I am Wang Changyou. I live in Wangjiazhuang village in Rugao City, Jiangsu Province. The Falun Gong cult is notorious in these parts. The people in our village absolutely hate it and turn their backs at the mere mention of “Falun Gong.”Twenty years ago, people who had practiced Falun Gong discovered that they had been deceived, so they have looked upon it as a shameful scandal and refuse to breathe a word about it. Since that time, people who hadn’t practiced Falun Gong generally thought that those who practiced Falun Gong were strange or mentally deranged. To some extent, people who practiced Falun Gong were treated with a certain level of discrimination. But in my view, those people were deceived and were not, themselves, bad people. The true bad guy is Li Hongzhi. Thus, we should neither discriminate against Falun Gong practitioners, despise them, nor should we refuse to mention the Falun Gong problem. Today I want to tell a true story about my old neighbor, Wang Changlai, whose whole family was exterminated by Falun Gong.

Before the demolition of my old home, Wang Changlai was my neighbor and he was also my remote cousin. He was a mason whose craft was pretty good. In the 1990s, he and his son Jiner (named Wang Jin) went out to work with a construction team. They earned tens of thousands of Yuan a year. His wife, Zhu Fang, stayed at home to farm. At that time, his family was richer than mine and most of the other neighbours in the village. However, everything changed when Zhu Fang followed others and began to practice Falun Gong.

At the end of 1997, when Changlai and his son returned home for the Spring Festival, Zhu fang told Changlai that she practiced Falun Gong to cure her arthritis. Many people practiced different forms of Qigong in our village at that time, and Zhu Jianfang was indeed suffering from arthritis. Changlai didn’t know that Falun Gong’s claims to be able to cure diseases were lies, therefore he didn’t prevent his wife from practicing Falun Gong.

After Spring Festival, Changlai and his son left home once more for work and Zhu Fang dedicated herself to practicing Falun Gong. She often went out to the lectures and when she returned she started to behave strangely. Once she saw me clearing my vegetable fields outside my door and came to my house to tell me and my partner that she was practicing Falun Gong. It was amazing that she did not feel the pain of arthritis without taking medicine. In her opinion, practicing Falun Gong was not only good for our body but could also teach us a lot about how to be good people. She said that if one person practiced, the whole family would benefit from it and that, to a certain degree, we could reach a state of completeness. She brought a book with her to show us as she advertised the benefits of practicing Falun Gong, the detail of which I can’t recall now. She asked my wife and I to follow her in practicing Falun Gong her. Because we had a young child, our family was in good condition and our bodies were healthy, I felt there was no need to practice Falun Gong,so I turned her down.

From then on, I often saw her close the door and lock it. She practiced Falun Gong all day outside and now and then someone came to her home, mysteriously. As the days got warmer, a man often came to her home in broad daylight and shut the door behind him. I was afraid that no good thing could come from those meetings. Such suspicions existed in our minds, but because we did not see anything, we couldn’t speak of it without knowing the facts. By the end of the year, something terrible happened. Changlai and his son came back home from work for the New Year. After likely hearing some gossip, Changlai asked Zhu Fang what the hell was going on. Unexpectedly, Zhu Fang told him without shame that the man, who was the counselor of rural assistance station, came to her home to counsel her exclusively. She said: “In the cultivation world, there is a cultivation method called Twin Disciples. The goal of Twin Disciples was to deplete yin to improve yang, to exhaust yang to nourish yin, and finally to bring yin and yang into balance. This method was written by the “master”in holy books. The master also said that even the Bodhisattvas in the temple, both male and female, would embrace each other naked.” Hearing what she said, Changlai was consumed by jealousy and full of rage. , Ashamed and indignant, he beat Zhu Fang. That night, on December 27 1998, Changlai hanged himself. Zhu Jianfang and Jiner called me to their home. It was I who untied the rope and brought Changlai down. Zhu Fang wept out: “I am to blame. It is my practice of Falun Gong which killed him.” Busy with the affairs of Changlai, we failed to notice that Zhu Fang walked away secretly. We could not find her anywhere. Several days after the funeral of Changlai, on the morning of January 5 1999, the body of Zhu Fang was found floating on the river in the east of our village. She had jumped into the river to commit suicide.

In the blink of an eye, Wang Jin had lost two loved ones. He was too angry and lost himself in the pain and stayed at home alone and did nothing all day. He neither went out to work nor farmed at home. After a while, he began wandering. A girl in the west of our village originally wanted to marry him, but when she found Wang Jin had changed completely, she broke things off with him. Wang Jin had no source of income, so he sold his property after he spent all of the family’s savings. After he sold all the furniture, he began to tear the house down to sell it piece by piece. He had a nice three room, tile-roofed house. He sold a couple of the tiles one day and a few bricks the next. After selling everything from the eastern room, he began to tear the western one down. Village cadres found he had no shelter, so they helped him rebuild a house. Later, his mental state became more and more serious. Gradually, he did not go home and became displaced. Villagers took a lot of measures to help him, but all to no avail. On January 22 of last winter, the coldest day (minus 13 degrees) in the past thirty years, Wang Jin was found to have frozen to death by his neighbor who usually took care of him. He died without any bedding at only 44 years old.

A happy home was exterminated in this way by Falun Gong.