Corrupt Officials Arrest Appealing Retired Workers as Falun Gong Practitioners and Persecute Them

(Clearwisdom.net) On a train on my way to Northeastern China, I met a worker from a forestry center. After learning that I cultivated Falun Gong, he told me a true but strange story.

He said that for the past few years, the employees from several forestry bureaus have had some trying times. Even though you could see one trainload of trees after another transported to the south and the north, all the hard-working retired forestry workers had monthly retirement pensions of only about three hundred to four hundred yuan. This meager income could hardly support them. On the contrary, the directors left one after another once they had made enough money through their corruption and abuse of power. They did not even think about their employees. As a result, the workers voluntarily organized and decided to appeal to demand an increase in their salaries. But it was difficult since they had no money to go to Beijing.

So the forestry workers set up check-points at the train stops. They thought that their supervisors would comply with their requests, but in fact the incident turned out to be a disaster for them. The local public security bureau brought them to the police substation, forcing them to admit that they made this trouble as a result of practicing Falun Gong. Among all of these grey-haired, older workers, the youngest was over 60 years old, and the oldest was nearly in his 80s. They were surprised and stunned since they did not know what Falun Gong was. A police head said, "Why do not you just recommend one person from your group to us, pretending he is a Falun Gong, because it is easy for us to handle a Falun Gong case. This way, we can get our job done more easily." One week later, these older persons were actually convicted. Three of them who were younger (but over 60 years old) were sentenced to three years' forced labor. Their charges were "Falun Gong practitioners who made trouble by stopping the train." Isn't this seem ridiculous?

People who do not practice Falun Gong were arrested as Falun Gong practitioners. For those who genuinely practice Falun Gong, aren't they at even greater risk of being arrested? Why? Is this what Jiang Zemin calls "human rights"?
Chinese version available at http://minghui.ca/mh/articles/2005/1/14/93505.html

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