My father, Jiang Xiqing, 65, a former cadre at the Chongqing Jiangjin District Tax Service, was illegally detained in brainwashing sessions and persecuted numerous times for refusing to renounce Falun Gong. He was arrested again on May 14, 2008 and sent to forced labor for one year at Chongqing Xishanping Labor Education Management Center.

On the afternoon of January 27, 2009, four of my family members went to see my father at the labor camp (7th unit, 2nd subunit). When we talked with him, his mental and physical health was completely normal.

At 3:40pm the next day, the labor camp called Jiang Ping from an unidentified phone number. The person said, “Jiang Xiqing died at 2:40 in the afternoon” and immediately hung up.

Seven of my family members arrived at the Shijialiang Mortuary House in Chongqing at about 10:30 pm with the guidance of police officers and after some setbacks. Many police cars were parked around the mortuary, and my family members saw armed police surrounding the perimeter wall.

They took us into the mortuary and read out the regulations: 1) we could see the body for only 5 minutes, 2) no cameras, camcorders, or communications devices were allowed, and 3) we could only go to the cold storage room and see Jiang Xiqing’s head (not the rest of his body).

My father was placed in a middle slot on the second freezer shelf. When my older sister saw my father’s body, she yelled, “Dad! Dad!” There was no sound, so she touched his face. She found that his philtrum was still warm and saw that his upper teeth were biting his lower lip tightly. She yelled out, “My dad is still alive!”

When we heard her from outside the room, we rushed to the freezer and pulled out my father’s body halfway. We touched his chest and found that it was warm. He was wearing a down jacket in the freezer, and his body temperature was higher than that of our hands. My relatives came in, all touched his body, and confirmed that it was warm. I ran out of the room and dialed 110 to call the police. A plainclothes officer at the scene said, “It’s no use calling the police. Officers are here already. They won’t come.” My brother asked someone on site why someone who was put in a freezer for seven hours after death was still alive. A woman answered, “Regardless, we have the death certificate from the hospital.” One of my relatives, Li Jia (李嘉), took three photos of my father using a digital camera. My older sister prepared to perform CPR on my father while my relatives yelled out for help to save my father.

There were many people on site. Right when we were about to inspect my father’s body, we were each forcibly dragged out of the room by four people. They also forcibly grabbed Li Jia’s camera and deleted the three photos we took of my father’s body on the floor. Uniformed and plainclothes officers pushed my father’s body back into the freezer!

They demanded that we quickly sign for cremation and pay 1,000 RMB in cremation fees. We refused. They said, “We’ll cremate him even if you don’t sign!”

We (relatives) demanded to see my father again, but they did not allow it. We never saw my father again.

On February 8, 2009, they called and said that my father was autopsied and cremated.

On March 26, 2009, we received a phone call from Zhou Bailin (周柏林), the director of the Supervision Office of the First Branch of the Chongqing Procuratorate, who told us to go to the Yuxun Hotel in Beibei District in Chongqing on March 27 to hear an explanation of the autopsy report.

At the meeting on March 27, 2009, we recorded audio using a cell phone and preserved an original recording of the meeting. The recording length is 1:57:59.

In the recording at 1:56:57, Zhou Bailin said, “What could be preserved are his organs, that is, all of his organs. That is to say, we preserved them to make specimens.” This meant that they took out all the organs from my father–whose body was still warm when we saw him–and then cremated him without our family members’ consent!

As evidenced in the complete recording, the eight labor camp officials who participated in the meeting were Zhou Bailin, Wu Xiaochang (伍晓畅), two labor camp managers surnamed Jin (金) and Hu (胡), Liu Hua (刘华), unit commander Tian Xiaohai (田晓海), Hu Yuejin (胡跃进), and meeting recorder Dong Yi (懂忆). There were more people listening in a small neighboring room. The seven participants from the Jiang family were Jiang Hong (江宏), Jiang Hongbin (江宏斌), Jiang Li (江莉), Jiang Ping (江平), Xia Buchu (夏步初), and Jiang Dehua (江德华), and Luo Kexiang (罗科祥).

We subsequently invited two lawyers from the All China Lawyers Association to seek justice for my father: Zhang Kai (张凯) from Beijing Yijia Law Firm and Li Chunfu (李春富) from Beijing Gaobo Longhua Law Firm. On May 13, 2009, the two lawyers went to my father’s home in Jiangjin District of Chongqing to investigate and collect evidence. More than a hundred personnel from the Jiangjin District Public Security Bureau, Political and Legal Affairs Committee, 610 Office, domestic security police, and Jijiang Police Station surrounded the home, broke in, and beat the lawyers and my relatives. There were six people in the home at the time. The only person spared was my 76-year-old uncle who had heart disease; he personally witnessed the entire sequence of events. At around 7 o’clock in the evening, the two lawyers and my brother Jiang Hongbin were handcuffed behind their backs and marched through the streets to the police station.

Lawyer Zhang Kai was hung up in a metal cage and beaten. Lawyer Li Chunfu was also handcuffed behind his back to a stone structure at the entrance of the police station. The three were released at around 1 o’clock the next morning only after we brought attention to the incident and more than twenty lawyers from Beijing came and spoke up for Zhang and Li, filmed my uncle’s testimony of events, and submitted a case to the United Nations. Li’s law license was subsequently revoked. We then invited four other lawyers, who were also monitored and threatened by the authorities.

We did not stop pursuing this case. In June 2009, a person from the Chongqing Procuratorate (who did not tell us his identity or role) came to Shanghai and offered to give us 300,000 RMB to resolve my father’s matter privately (requiring us to drop the matter). We refused. They then had Deputy Chief of the Shanghai Public Security Bureau Cheng Jiulong send people to my workplace, pressure them to terminate my employment, intending to cut off my financial resources to stop me from filing a lawsuit. I worked at Shanghai Airlines at the time and was a model employee. My manager tried to protect me but was unsuccessful because my father’s case was a “political issue” (a coworker told me this). In 2013, the local police in Jiangjin District found me again and told me to name a price to resolve the matter privately, but we refused.

I was terminated by my employer in 2010 only for seeking justice for my father. In the five years that followed, I went to petition in Beijing and was put in black jails numerous times and detained once. I avoided more severe persecution because I was petitioning only for my improper termination at the time, as I knew family members of victims of forced organ harvesting who were killed for seeking justice. In June 2015, I went to Beijing to submit a legal complaint against Jiang Zemin to the Supreme People’s Court and Supreme People’s Procuratorate, but they did not accept the case. Because filing lawsuits against them in China would not yield any results, I wanted to file suit in an international court, so I came to the United States.

Jiang Li, on behalf of the Jiang family

October 31, 2018