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NEW YORK—At the surface, it is hard to tell how much 55-year-old Suhuan Zhao has been through. Behind her eyes one can see extraordinary calmness—one that is brought out from great compassion and one that kept her from giving up her faith under indescribable pressure.
Ms. Zhao used to own a business and earned a lot of money, but couldn’t enjoy life because she was sick with heart disease. She said she was a really bad person back then; constantly fighting with others and deceiving many people in order to earn more money.
In 1996, a friend introduced her to the traditional Chinese cultivation practice Falun Gong, and within half a month of practicing, all her illnesses disappeared. Falun Gong is based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance, and the teachings changed Ms. Zhao completely. She no longer cheated people and started to put other people above herself. She knew she had obtained an extraordinary practice.
By 1996 Falun Gong had grown so popular that the atheistic Chinese Communist Party (CCP) began to react, banning Falun Gong books and investigating practitioners. In 1999, then-President Ziang Zemin ordered a full-scale persecution against the practice.
“It is precisely because [Falun Gong] is so good that the CCP persecutes it,” Ms. Zhao said.
On the morning of July 20, 1999, Ms. Zhao went to her practice site as usual and noticed the coordinator of the site was not there. The previous night, Falun Gong coordinators all over the country were arrested.
Ms. Zhao and her fellow practitioners were compelled to go to the Liaoning provincial office to appeal. When they arrived, they were forced into trucks and driven to Liaoning Stadium. They were detained there until1 a.m with no food or water.
The next day, they returned to the appeals office, still believing that the officials would listen. There, Ms. Zhao witnessed many practitioners being beaten and arrested.
“I lost my hope,” Ms. Zhao said. That afternoon, she decided to go to the Beijing Appeals Office.
The train station was full of police, and the hotels in Beijing were forbidden from receiving Falun Gong practitioners, so Ms. Zhao was forced to stay on the streets.
The police arrested practitioners outside the appeals office, so Ms. Zhao decided to go to Tiananmen Square. “We didn’t want to go there, we wanted to appeal through regular means,” she said, but felt they had no other choice. “If we go to the appeals office, we will be arrested and no one will know about it. If we go to Tiananmen Square, we will also be arrested, but the whole world will know about it.”
She handed out Falun Gong materials in Tiananmen Square, but was taken to the Tiananmen police station, where she was kept with mental patients. The next day they were taken to Jinzhou, Liaoning, where Ms. Zhao escaped.
She headed to Beijing again, but was arrested at the train station and sentenced to a month at the Shenyang Detention Center. There, over 20 practitioners were shocked with electric batons for doing Falun Gong exercises. When her term ended, in April 2000 Ms. Zhao was sent to a brainwashing center.
She was arrested again in July that year, and spent the next two years in and out of re-education through labor (RTL) camps. Suffering untold torture and misery, Ms. Zhao also saw many other Falun Gong practitioners being persecuted. Once, she witnessed a 14-year-old girl being shocked by police with electric batons.
Her time in Masanjia RTL camp left Ms. Zhao with scars that remain today. “Every second of our lives was like a year,” she said.
There, the police force detained criminals to beat Falun Gong practitioners. If the criminals refused to do it, their sentences would be prolonged, and vice versa. “It is a place that can turn good people into bad people,” Ms. Zhao said.
Ms. Zhao also witnessed at Masanjia RTL the fabrication of a scene for the news. One day, the police filmed an old lady sitting in front of a bowl of noodles with a policeman pretending to feed her. Then he said in front of the camera, “You are just like my mother!” After the cameras were taken away, so were the noodles.
Another Falun Gong practitioner, Su Juzhen, who was released six months after Ms. Zhao, suffered a mental collapse from being injected with unknown drugs. When she was released she was in a vegetative state and unable to talk. She died in 2006, and when her body was being cremated, it was discovered that her bones were black.
The last time Ms. Zhao was arrested, she was sentenced to seven years, solely because she went to visit another Falun Gong practitioner. She was released early because her health became very critical after repeated hunger strikes.
In March, 2002, Ms. Zhao escaped from China through Tibet to Thailand, where she gained refugee status to the U.S. She described this as, “Escaping with bare life.”
After coming to the United States, she said her greatest wish was to tell the world about her story. The persecution of Falun Gong had been going on for 10 years, she said, and there were many people who were still being deprived of their freedom because they believed in truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.
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