(Minghui.org) Bitter Winter, a magazine headquartered in Italy, carried an article on June 5, 2026, titled, “Sick and Pensionless: The Long Punishment of a Xinjiang Falun Gong Professor.” The article described the tragic suffering of Falun Gong practitioner Li Xianghong, a former lecturer at the Xinjiang Institute of Technology. The report stated that, in China, “The repression of dissidents does not conclude at the prison gate. It continues through the quiet, devastating weapon of economic annihilation.
“Li began practicing Falun Gong in 1997. When the movement was under attack in 1999, she joined the early wave of practitioners who traveled to Beijing to protest. What followed was a descent into the kind of abuse that the authorities still deny, but that survivors and witnesses have described for decades.
“In 1999, she was abducted by agents of the Xinjiang 610 Office and taken to the psychiatric hospital in Ürümqi. There, according to testimonies collected at the time, she was confined among mentally ill male and female patients, subjected to verbal and physical harassment, and forced to take unknown medications. Fellow practitioners who managed to visit her in August and September 1999 reported scenes of humiliation and neglect. When the hospital realized the visits might expose what was happening, it barred further access.”
She was later sentenced to 11 years in prison and sent to the notorious Xinjiang Woman’s Prison. After she was released, she was sentenced to three years in prison again, for a total of 14 years. She was imprisoned simply because she refused to give up her belief.
However, being released did not mean her suffering ended. As early as 2001 “the Xinjiang Institute of Technology fired her. Sixteen years of seniority vanished overnight, and with it every yuan of pension she contributed. When she fell ill in 2021 and required radiotherapy for cancer and heart surgery, she discovered that her public medical coverage had also been stripped away. Tens of thousands of yuan in medical bills were left to her family.
“Today, at retirement age, she receives no pension at all. She lives alone, without income, in conditions that would be precarious for anyone, let alone a woman whose health has been repeatedly damaged by imprisonment, forced medication, and years of stress.”
The article continues, stating that Li’s case was not unique. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime uses this systemic withdrawal of livelihood to punish dissidents. “Even after you have served your sentence, the state retains the right to erase your past, your career, your savings, and your future. For Falun Gong practitioners, this is a familiar script. Many emerge from prison only to find themselves unemployable, uninsured, and without pensions they contributed to for decades.”
Li’s case reveals the brutality of the CCP’s 27-year persecution. “The psychiatric abuse she endured in 1999 was an early example of a method later used against countless others.”
In conclusion, the author wrote, “The denial of pensions has become a quiet but effective instrument of coercion. It also raises a question that China’s authorities prefer not to hear, that if a citizen has completed her sentence, by what logic—legal or moral—does the punishment continue for the rest of her life?”
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