‘When it comes to Falun Gong, the CCP follows no laws. They arrest people and send them to prison at will,’ says woman who escaped China
Shi Baohua opened her eyes. She was in a hospital bed, but she had no idea how she got there.
Clearly, though, she was in bad shape. Her spine was fractured; a few broken ribs had forced their way into her lungs; her wrists were broken and dislocated; and her clavicle was swollen purple.
She had spent six days in a coma, after falling from a third-floor balcony, her daughter, Qin Lili, told her. But Shi had no memory of that, much less an inclination to do such a thing on purpose.
Gradually, some memories streamed back. It was 2019. A week before, her daughter and son-in-law had come to visit her. But they had been followed.
Police came and grabbed her son-in-law. Her daughter managed to lock the door and tried to reason with the police. Shi remembered rushing to the back room to hastily pack and hide the printers and all the Falun Gong materials already printed out. Then, nothing.
When Qin went into the back room, she was blocked by the police. Her mother was gone. Did they push her off the balcony? To this day, the family doesn’t know.
Shi’s story is but a drop in the sea of senseless repression in today’s China—a totalitarian surveillance state where possession of dissident literature can land one in prison for years, often tortured to the brink of death, or slaughtered outright, with one’s organs sold to the highest bidder.
Shi refused to accept such a fate. Incapacitated as she was, she started to contemplate her escape from the hospital.
“I was still not very clearheaded, but I had an intense feeling that I couldn’t be there,” she told The Epoch Times.
But officers from the 610 Office, an extrajudicial, Gestapo-like agency tasked with suppressing the Falun Gong faith group, were monitoring her hospital room and had instructed the doctors to do the same.
The family waited for the 610 officers to take a break, then carried Shi out of the hospital. Nobody stopped them.
They loaded her broken body into a car and drove her to her daughter’s home in another city. Within two months, she had almost completely recovered, a fact she credited to her faith and persistence in doing Falun Gong’s Taichi-like exercises.
By this time, Shi was accustomed to living as a fugitive. Since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) launched the persecution of Falun Gong in 1999, Shi had been arrested five times.
The Epoch Times spoke with Shi and other Falun Gong practitioners ahead of July 20, the date marking 26 years of persecution against the spiritual group in China.
