(Minghui.org) More than 150 people from Daochi Village in Huludao City put their fingerprints on a petition to protest Mr. Gao Wenzhi's recent sentencing and demanded that the government release him.

One villager noted on the petition that Mr. Gao was always very kind and willing to help others. He pointed out in particular that Mr. Gao had repaired many of the roads in poor condition in the village with his own money.

Mr. Gao, 72, was sentenced to four and a half years in prison in December 2017 in the Longgang District Court for filing a criminal complaint against former Chinese Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin, who ordered a nationwide persecution of Falun Gong in 1999.

Villagers' fingerprints in support of Mr. Gao Wenzhi

Falun Gong Cures Him, the Authorities Arrest Him

Mr. Gao once had two forms of cancer and the hospital had even refused to provide further treatment for him. Shortly after he began to practice Falun Gong in 1995, however, he fully recovered and his health was even better than in his youth.

Grateful to Falun Gong for restoring his health, Mr. Gao went to Beijing to appeal for the right to practice his faith after Jiang launched the persecution in 1999. Mr. Gao was then arrested, detained, interrogated, and tortured by the police.

In the detention center, the police beat him four times a day and did not let him sleep. They put heavy shackles on his ankles, which rubbed off his skin in just a few days.

At the end of his detention, he was sent to a three-day brainwashing session and then to a forced labor camp for three years.

He was forced to do hard labor every day and not given enough food. The guards beat him if he failed to finish the work on time. At the same time, his employer withheld his pension.

When it was time for him to be released from the labor camp, the authorities refused to let him go. In 2002, he was sentenced to three years in prison and transferred to the prison complex in Shenyang.

He was finally released in 2015, after a total of six years.

Volunteer Road Repairer

Not far from where Mr. Gao lived, a road shared by more than 30 farmers was in terrible shape. It was always muddy and waterlogged, making it difficult for villagers to pass.

Without telling anyone or asking for any donations, Mr. Gao bought the materials with his limited income and fixed the road himself.

That impressed many villagers and they began to greet him by saying, “Falun Dafa is good!”

From then on, Mr. Gao committed himself to repairing roads around the village. In eight years, he spent more than 30,000 yuan out of his own pocket and fixed roads nearly two miles long, all by himself.

Whenever a villager saw Mr. Gao working out under the blazing sun, his shirt soaked with sweat, they would stop and give him something to eat.

Knowing that he practices Falun Gong, the village officials have also been protecting Mr. Gao from police harassment.

After the director of the transportation bureau heard about Mr. Gao, he intended to invite the local TV station to do a feature program about him. Mr. Gao refused, knowing that it would be impossible for him to share that he did this because of his faith in Falun Gong.

Persecuted for Suing Jiang Zemin

In 2015, after the Supreme People's Court in China claimed that it would guarantee the registration and processing of all complaints filed, including by citizens against government officials, Mr. Gao joined hundreds of thousands of practitioners to file a criminal complaint against Jiang for ordering the persecution.

Because of the complaint, Mr. Gao was arrested on June 23, 2017, and put in “criminal detention” on a charge of “false accusation.” The police ransacked his home and confiscated his Falun Gong materials, his laptop, and the tricycle that he used to repair the roads.

The Longgang District Court held a closed-door trial on December 5, 2017. No one in Mr. Gao's family was allowed to attend.

According to his lawyer, who entered a not-guilty plea on his behalf, Mr. Gao had difficulty walking into the courtroom and also suffered from headaches and hypertension.

The judge rushed the proceedings, which ended in an hour, and did not announce a verdict. A few weeks later, he handed down Mr. Gao's four-and-a-half-year prison sentence.

Perpetrators' contact information:

Yu Zhisheng (于智盛), head of Longgang Police Station: +86-13709895127Zheng Xuping (郑绪平), head of Huludao Detention Center: +86-13998963869Gu Yue (谷月), judge, Longgang District Court: +86-429-2039043Bai Yinyan (白银燕), president, Longgang Procuratorate: +86-429-2298001, +86-13470613311Dong Cheng (董程), prosecutor: +86-429-2298022, +86-13904290999