Entire Family Dies in the CCP’s Ongoing Repression of Faith

Falun Gong adherents take part in a candlelight vigil in memory of Falun Gong practitioners who passed away due to the Chinese Communist Party’s 24 years of persecution, at the National Mall in Washington on July 20, 2023. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

An entire family has died as a result of Beijing’s nationwide campaign to eradicate the spiritual tradition of Falun Gong.

Su Anzhou had previously lost his wife and son to the Chinese regime’s ongoing persecution of Falun Gong. On Jan. 10, Mr. Su succumbed to death at the age of 71 while under house arrest for the same reason.

Mr. Su is among the 13 death cases that Minghui, a website reporting Falun Gong, documented in its latest monthly report tracking the brutal repression of the faith group.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) began persecuting Falun Gong in 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.

Facing the brutality, Mr. Su, like numerous other Falun Gong practitioners, had tried all manner of peaceful means to raise awareness of and call for an end to the persecution.

Wife Dead

On Dec. 29, 2000, Mr. Su, along with his wife, traveled over 700 miles to Beijing in an attempt to tell the central authorities that Falun Gong is good and how they benefited from practicing its moral teachings. However, the regime responded to their peaceful protest with violence.

At Tiananmen Square, the couple unfurled a banner reading “Falun Dafa is Good.” They were immediately dragged away and thrown to a police station nearby before being transferred back to their hometown in Lanzhou, the capital of China’s western Gansu Province.

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Mr. Su was later given a 1-year sentence at a forced labor camp in Lanzhou. While in detention, Mr. Su was forced to work 13 to 16 hours a day and frequently beaten by other inmates on the order of guards. As his health deteriorated, the authorities released him to avoid being blamed for his condition.

His wife, Ge Cuifang, was detained at a separate detention facility in Lanzhou till October 2001. Ms. Ge died in 2002 while attempting to evade persecution.

In the early morning of June 13, 2002, when a group of police repeatedly banged on the door of their apartment following the arrest of her husband, Ms. Ge tried to escape by climbing from the window with a rope. But the rope gave way and she fell to the ground.

At the time, Ms. Ge was still alive, her neighbor told Minghui, yet the police stopped them from calling an ambulance. Their neighbors added that they saw the police take keys from her pocket and go back to ransack her apartment, leaving Ms. Ge lying on the ground for hours before she ultimately died at about 4 p.m. She was only 48 years old.

Su Anzhou(R), Ge Huifang (L) and their son, Su Wei (M). The entire family has dead the Chinese regime's ongoing persecution of Falun Gong. (Minghui)

Continued Resistance

Formerly a staff at the Lanzhou railway bureau, Mr. Su began practicing the meditative exercises of Falun Gong in the spring of 1997. He said he was cured of heart disease and migraines, which often appeared as an intense pain on one side of the head, without medical intervention.

Stunned by the healing effects, Mr. Su recommended Falun Gong to his wife. After reading its main book, “Zhuan Falun,” Ms. Ge decided to take it up as she was attracted by its moral tenets: truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.

By the end of the last century, an estimated 70 to 100 million Chinese were practicing Falun Gong, a figure higher than the Communist Party membership at the time. Practitioners came from almost all walks of life, from professors to barely literate villagers.

Fearful of the practice’s surging popularity, then-Party boss Jiang Zemin ordered the eradication of Falun Gong in 1999, mobilizing the entire nation’s public security organs to monitor and detain adherents. The Party’s propaganda organs also launched a nationwide slander campaign to enlist the public’s support for its brutal suppression.

Persecution was escalated in 2001 after an event was staged in Tiananmen Square. In January 2001, several purported Falun Gong practitioners, including a mother and a 12-year-old daughter, set themselves on fire. The scene was captured from multiple angles and state media broadcasted the footage nationwide for weeks.

The incident was the CCP’s attempt to slander Falun Gong, the NGO International Educational Development confirmed on Aug. 14, 2001.

To help the Chinese access the truth, in the summer of 2002, Mr. Su, along with a small group of Falun Gong practitioners, hijacked two massive provinces’ television signals, airing footage that exposed the state-sponsored lies.

Tens of millions of residents in the western provinces of Gansu and Qinghai watched the uncensored news for at least half an hour.

Consequently, Mr. Su and six other Falun Gong practitioners were arrested in September 2002. Mr. Su was later sentenced to 10 years in prison, while some of the adherents received 20-year jail terms.

During his second detention, Mr. Su was again tortured brutally. Once, his arm and wrists lost feelings for eight months after the police strapped him to the infamous “tiger chairs”—in which he was kept in a fixed position causing excruciating pain while being beaten—for a total of 72 hours. Several times, he was persecuted to the brink of death.

Son Passed Away

While Mr. Su was incarcerated, his teen son was left with no family and had to fend for himself. Su Wei often starved and couldn’t afford the treatment he needed for a lung disease, which later developed into cancer. On Aug. 4, 2006, the young boy died alone at home.

Mr. Su, despite becoming incapacitated as a result of torture, still faced constant monitoring and coercion by local CCP officials after he was released in January 2010. The pressure escalated during the COVID-19 pandemic when police and neighborhood community staff harassed him on a nearly monthly basis.

His last arrest before dying was in October 2023. Police officers from Lanzhou Qilihe Domestic Security Department, and the Public Security Bureau, took Mr. Su away from his bed and threw him to a detention center. As his health condition was too weak, Mr. Su was placed under house arrest.

After enduring years of trauma, Mr. Su lost his life on Jan. 10, 2024.

It may never be known how many other families like Mr. Su’s have died in the course of the persecution that started 25 years ago. To date, Minghui has confirmed over 5,000 practitioner deaths. The actual number of deaths is likely many times higher, the website noted, considering the regime’s strict censorship of related information.

Many more were still being held in the country’s vast detention facilities. In the first month of this year, China’s courts sentenced 38 Falun Gong practitioners to prison, according to the Minghui report.

Under the watch of Xi Jinping, China’s current leader, the regime only turned the dial up in its abuses. According to an analysis of official documents by the Falun Dafa Information Center, the persecution of Falun Gong emerged as a higher priority for the CCP’s security apparatus than in previous years.