“Dear Head Warden of Beijing Women’s Prison,
Greetings! My name is Gao Zhisheng; I am a lawyer who has been deprived of the right to practice my profession. I have been working very hard on defending those whose rights had been violated by the authorities for all these years. The facts of the severe persecution suffered by citizens who practice Falun Gong in recent years have been made known to the whole world! And the persecution is also one of my deepest concerns.
Today I was approached by close relatives of Ms. Yue Changzhi, who is incarcerated in Beijing Women’s Prison, to help with legal assistance regarding her parole... The barbarous persecution of Falun Gong believers has not only caused a tragic situation that is ‘loathed by people and condemned by heaven;’ but has also brought unrecoverable bad reputation to the images of the government and the nation. Faced with this reality, we should try to reduce the losses as much as we can! Every person, every Chinese person should work hard to achieve this goal.
Ms. Yue’s daughter is about to have a baby soon; and there is nobody in the family to take care of her. Releasing Ms. Yue will not bring any harm to the government or to society. On the contrary, continuous detainment of her will definitely bring harm to the image of the government and the nation under the current circumstances. Please consider my suggestion carefully! Please consider all aspects of this matter!
I sincerely hope that I can meet you in person to discuss a final solution to this affair. My best wishes to you and your whole family.”
Above is a letter written on December 19, 2005, the first letter I wrote to the Head Warden of Beijing Women’s Prison for the release of an elderly lady named Ms. Yue Changzhi.
Mrs. Yue was a former electronics engineer at the No. 2 Institute of the Ministry of Aerospace Industry in China, and a painter as well. She was arrested illegally eight times for practicing Falun Gong and sent to the brainwashing center twice. During these illegal incarcerations, the inhuman physical tortures and long-lasting horrifying mental maltreatments she suffered could not be fully recorded even if we used all the paper in the world. Ms Yue suffered hellish crucifixions; ultimately she was forced to leave her home in April 2000, and to live in exile in order to avoid any further persecutions, which could happen at any time.
In order to force this elderly lady to give up her belief, the worker’s union, the Security Department of her former workplace and the local Yongding Gate police station, all participated in persecuting her; they never spared her a minute’s peace. In the four years that she was a prisoner, a bunch of party cadres, with extremely strong limbs but with low morality, tortured her. Most of her arrests happened during the Chinese New Year Festival or other traditional festivals; each time she was tortured for days, weeks and months. She was also forced to pay not only for her accommodation and food during her detention, but also for all sorts of other unreasonable fees. After she left her home, the security department sent people to arrest her in the countryside in Shangdong province where she was hiding. On three occasions they barged into the American company where her youngest daughter Xiao Haiying was working in to search for her
Mrs Yue’s has had a life full of misery and misfortune. Her husband was driven to madness during the denouncement campaigns of the Culture Revolution and was constantly ill before he died. Because of all the tragedy she experienced while she was pregnant with her eldest son, he was born a sickly child and died at the age of eleven. Apart from losing her eldest son, she also had to look after her ailing husband, her two little daughters, and be the family’s slole bread winner as well. Her own health was not very good; as a child she was constantly sick. Such huge burdens have made her life full of misery.
However, this lady kept on doing good deeds. She donated 30,000 yuan to the victims of a huge flood in 1998. In my investigations I found this mother to be very kind-hearted and always ready to help others. She had done extremely well in her work too; so well her workplace re-employed her after she retired. She seeks neither fame nor money. Instead, she selflessly passed on her many years’ work experiences and technical patents to the younger generation. She has many talents too. She had been learning from famous painters for many years and her ink paintings have been exhibited many times.
Nevertheless, the communist regime has kept on illegally kidnapping such a respectable mother hroughout the past six years and, to this day, torturing her with inhuman means in their prisons.
In December, her youngest daughter was due to deliver her baby, and there was nobody at home to take care of her. My assistant and I went to the women’s prison on two occasions to plead with the prison head, who was also woman and a mother, but she chose to be deadly quiet! Before I went back to my hometown for Chinese New Year in 2006, I once again asked my assistant to deliver a letter in which I said, “I truly hope that you still possess one capability: the capability to release an innocent elderly lady who has been incarcerated by you, and whose daughter desperately needs her mother at this very special time of her life; this is the most necessary requirement and respect for a human being.” But it is very disappointing that once again we witnessed their cruel nature and complete inability to do good deeds.
The regime in China has completely lost its ability to solve social conflicts and problems; this is a fact that is too terribly true. It is the source of our countless countrymen’s misery and disaster; it is also source of the huge tragedy in our society and the source of the coming danger that has become almost unavoidable. Our whole society’s foundation of resolving problems and balancing conflicts has been structurally, purposely and completely destroyed; at the same time, those cruel and indecent official groups are continuously and brutally using their ability to create and instigate social conflicts without any barrier.
I cannot disagree with the view that this kind of social tragedy is what the central government mostly wants to see, although it is very possible the leaders of the government, President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, also suffer headaches because of this problem. You cannot see through their actions that they sincerely want to change the system that causes the tremendous pain to the Chinese nation.
The besieging of my office and my home has shown no sign of being reduced; large numbers of secret police gangsters are still wandering around me and use indecent means to stop whoever attempts others make to meet with me. Since yesterday, the telephone in my home and office, fax, and Internet, all have been cut off. The IP connection function on my mobile phone (which allows connection to Internet through the mobile phone) has also been disabled, and my mobile’s status shows “in conversation” three quarters of the day.
Today (Feb 22), Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau officers performed body searches and forcibly took photos of everyone who tried to see me but were unfortunately arrested by the gangster secret police in front of my office. Those brave citizens were beaten, threatened and questioned by the bureau, “Did you not provide Gao Zhisheng living expenses?” “Nobody is allowed to provide Gao Zhisheng any living expenses; whoever provides him living expenses will be sentenced. You should not provide him any money even if he is starving to death”
The people that had been interrogated told me on the phone, “Attorney Gao, such an ugly thing, how could those government officials say such terrible things so easily? They screamed at us, they said, ‘Gao Zhisheng is a bad guy, his family deserves to starve to death’, we were tremendously upset after listening to that!”
On Feb 22, 2006, in my office in Beijing that is surrounded by spies and gangsters.
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