Freed from jail in 2021, Shandong’s Wang Jinhua can no longer sleep without medicines nor speak clearly.
by Yang Feng


For Falun Gong practitioners in China, there is anguish and pain in jail but there is an unbearable life after prison too. The story of Wang Jinhua, a retired schoolteacher from Shandong province, is not unique. But it is particularly sad.
Wang was born in 1951 in Pingyuan county, under the administration of the prefecture-level city of Dezhou, in northwestern Shandong. He is a veteran Falun Gong practitioner. He and his wife Jing Chuanfeng started practicing Falun Gong in 1997.
They were already among the victims of the first national crackdown on Falun Gong in 1999. Since then, Wang was arrested nine times, and his wife was detained three times. The last decision against Wang was in 2019. In July, he was sentenced to two years in jail.
In Shandong Provincial Prison and then in Nanshan Prison, as a recidivist Falun Gong practitioner, he was continuously tortured, deprived of sleep, and forced to take injections and medicines of an unknown nature.
He was released and went back home on October 9, 2021. But he was a broken man. He suffers of pains all over his body, is often confused, cannot sleep without medicaments, and is no longer able to speak clearly, according to information that his family forwarded to human rights organizations and tried to spread through social media in December 2023.
Although he clearly no longer represents a threat, Wang is continuously kept under surveillance, which makes his condition worse.
Such is the regime of terror imposed on Falun Gong practitioners even when they have purged their sentences and are technically “free.”