[ Editors’ Note: Three days after this article was written, Gao was kidnapped by CCP officers from his sister’s house, and has been held incommunicado since that time. ]
My family and I have been illegally suppressed and harassed for 259 days by the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Commission on Political and Legal Affairs, the Ministry of Public Security, the Ministry of State Security, and the Ministry of Justice.
They initiated this persecution simply because I appealed in open letters to China’s top leaders Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao to face and to stop the atrocities the evil forces within the Communist Party (CCP) have committed against Falun Gong practitioners.
The public security system has used the worst forms of illegal and uncivilized means against my family and me, including incessantly following, watching, harassing, intimidating, besieging, and the like. In the past few dozen days in particular, the CCP’s police and special agents have committed their savage acts against my family anywhere—to the level of wantonness.
On the night of July 30, communist special agents beat me at the entrance of my home and right in front of my wife. They almost killed me. And that was the third time in a dozen days that they beat me. On August 4, still in pain from the beatings, I arrived at my sister’s home in Dongying City, Shandong Province. By the time I got there, my sister’s husband was on his deathbed.
When I went outside the building and was about to go to the hospital yesterday, I found a note on my car window—another evil act by special agents. They claimed they spoke for all residents living in Building 27 (where my sister lives) and ordered me to leave quickly. Three exclamation points followed the word “otherwise” in the note. One of the residents told my nephew, “They [the special agents] pasted a note on your uncle’s car. I don’t know what they are up to.”
Today special agents instructed community officials to let me know that my car is not allowed to be parked in front of the building, whereas the agents’ cars and other residents’ cars are all parked there.
My father died when I was little, and no words can describe how poor our family was then. The role my eldest brother played in raising his younger brothers and sisters has been imbedded in our minds. We are always ready to lend a hand, as much as possible, to our eldest brother and his family. The mutual care and love between our brothers and sisters has been the envy of our hometown folks.
When the CCP illegally revoked my attorney’s license, I was deprived of the means to help my eldest brother financially. Recently I used my money to rent two basement vendor’s stands inside a large shopping mall in Beijing for my brother’s two children. It took my wife, Geng He, nearly a month to close the deal. We had practically met all requirements of the owner.
To avoid harassment from the CCP’s agents, I didn’t go to the stands to have a look until my brother’s older son became ill a dozen days after the two children started the business. As expected, on the afternoon of the day of my visit, my brother’s younger son, who worked as a guard there, was fired. We managed to keep our anger under control and let him join his elder brother in selling vegetables.
On August 10, six uniformed policemen stepped in at the Office of Stands Administration. A few minutes later, officials from that office were in front of my brother’s elder son saying, “Officers from the Ministry of Public Security ordered that your two stands be taken back, and you are not allowed to sell vegetables in Beijing anymore.”
Even more absurdly, the nephew of a Mr. Huang, who had been illegally detained and interrogated by 20 policemen for more than 10 hours for teaching one of my younger brothers’ sons to cut hair, received the same notice on the same day, meaning his two stands were taken back, too. The kids cried in sorrow.
My wife was noticeably outraged that day when she said on the phone: “We can’t tolerate it anymore. We have stepped back again and again in the face of the shameless actions of the Ministry of Public Security. We feed these animals with our sweat, and yet they are hurting us day in and day out with such cowardly means. Our children make their living by selling vegetables, and they already belong to the lowest social stratum, having to support their families with hard labor. Still, those animals do not spare them! This time I will fight them to the end, despite the risks!”
At that, my sister, tears in her eyes, took a deep breath and replied: “Even if there is a crime, family members should not have been blamed for it. Why do they have to push us over the cliff?”
There are far more cases of “pushing us over the cliff” than stated above. On August 6, the third day after I arrived at my sister’s home, I went to visit two of my sister’s daughters who work at an oil field company in Hekou City. I had planned to stay at my sister’s older daughter’s home on the night of my arrival. No sooner had I arrived than her home phone connection was cut off. More ridiculous, on the same night, gas service was stopped, too, and so cooking couldn’t be done.
Considering the consequences, I kept silent about what had happened. On the morning of August 8, my nieces called their mother separately and asked, as they sobbed, that their uncle stay in their places for one more night each. The reason is, as the kids put it, that they had seen the wounds on their uncle’s body and felt that their uncle could get killed any moment as two or three dozen unidentified people followed him around the clock. They both said that they were afraid for their uncle’s safety and insisted that their uncle stay over for one more night each. With a big smile, I agreed.
On the afternoon of August 8, I was again on my way to my sister’s older daughter’s home, a 50- kilometer drive, but not without company—a convoy of four special agents’ cars. Their license plate numbers were Lu BZ0234, Lu E62396, Lu GS5588, and Lu EW1175. As I pulled into the driveway in front of my niece’s home building, I found another five cars already there, waiting, including one police car with its plate covered by newspapers. The plate numbers of the rest were Lu EE2212, Lu EE3395, Lu EE3326 (or maybe Lu EE3362), and Lu E78072.
This time the special agents took “better” care of me. It was a hot day, and less than one minute after we turned on the air conditioner when we stepped into the apartment, the electricity was cut off. Meanwhile the younger niece found that her home phone was cut off, too. At five o'clock, when the kids were about to start cooking, they realized that the gas supply had been stopped. So we had to dine out together.
The interesting thing is, the gas supply there is provided by the oil field company, and they had never experienced a cut-off. To cut off the supply to my niece’s apartment, they had to stop the supply to the whole building. The word spread in the building, and later in the whole compound, that I was the reason for the gas cut-off. Curious, many residents waited outside the building, eager to see me—a “dangerous person” in the eyes of the authorities.
On the afternoon of August 9, as I stepped outside the building, I saw crowds of curious people on both ends of the building. Unwilling to leave immediately, I walked over to them. As I stopped in front of them, they swarmed around me. Under the watchful eyes of the special agents, I had an interesting conversation with the local residents before I left.
The CCP’s public security system, at the direction of the Ministry of Public Security, has conducted a systematic and continuous harassment and persecution against my family and me for the past eight months, using illegal methods beyond reason and imagination. Everything they have resorted to has reached extremes.
During these eight months, my exposing and criticizing [their wrong doings] have not gone beyond individual cases, individuals, or a certain group. The authorities of the CCP’s public security system may have taken this as my fear of them, and that is why they have intensified their persecution by openly employing the wicked practices of cutting off my relatives’ means of living.
They not only beat me several times in the open, but also cut off the electricity, telephone lines, and gas supply to my relatives’ homes, at a time when one of my loved ones was in the last stage of his life.
The recent acts of the CCP’s public security system show that the very existence of my family and me is an eye sore for them and the cause of their sleepless nights. The Ministry of Public Security sent out a large number of uniformed policemen to stop my relatives from making a living by selling vegetables.
This senseless act [and all the rest] indicate that the manipulators behind the Ministry have lost their basic rationality. I wish to revive their senses and call on them not to push my innocent and unsophisticated relatives over the cliff. Remember this: Those who stop at nothing are at the same time digging their own graves!
August 12, 2006, at my home, which has been besieged by the CCP’s gangs for 259 days, and at my sister’s home in Dongying City, Shandong Province.
(Compiled from a transcript of conversations by telephone with Gao)