(Minghui.org) Mr. Xuan Chengxi (玄成喜), a 61-year-old farmer from Shandong, was beaten to death a few hours after he was arrested on October 12, 2000. At the Yuhe County government building, 610 Office personnel and police officers took turns beating him. When Mr. Xuan lost consciousness, they poured cold water on him to wake him up before continuing to beat him until he passed away.
Without notifying his family, officials cremated his body. They then told his family that he died from a heart attack and accused him of “colluding with overseas influences and intending to overthrow the government.”
A 19-year-old Jilin practitioner, Ms. Zhao Jing (赵静), was arrested on November 23, 2000 on her way to Beijing to petition the government to stop persecuting Falun Gong. She died soon after being beaten at a detention center.
According to a report by Radio Free Asia, her father “saw many marks of beatings on her body. The local police hurried to cremate her body on the same day and gave him no chance to photograph the body.” Her family later told Minghui that they found two strands of metal wire in her cremated ashes.
Another practitioner beaten to death at the age of 19, Ms. Chu Congrui (初丛锐), was arrested on December 1, 2000 at Tiananmen Square for protesting the persecution. She died 12 days later at Haidian Prison in Beijing. Her face was deformed, and her body was bloody all over.
Above are three of the 445 Falun Gong practitioners beaten to death for their beliefs in the past 15 years. Deaths from beatings account for 11.7% of the total 3,795 confirmed deaths in the persecution so far.
Falun Gong practitioners have been killed every month since the Communist regime started the persecution on July 20, 1999.
To force practitioners to renounce Falun Gong, the authorities often apply multiple forms of torture at the same time, including beatings, shocking with electric batons, forced-feeding, hanging by the wrists, sleep deprivation, and others. The focus of this article, however, are practitioners who were beaten to death, with either bare hands or tools, including many everyday objects.
Except for 3 of the 445 practitioners, we have location data showing where exactly the beatings took place.
Out of the 442 cases with known location data, 419 practitioners were beaten during arrest or while incarcerated in police stations, detention centers, labor camps, prisons, brainwashing centers, and other extralegal detention facilities.
Many practitioners died while still in custody. For example, among the 109 practitioners beaten at police stations, 77 (70.6%) died before their release.
Five practitioners were beaten while being transferred from one facility to another. Another 18 practitioners were beaten during their arrest, including 11 brutalized in their homes. In total, 23 practitioners died from beatings during transfer or arrest.
In aggregate, 51% of the 445 practitioners died while in police custody.


