Xia Zhenglun “was tortured to death in Guanyun County, which is under the administration of Lianyungang prefecture-level city, in Jiangsu province.”
It took “only six months” after the murder to know what had happened, Bitter Winter’s Yang Feng bitterly reports (“Death of an Insurance Salesman: Falun Gong Practitioner Tortured to Death in Jiangsu,” March 1, 2024). In China, sometimes it takes that long to confirm such information, Yang says.
Xia used to be on the right side of the law, so to speak. He once accepted the government’s sour view of Falun Gong, which meant that he was not in the government’s sights. (At least not because of Falun Gong; it seems that everybody in China is in the government’s sights for one reason or another.)
But in 2012, Xia met some members of the spiritual movement, read their literature, found it persuasive, and became a practitioner of Falun Gong himself. According to Minghui.org, a Falun Gong website:
Before he became a Falun Gong practitioner, Mr. Xia had deep misunderstandings about the practice due to the communist regime’s persistent hate propaganda. After he came across Zhuan Falun, the book containing the main teachings of Falun Gong, by chance in 2012, he found answers to the many questions he had about life. After he tried the Falun Gong exercises for the first time, he reported that his body felt light and “wonderful beyond words.”
The Chinese Communist Party is hostile to various religions. When it found out about Xia’s participation in Falun Gong, which it had banned in 1999, the state did not regard this as an annoying but neutral fact. In 2014 the police raided the home of Xia Zhenglun, confiscated his Falun Gong literature, and detained him for 15 days. The 15-day detention is the Chinese state’s version of a warning, offered in the hope of scaring the detainee into submission.
The lesson didn’t take, though; in 2015, the police again detained Xia for 15 days. Yang writes:
He kept a low profile and practiced his Falun Gong quietly, which kept him out of jail for several years. According to his relatives, approaching retirement, he became more active, and the police arrested him in February 2023. He was detained at Guanyun County Detention Center [shown above].
In September 2023, he was transferred in emergency to Lianyungang First People’s Hospital and died shortly thereafter. It took several months for his relatives and co-religionists to investigate and collect several reports that he arrived at the hospital with the body badly bruised and swollen with edema. They insist that Xia was in good health when he was arrested.
Even if he hadn’t been in perfect health, that Xia’s body was badly bruised is evidence enough that he was beaten to death. Nor is the treatment an anomaly. Torture of prisoners is common in China.
