Remembering Fellow Practitioner Fan Dezhen

(Clearwisdom.net) When I browsed the Minghui website (the Chinese version of Clearwisdom) on April 23, I read the sad news that Fan Dezhen, a Falun Dafa practitioner from Huludao, had been tortured to death in jail. I pictured him in my mind.

At the end of 2000, when about a hundred practitioners from Huludao went to Tiananmen Square in Beijing to peacefully protest the persecution to Falun Dafa, they were detained or sent to labor camps. In January 2001, I got to know Fan Dezhen in the Huludao Detention Center. He and his father had been apprehended together.

Fan Dezhen, other practitioners, and I started to study the Fa and practice the exercises after we entered the jail. Although we were beaten many times, we pulled together and resisted the violence, gradually creating a normal environment in which to study the Fa and practice the exercises. My impression of Fan Dezhen was that, other than studying and reciting Fa, he did not like to talk. Later, we initiated a group hunger strike to protest the long term illegal detention of Falun Dafa practitioners. After observing the hunger strike for a few days, the detention center sent several practitioners to a guarded area. Then we were all sent off to forced labor camps. The female practitioners were sent to Masanjia Forced Labor Camp in Shenyang, and the male practitioners were sent to Huludao Forced Labor Camp.

A few days after we arrived in the labor camp, I saw Fan Dezhen again. At the time, the labor camp had dispatched a group of people to brainwash us. During that time, Fan Dezhen firmly resisted their attempts to "transform" him, so he was sent to a more strict supervisory team. Although we did not see Fan Dezhen anymore, we could often hear shouts of "Falun Dafa is good" from upstairs. We knew he was still firmly safeguarding his faith. Later we heard that he had become hoarse from crying out. Eventually we heard that the labor camp officials, fearing that Fan's determination would influence others, shut him into a vacant room in a nearby building.

After I was released, I went around inquiring for news of Fan Dezhen. Someone told me that after Fan had been on hunger strike for a month, his health was very poor and he was released. Later, because he printed Falun Dafa truth-clarifying materials and clarified the truth publicly, he was sentenced to forced labor several times. However, Fan was released every time, due to his firm faith and by hunger striking.

Today, Fan Dezhen has left this human world due to the Chinese Communist Party's brutal persecution of Dafa. His wife and child will never see him again.

Chinese version available at http://minghui.ca/mh/articles/2008/4/27/177301.html

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