(Minghui.org) Ms. Xiang Huaixiang was sentenced to 7 years for distributing Falun Gong informational materials. After she was released in 2017, she discovered that her pension had been suspended since September 2014. Her request to have her pension restored has been repeatedly denied. Her only daughter, also a Falun Gong practitioner, was driven insane while in custody and died in her 20s in November 2014.
Ms. Xiang was born in Hengdong County, Hunan Province on August 13, 1950 . She is a retiree of China Construction Bank Chenzhou Branch, and was elected as an outstanding employee many times at both the city and provincial levels. She began practicing Falun Gong in April 1996. The miraculous effects of Falun Gong made it possible for her to bid farewell to all of her illnesses. She has since never been ill and has not needed any medications.
After the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) began to persecute Falun Gong in July 1999, Ms. Xiang was repeatedly targeted for exposing the persecution to the public.
Ms. Xiang's only daughter, Ms. Chen Lijuan, was arrested in 2000 while doing the Falun Gong exercises at Tiananmen Square in Beijing. She was around 20 years old at the time and still a college student. Chen Bing, head of the Chenzhou Political and Security Section (now the Domestic Security Division), and other officers went to Beijing and took her back to Chenzhou and locked her up at a detention center. She became mentally disordered as a result of torture and intense stress. She was released on bail and was eventually sent to a mental hospital in July 2000 for treatment. However, her condition worsened and she died in November 2004.
The residential committee director reported Ms. Xiang for producing and distributing Falun Gong information materials in 2010. She was arrested at home on July 19 that year. The police also ransacked her home, terrifying her bedridden husband. They confiscated 17,000 yuan in cash, a computer, a disc burner, and Falun Dafa materials, as well as some personal belongings.
Ms. Xiang appeared in court four times between November 5, 2010 and April 7, 2011, and was finally sentenced to a seven-year jail term for “using a cult to undermine the enforcement of the law,” a standard pretext used by the regime to frame and imprison Falun Gong practitioners.
Ms. Xiang was released on July 18, 2017 and found out that her pension had been suspended since September 2014. She has repeatedly appealed to her former employer and the provincial social security bureau, but to no avail. Her employer further demanded that she return the more than 90,000 yuan of pension benefits she received between September 2010 and September 2014. As she did not have money to meet the demand, her employer has been deducting money from her pension account since August 2017 (one month after she was released). They said they’d issue minimum living expenses after recouping the entire amount of 90,000 yuan in nine years, but they would not restore her retirement benefits.
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The Persecution of a Woman in Her 60's and the Hardship it Causes Her Elderly Mother