Li Fenglan had breast cancer and Li Yuzhen may have suffered from some natural illness too. However, denial of adequate medical treatment combined with torture is a form of persecution to death.
by Yang Feng
As the CCP had to admit that the “total eradication” of Falun Gong, prematurely announced, never happened, its fury targets practitioners in jail, and extra-judicial killings multiply. Two women should now be added to the list.
Li Yuzhen, 74, from Daowai District, Harbin City, was tortured to death in the Heilongjiang Provincial Women’s Prison. Li was a veteran of Chinese jails. She was first arrested in 2003 for refusing to give up her practice of Falun Gong, tortured, and sentenced to three years of prison. She was arrested again in 2007, and sentenced to one year of labor camp, then again in 2013, although she was detained for a short period.
On June 10, 2021, she was arrested again, sentenced to four years, and transferred to the dreaded Heilongjiang Provincial Women’s Prison, nicknamed “the cemetery of Falun Gong ladies.” Thirty female Falun Gong practitioners have died there in suspicious circumstances, three of them in 2023. The prison also hosts ruthless common criminals, who are rewarded by the guards if they humiliate and torture the Falun Gong prisoners of conscience. Li Yuzhen was mistreated for two years, and was transferred to the hospital in January 2024, when she was a dying woman. She died soon thereafter.
In the case of Li Yuzhen, the authorities insist that she died of “natural causes.” The lack of transparency sometimes plays against the authorities themselves. It is possible that Li also suffered from some illness, although relatives claim she was comparatively healthy when she was arrested in 2021. Very often, it is a combination of untreated diseases and torture that causes the death of prisoners of conscience. There is little doubt that torture of female Falun Gong inmates is a routine practice in Heilongjiang Provincial Women’s Prison. Even if an unknown illness might have been a concomitant cause, listing Li among the prisoners “tortured to death” is certainly not inappropriate nor arbitrary.
Denying medical assistance and not properly treating natural diseases is also a form of torture. This is what happened to another female Falun Gong practitioner, Li Fenglan, 69, an inmate in Lanzhou Women’s Prison, in Gansu province.
A bureaucrat in the local finance bureau, Li was shortly and repeatedly detained in 2008, 2009, 2015, 2016, and 2018. In 2019, she was arrested again and sentenced but freed on medical parole after she developed breast cancer. However, she was shortly detained again in March 2022, released, and arrested in September 6, 2022. This time, despite her cancer, she was taken to jail to purge her full term.
While relatives claim Li Fenglan was also tortured, she was basically killed by denying her proper medical treatment for her breast cancer. If paroled again, she might have been properly treated. Instead, when she was finally transferred to the hospital in December 2023 after repeated requests by her husband, she was declared incurable and sent home where she died on January 10, 2024.
She did have cancer, but she died because she was refused proper medical treatment and, according to her relatives, she was also starved and routinely tortured. There are many ways of torturing prisoners of conscience to death.