Two families have been devastated by the persecution of Falun Gong: Those of Wang Zideng and his brother Mr. Wang Zike. Wang Zideng's family consists of his wife, Ms. Wang, their son, Wang Xin, and their daughter, Wang Jing. His brother Wang Zike's family consists of his wife, Ms. Han Xiuli, and their daughter, Wang Shujie. All of them lived in Nanmiaoshan 3rd Village, Miaoshan Town, Laiwu City, Shandong Province.

Mr. Wang Zideng and his family began practicing Falun Gong in 1994. He has always been kind and honest, and Ms. Wang is very warm-hearted. After they learned Falun Gong, they also began to conduct themselves according to the principles of Truth-Compassion-Tolerance.  

Up until 2000, Mr. Wang and his wife operated a small business at the Guansi Market in Laiwu City. The following is an example of their character. In 1998, a customer left a brown bag containing over 200,000 Yuan in cash, over 100,000 Yuan in receipts and a cell phone on Mr. Wang’s stand. Mr. Wang kept it for him. When he returned, anxiously looking for the bag, Mr. Wang gave it to him. He was so relieved that he took out two stacks of cash to give to Mr. Wang as a gesture of thanks. Mr. Wang kindly refused. The customers and vendors who heard about it could not believe that there were such good people in the world.

Their daughter, Ms. Wang Jing, was in high school, and their son, Wang Xin, was just two years old at that time.

Mr. Wang did not only treat his customers with honesty; he was the same with other vendors and business competitors. He conducted himself according to the principle of Truth-Compassion-Tolerance and mediated many conflicts. Private business owners have to pay an annual 3,000 Yuan in taxes and 1,700 Yuan in administration fees. Mr. Wang was always among the first to pay taxes. The Wangs were known as law-abiding citizens.

On July 19, 2000, after the persecution of Falun Gong started, Mr. Wang's family gathered at his house to celebrate little Wang Xin's birthday. Wang Zideng's sister-in-law, Ms. Han Xiuli (his brother's wife), was also present with her daughter, Wang Shujie, who at that time was only two years and four months old. Police officers Tian Yugang, Shao Liyong and others from the Guansi Police Station broke into the home. They pushed Mr. Wang to the ground. In front of everyone, including the little children, some of the policemen stepped on his head, some stepped on his feet, and others put handcuffs on him. They took him to the police station and then to a detention center. Mr. Wang's wife and other family members and relatives who were there were also sent to a detention center. Wang Zideng's two young children, fifteen-year-old Wang Jing and two-year-old Wang Xin, were taken to the police station. Han Xiuli's two-year-old daughter, Wang Shujie, was so frightened that she could not even cry.

Mr. Wang and his wife managed to escape from the detention center, and became homeless in order to avoid recapture. At this time, police officer Su Guojian, then-deputy head of the Guansi Police Station in the Laicheng District, and policemen Tian Yugang and Bi Yusi decided to pressure the Commerce and Industry Bureau to put Mr. Wang out of his business. As early as March 2000, they targeted his business for persecution. By November 2000, Mr. Wang was forced to close his doors.

On December 3, 2000, when Mr. Wang wanted to return home from being homeless, the police were there, and they blocked his door. He and his wife managed to escape, but the police took the family of his brother Wang Zike, including their two-year-old daughter, to the police station. They also arrested Mr.Wang’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Wang Jing. She was sleeping in her room at the time but the noise from the police in the living room woke her up. When the police realized there was someone in the bedroom, they barged in and carried her downstairs in her underwear. Wang Jing escaped along with her mother seven days later.

When the officers from the Guansi police station got back to the station, they interrogated the adults while pounding on the table and cursing and shouting at them. Before Wang Zike even opened his mouth, the officer used a book to slap his face. His daughter, Wang Shujie, who was watching, immediately passed out from the shock and from fear. After she regained consciousness, she had a fever and was sweating profusely. She shook her head from side to side due to severe pain in her head. She was nervous and uneasy and kept banging her head against the wall. After the family returned home, she slept for a whole day. After that, the police went to her home over and over again to arrest her family members. She was not at home when they arrested her father. Shujie missed her father very much. She had a picture taken with her father. She often held it in her little hands and sobbed deeply.

After her father was released, on the evening of August 14, 2001, Li, the chief of police, and also the political chief of the Miaoshan Police Station, went to Shujie's home again, with a police stick in his hand, to arrest people. Shujie awoke after having fallen asleep minutes before and shouted, "Dad, Mom, I won't let you go!" She grew thinner every day. At dawn on February 1, 2002, nearly 20 police officers surrounded her home. They broke inside in an attempt to force Shujie's father to go to a brainwashing center. Shujie was so scared she wet her bed. The police simply ignored her, took away her father and sent him to a brainwashing center. Shujie cried loudly.

On February 14, 2002, Shujie and her aunt went to the brainwashing center to visit her father. When she returned, Shujie said to her mother, "Dad said today is my birthday, but he can't be with me." Mother looked at the emaciated child and shed tears. Shujie was only skin and bones and she had hardly grown since the persecution of her family started. She had a hard time sleeping and eating. When her father was released, her parents decided to take her to a hospital for help.

On July 11, 2002, Shujie's parents took her to the prestigious Qilu Hospital. Shujie was found to have a benign fluid bubble on her brain and needed surgery. After the operation, Shujie began convulsing and her body temperature reached 107.6° F. Four days later, on July 15, 2002, Shujie stopped breathing and died at the age of four. When she died, she was 85 cm. tall, the same height as when she attended Wang Xin's birthday on July 19, 2000. She had not grown at all during those two years.

The other child, Wang Jing, also suffered terribly. In March 2001, she went to Beijing to appeal to the government to stop persecuting Falun Gong and was arrested. On March 27, 2001, the local police took her back and held her in a custody center for one month. Then they transferred her to a detention center. In April 2001, when Wang Jing was sixteen years old, the police from Laiwu sent her to Jinan City's Jiangshuiquan Women Forced Labor Camp, where she was subjected to brainwashing and forced to do slave labor. She was often only allowed two hours of sleep. Because she was young, often lacked sleep and was exhausted, when she was working on a sewing machine, the needle went through her finger and became stuck.

Prior to her stay in the labor camp, Wang Jing was in her senior year in high school, but the police pressured the school to expel her and forbid her to apply to college. She was therefore deprived of her right to an education and, soon after, was sent to the labor camp. The perpetrators at the labor camp exhausted all of the methods at their disposal and forced Wang Jing to write a Guarantee Statement to not practice Falun Gong. Afterwards they planned to release her, but the officials from the Laiwu "610 Office" told them, "Her parents have not been found. We can't let her go home." Wang Jing was thus held at the forced labor camp for two years.

Mr. Wang Zideng and his wife finally returned home in 2004. Around 5:00 p.m. on August 5, 2004, about half a year after they returned home, Mr. Wang went to the kindergarten to pick up their son Wang Xin. After getting his son, while he was talking to an acquaintance, a dozen men wearing sunglasses and civilian clothes suddenly attacked him from behind. One man kicked the back of his knee and one man put his arm around his neck and pulled him to the ground. The rest of the men carried him away and threw him into a car about 200 meters away. His son was pushed to the ground and was left there sobbing.

Around 8:00 p.m. the same day, two police officers wearing black T-shirts knocked on Mr. Wang's door. Only the couple's two children, Wang Jing and six-year-old Wang Xin, were home. They refused to open the door. The police tried to open the door with a key. The kids locked the door from inside so the police couldn't open it, so the police pounded on the door. The kids were terrified and didn't make a sound. Around 11:00 p.m., more plainclothes police arrived, but after a while they left. Around midnight, the police shone a floodlight into the home through the window. They kept it on until around 5:00 a.m. Then they went back to the door and yelled and pounded on the door. The kids continued to cry loudly. Around 10:00 a.m., three or four police officers, each holding a rubber club, climbed in through the bathroom window, opened the door and ransacked the home. They threw all the Falun Gong books on the floor and tried to take them away. The police locked young Wang Xin in a room and interrogated him. It wasn’t until around 1:00 p.m. that the police left. They included Zhang Baode, Shao Shiyong, Tian Yugang and Tang Guangyun.

The two children were so frightened they could not eat and became increasingly thin. Wang Xin could not sleep at night and cried for his father. After his mother rocked him to sleep, within two hours he awoke from a nightmare and again cried for his father.

Even now, a police van numbered LU S1026 is still parked outside Mr. Wang's home around the clock, monitoring activities there.

Mr. Wang Zideng is being held at a local detention center. He and other Falun Gong practitioners held a hunger strike and were force-fed. The guards put shackles on him and often locked him, shirtless, to a metal chair. They also forced former Falun Gong practitioners who succumbed to brainwashing and torture to brainwash Mr. Wang. They tortured him day and night in an attempt to make him give up his belief. They threatened to put him on trial if he didn't give in. He is still holding a hunger strike to protest the persecution. He is extremely emaciated and his calves are severely swollen from the torture.

Wang Zideng's sister Ms. Wang Hui and brother-in-law Mr. Yin Yuxin were sentenced to three years of forced labor.

type=Case, Children; type=Case, Family; type=Case, Religious Intolerance