The phone rang. It was cold that morning in Binzhou, just off the Bohai Bay in northeastern China. Two days before the Lunar New Year, it was time for families to come together. But Qi Guanmei couldn’t expect her daughter to visit. Not for a long time.

She picked up the phone.

“Mom,” she heard a familiar voice say. Tears streamed down her face as she listened to the sobs on the other end. It was the first time Qi had heard from her daughter in months. And now, they couldn’t speak, just weep.

They never said another word to each other again.

Qi couldn’t bear the pain of what was happening to her daughter. She collapsed on the floor with a stroke and was pronounced dead a short while after. Her daughter was in prison, despite not being a criminal. There was no justice. Just torment.

The year was 2006. Four months earlier, Qi’s daughter, Sun Dongxia, had been sentenced to five years in prison for possession of literature about Falun Gong, a faith group brutally persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Sun’s daughter, Gong Xiaoyan, shared with The Epoch Times her family’s story, a decades-long string of tragedies involving persecution that failed to break her spirit. Speaking at her home in upstate New York, she backed her account with contemporaneous articles and photographs.

‘Good Life’

Gong grew up in the comfort of CCP privilege. Her father was a colonel in the People’s Liberation Army. Her mother worked in the propaganda department of a state-run company, a job involving good pay and very little work, Gong said.

“We were not wealthy, but we had enough money to live a good life,” she said, noting her obliviousness to the nature of the regime she was living under.

“We thought the government was good. We loved our country, and we loved the CCP, because that’s how we were educated since we were very little children.”

For a military officer of his rank, Gong’s father would have been expected to amass substantial wealth, trading his influence for money and favors. It wasn’t just common, Gong said—it was the norm.

However, her father was known not to follow those corrupt practices, ever since he and Sun began practicing Falun Gong in the mid-1990s. The spiritual practice—which combines slow-moving exercises with teachings based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance—spread quickly across China after its public introduction in 1992. Its practitioners commonly reported improvements in both health and morality.

Gong recalled that her grandma Qi brought the Falun Gong book during a visit to the family’s home in the city of Qingdao in 1995.

Both her parents finished the book in a day. Despite being CCP members and thus officially atheist, they found Falun Gong’s spirituality extremely compelling.

“They were super excited,” Gong said.

One night, she remembered, her mother asked her father, “Have you read this book?”

“He said yes. She said, ‘Do you believe what the book said? Do you think this is true?’ And my dad said, ‘Yeah, it is true,’” Gong said.

One after another, five Falun Gong exercise groups sprung up in the park close to their home, with many more in other parks. Ten-year-old Gong would go with her mom almost every morning, playing while Sun did the exercises, until one day Gong asked if children could practice, too. She has practiced Falun Gong ever since.

Disillusion

Gong didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary until April 1999. That month, some Falun Gong practitioners were arrested in the city of Tianjin for raising concerns about a negative article printed in the media about Falun Gong.

Many Chinese that went through the Cultural Revolution knew that media denunciations were the canary in the coal mine of changing political winds. This signaled that the regime was turning against Falun Gong. When the arrests prompted even more complaints, Tianjin authorities responded by redirecting people to the Appeals Office in Beijing—the one place where Chinese citizens were allowed, in theory, to voice their grievances against the regime.

On April 25, 1999, about 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners showed up in Beijing, making their way to the office. They were blocked by the police, however, and redirected instead to the streets surrounding Zhongnanhai, the CCP leadership compound. There, they stood quietly, until then-Premier Zhu Rongji came out and invited several representatives to come inside to talk to him. When they came out again, they said the matter had been resolved, and everybody left.

Gong’s family knew nothing of that. All they heard was that some people were arrested and the situation was changing.

Then came July 20. As he did every evening, her father sat down in the living room to watch the 7 p.m. news. It was a regular 30-minute program on CCTV, the main CCP propaganda channel. That night, however, it was extended to one hour. The entire program was about Falun Gong.

“There were no other topics, no other content,” Gong said. “I was standing in front of the TV and watched for the whole hour. My jaw just dropped. I didn’t even move.”

The program depicted Falun Gong practitioners as dangerous lunatics bent on killing themselves and others.

“I was 14 years old at that time. I was so shocked, because I never knew a government could lie to its people like that, because nothing they said on the news was true. It was totally fabricated,” she said.

The family didn’t lose faith in the practice. They decided to lodge an appeal with the government in Qingdao.

“A lot of practitioners all went there. They wanted to let the people know that Falun Gong is good. It’s not what it appears to be on TV,” Gong said.

“Nobody would see us or talk to us.”

A few months later, she accompanied her mother to file an appeal at the office in Beijing. Not knowing the address, they went to Tiananmen Square and asked a random passerby for directions. Only later did they learn that the square was crawling with plainclothes police. The man, pretending to help them, led them to a plain van and said it would take them to the office. They got in. A few people were already waiting there and a few more got in after them. The van then took them to a place she didn’t recognize, an office of some sort. They were made to wait there for a few hours until some officials from Qingdao came to pick them up and take them back home by train.

Gong didn’t know who the officials were. They didn’t introduce themselves. They barely even looked at them.

“They treated us like we were psychotic,” she said.

Brainwashing

From that day on, Gong’s family was under constant pressure. Her mother was demoted to receptionist and periodically summoned by her supervisor to get “educated.” The purpose was to convince her to stop practicing Falun Gong.

First and foremost, “they have to make sure you don’t go to Beijing,” Gong said. “That’s the most important thing, because if my mom went to Beijing, they would all lose money.

“So it affects not only my mom or the supervisor, it affects the whole company. They would all lose their bonuses.”

The mere fact that a Falun Gong practitioner was among the employees put the supervisor’s career at risk. He would be skipped for promotion and could even lose his job over it, she said.

“The supervisor and a lot of her coworkers were very, very nice people, and they did a lot to help her. They were trying to protect her,” she said.

“It was the 610 Office that put pressure on them so they had to talk to you and give you the ‘education’ and make sure you stay at home.”

The 610 Office was created at the onset of the persecution as an extralegal Gestapo-like police force tasked with eliminating Falun Gong. It set up branches at every level of the government, permeating society.

To this day, imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners routinely face torture, as documented by human rights groups and multiple U.N. reports. Several independent investigations have found that a large but hard-to-determine number of Falun Gong practitioners have been killed to fuel China’s organ transplant industry, which suddenly exploded in scale around 2000, the year following the start of the persecution.

Time and again, Gong’s mother was sent to a “brainwashing class,” a form of extralegal detention common in the early years of the persecution. There was no criminal charge, no documents, and no set day of release. She would be whisked away to an unknown location, usually masked as some innocuous government office. There, she would be subjected to intense psychological pressure. She would be held in a “class” with other practitioners, forced to watch anti-Falun Gong propaganda all day. The detention could last from days to months, with no visits or even phone calls allowed.

“They can keep you there however long they want,” Gong said.

Because her father was often away for work for a whole week or a month, Gong sometimes returned from school to find the home empty, her mother disappeared by the regime.

“My [adolescence] was full of fear,” she said.

Even at school, Gong couldn’t escape. At least once a week, she said, she would be pulled out of class at her middle school and teachers would give her “education,” trying to convince her to “transform,” which meant to stop practicing Falun Gong. Sometimes, it would last 20 minutes; sometimes, the whole afternoon. Some teachers tried to be nice about it, while others scolded.

“They told me, ‘If you don’t give up your beliefs, when you apply for high school, no school will want you. No school can accept you.’ I said, ‘I know, but I still won’t give up my beliefs,’” she said.

In the end, she was accepted to her preferred high school—on one condition. “They said, ‘We want to take a look at you, and we feel like you are a nice girl, and we feel like you will be transformed. So that’s why we accepted you,’” she said.

The “education” continued in high school with increased ferocity. She would be pulled out of class several times a week.

In politics class, there would be test questions about Falun Gong, requiring students to regurgitate the propaganda they'd been fed. She left them blank.

One day, the school held an event in which students signed a large banner denouncing Falun Gong during the morning flag-raising ceremony. The teachers wanted to spare themselves the embarrassment of having somebody refuse to sign. They tried to ensure her compliance beforehand, but she refused. In the end, they had her wait in the classroom instead.

Despite the disruptions to her life, Gong became a top student at her school.

She could tell that some of the teachers participated in the pressure campaign unwillingly.

“I knew there were a lot of nice people there. They had to do their job. This was their job. They didn’t want to do this, but they had to,” she said.

“The system drags them to hell, to do bad things against their will.”

As she was about to graduate, the pressure escalated. She was told no college would accept her unless she gave up her faith.

“Going to college is kind of the only way you can have a bright or normal future. If you don’t go to college, it’s almost like you’re done. You will live a miserable life,” she said.

The local CCP Youth League secretary told Gong that she would have her kicked out of school and sent to a labor camp.

Finally, Gong relented. She signed a document saying she wouldn’t practice Falun Gong anymore.

“This is the single thing that I regret the most in my life,” she said.

Tragedy

In 2005, Gong was home for the summer break before heading to a college in Shanghai. One day, her parents were visiting friends. As they left their apartment and were about to head home, they were surrounded by police and arrested. The police found some Falun Gong flyers in her mother’s purse. Their home was then ransacked by the police.

Her mother was charged with “undermining the implementation of the law,” a bogus charge often used against Falun Gong practitioners. Gong surmised that her father was sent to a brainwashing center.

“Nobody knew where my dad was,” she said.

She tried at his work, but was kicked out. Finally, another Falun Gong practitioner suggested which brainwashing center he might have been sent to. Gong went there almost daily. She wasn’t allowed in, but two supervisors came out to talk to her. They wouldn’t say, however, if her father was there. She persevered. After a few visits, the staff finally admitted her father was held there. After a few more visits, they agreed for her to see him.

When Gong saw her father, she started to cry immediately.

“His hair and beard had turned all white, aged like 20 years in just a few months,” she said. “I was so shocked. He could hardly walk. His hands were shaking.”

She was pushed out within a few minutes.

She wasn’t allowed to see him again, but she kept coming.

“I just went there every day. They didn’t let me in. But I sat at the gate,” she said.

One time, her father saw her through a window. They managed to shout a few sentences at each other, before he was pulled away.

As the weather turned colder, Gong brought warmer clothes for her father. Her father never received them, she later learned. When he complained, he was beaten so badly his internal organs were damaged. After he was released from the hospital, he was allowed to go back home.

Gong’s mother wasn’t allowed any family contact at all. The only time her family saw her was during her show trial. She was sentenced to five years in prison. A family friend with some high-level connections sent a few people to the courthouse to arrange for more lenient treatment, but to no avail.

“The people [the friend knew] are so powerful that even if you kill somebody, or even if you’re a drug dealer, they can get you out of there. They have all kinds of methods to get you out of there. You spend probably one or two years in jail,” Gong said. “But she said with Falun Gong, there’s nothing they can do. Nobody can do anything about it.”

Gong couldn’t really process what happened. She didn’t even cry. Some time later, she saw an article in a local paper saying her mother and another Falun Gong practitioner had been sentenced. At that moment, it hit her.

“I just cried,” she said.

“My grandma cried even worse. She couldn’t take it. It was too painful for her. She just fell on the bed and cried very badly, just crying her heart out. So I realized, ‘OK, I have to stop crying, because it’s too hard on my grandma.’”

Soon after, it was time for Gong to leave for college. Her grandparents accompanied her to the bus station. She was trying to maintain her composure, but when she saw them walking away, her heart ached. Her grandma had lost half her weight in just the previous few months. “The clothes were so loose on her,” she said.

Gong couldn’t help but burst into tears. “Everybody was watching me. Maybe they thought I was homesick or something.”

Soon after, her grandma had her first stroke. After the incident, she began recovering well, a fact she attributed to Falun Gong exercises. But her blood pressure was extremely high, and doctors told her not to get emotional—a tall order in her situation.

For the winter break, Gong traveled to her grandparents’ home in Binzhou, a few hours northwest of Qingdao. It was then, on Jan. 27, 2006, that her grandma received the first prison call from Sun—and died right after.

New Life

During college, Gong didn’t dare tell anyone she was still practicing Falun Gong. She would try to talk to her friends about Falun Gong, but never disclosed that she was practicing herself. Every month, she would travel to visit her mother in prison. She graduated in 2007 with a bachelor’s degree in graphic design and took a job in Shanghai. When Sun was released in 2009, getting a one-year credit for the forced labor she did in prison, Gong decided to go abroad. She found a job with a Chinese company in Nigeria, and a year later, a different one in Botswana.

“I always wanted to try different things and try new things,” she said. “I was excited to see what Africa looked like.”

She fell in love with the continent. Despite the widespread poverty, there was joy and a sense of freedom absent in China, she said.

She found another job with a local company in South Africa. Then, in 2011, she moved to San Francisco. It was there she met her husband. They got married in 2013. A few years later, they welcomed a baby daughter.

Her mother came from China for a few months to help her out. But just as Sun was returning to China, the persecution struck them again.

Final Blow

In October 2017, Gong’s father went to visit a friend, also a Falun Gong practitioner. Unbeknownst to him, the police had just arrested the friend. As he came in, he was arrested, too. His home was ransacked, and Sun was also detained. When police questioned her about the Falun Gong materials they found, she denied any knowledge, saying she had just returned home from visiting her daughter overseas. She was released and immediately left China, joining Gong in the United States.

“Otherwise, she would have been taken again. She wouldn’t have been able to get out of it, for sure,” Gong said.

Her father was sentenced to 7 1/2 years in prison. Gong and Sun tried to stay in touch with him via letters, but it would take several months to receive one, Gong said.

“His letters all had to be screened by the police. You cannot just say whatever you want. He had to say, ‘I’m good here. Don’t worry about me.’ But we didn’t know what was going on there,” she said.

In April 2021, Gong received a call from a relative in China saying her father had passed away.

Officially, he developed severe hypertension and died of a stroke. His family is convinced he developed health problems due to abuse.

“He was a healthy man. He didn’t have any illness,” Gong said.

‘Dust of the Times’

Sitting on a sofa with fluffy throw pillows, Gong’s spotless home in the upstate New York countryside reflects her calm, laid-back demeanor. A full-time homemaker, she’s focused on her daughter. The deadly abuses of communist China seem so remote here.

But the memories linger. “The dust of the times, when it falls on a person’s head, is like a mountain,” a Chinese saying goes. “I don’t look back, only if I have to, because it’s too painful,” she said.

“The story of my family is just a typical story of millions of Falun Gong practitioners in China. The practitioners around us who still hold on to their beliefs all have similar or even more tragic experiences.

“It’s not only a tragedy for the individual, but also for their family and friends. More importantly, the persecution affected everyone around them in their communities, workplaces, schools, and every corner of society. Everyone in society must express their stance on Falun Gong.

“The whole nation was deceived. People are forced to make choices that go against their conscience to be safe. The CCP’s persecution of Falun Gong led to a sharp deterioration in the overall moral standards of the Chinese people and dragged the whole nation and its people to hell.”