main book, “Zhuan Falun.”

“Many things that I couldn’t understand in my life suddenly became clear to me,” he recalled to Minghui the feeling after reading the Falun Gong teachings. He decided to live according to its moral tenets: truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.

In February 2023, Mr. Xu was arrested in Lianyungang city, in southern China’s Jiangsu Province, and brought to Guanyun County Detention Center. He died less than seven months after detention.

It’s not immediately unclear what the 65-year-old man experienced in custody. According to Minghui, Mr. Xia was in good health condition before being taken away by local police.

After nearly a quarter of a century’s persecution, more than 5,000 practitioners have been killed by torture, according to statistics collected by Minghui. The actual number of deaths, however, is believed to be much higher, given the difficulty of getting related information out of China.