On April 9, Guo Hongwei (also known as Guo Hongwei on his ID card), a rights activist in Jilin Province who had been sentenced to thirteen years in prison, passed away after a failed brain hemorrhage surgery. His parents believe that Guo Hongwei’s untimely death at the age of fifty-six is a strange and suspicious cause of death, and must be investigated and held accountable to the end, as well as Jilin Ningjiang and Gongzhuling prisons have been delaying medical parole for years, beating and abusing Guo Hongwei, and the public prosecution system has been responsible for creating wrongful cases.
On the night of April 4, Guo Hongwei’s eighty-five-year-old father, Guo Yinqi, received a phone call from prison guards asking them to sign for Guo Hongwei’s brain hemorrhage surgery, which lasted until 4 a.m. On the night of April 5, Guo Hongwei suffered a second hemorrhage with dilated pupils and underwent a second surgery.
What is of interest is that before both surgeries, the police refused to allow the family to meet Guo Hongwei himself. Until the morning of the 6th, the family was allowed to visit after the nucleic acid test results came out, he was so thin that he was skin and bones, and was on a ventilator to keep him alive.
On the morning of April 9, Guo Hongwei breathed his last. Guo Yinqi did not find obvious injuries on his body, although there is no substantial evidence that the prison authorities beat him to death, but the condition of his brain is not visible to the naked eye and urgently needs investigation. “There is no evidence that it was beaten to death, but we have suspicions. The disease is all in the head. The brain bones after surgery, they do not give, take pictures also can not, said to unify the processing, can not give the family.”
Guo Hongwei’s body is still parked in the freezer of the funeral home, Guo Yinqi refused to be buried before the truth is known:.
“We are not convinced! The cause of death is unknown and cannot be cremated, but needs to be identified and processed. It’s a total persecution death. Such a serious patient, high blood pressure reached 260, medical parole is not allowed, just want to kill you; and after transferred to Gongzhuling prison, not allowed to meet, also not allowed to call. When we wanted to take pictures after death, several prison guards were there, not allowed to take pictures.”
Guo Hongwei’s mother: She must seek justice for her son, or she will not die in peace
Chinese human rights lawyer Xie Yan Yi plans to follow up on the investigation in Jilin. He told the station that intentional injury and dereliction of duty are possible, “but an investigation is needed, including whether to conduct an autopsy, retrieve video surveillance and medical records. According to the Criminal Procedure Law and the Prison Law, prisons have a duty to protect their health, and Guo Hongwei should be granted medical parole if his health is that bad.”
After Guo Hongwei was imprisoned in 2015, he was persecuted for a long time at Songwon Ningjiang Prison by being abused, beaten and held in a small black cell. in May 2020, prison guard Lu Jiaxun locked him in a confinement cell filled with peroxyacetic acid, causing him to suffocate and roll his eyes, but the prison authorities only deducted 1,000 yuan from the officer’s bonus after receiving a report. Guo’s father insisted that Lu Jiaxun should be sentenced to prison and appealed to the Jilin Prison Administration, which has not responded to date.
It was not until November 26, 2020 that Guo Hongwei was approved to be transferred to Gongzhuling Prison in Siping, Jilin. In mid-February this year, he has not heard from his family after the last four-minute phone call.
On March 15, the prison authorities sent Guo Hongwei to the provincial prison (Changchun City) hospital for a parole identification, and after a week of hospitalization, he was sent back to Gongzhuling prison, during which he was never allowed to contact his family.
Guo Yinqi believes that the prison may have delayed the best time for treatment. One of the main surgeons for this operation was Jiang Fucheng of Jilin Guowen Hospital. The doctor had asked the police how long Guo Hongwei had been in such a physical condition. The police officer said it had been more than two months, and in addition, Guo Hongwei had been unconscious for more than two hours before he was admitted to the hospital.
Xiao Yunling, 84, was still unable to accept the loss of her son when she put on his birthday suit at the funeral home. After he was imprisoned, his legs were crippled, and his conditions, such as high blood pressure and cerebral infarction, continued to worsen, and now he was a cold corpse.
“Son, don’t worry, mom will do justice for you. Why did you leave your children behind and die for no reason? Why? My son did not make any mistakes during his lifetime. Why did you frame my son and keep killing him? If so, I won’t be able to close my eyes the day I die.”
“My son was too straightforward, too loyal (to the country) and insisted on justice, otherwise he would have been subjected to this retaliation?” Xiao Yunling recalled that on Sept. 20, 2020, Guo Hongwei, who often watched news broadcasts while serving his sentence, was still chanting when he met Xiao Yunling for the last time in prison, “Mom, don’t worry, I’ll be fine here. President Xi will give us justice.”
Guo Hongwei’s wife is divorced from him, and his thirty-three-year-old daughter, who is currently studying for a PhD in history at Changchun University, burst into tears upon hearing the news of her father’s death; his twenty-year-old youngest son, who is about to take the college entrance exam this year, burned paper and kowtowed to his father, “Don’t worry, Dad, I will live up to your hopes, at least to graduate school.”
Xiao Yunling stressed that for the death of his son, Gongzhuling prison and Ningjiang prison have an inescapable responsibility, “April suddenly out of this disease. What makes him a brain hemorrhage? He is a disabled person, he is in a wheelchair, and not active, playing meals someone to him. He stays all year round, why is his whole body so thin? Not enough to eat, why not give my son more food?”
Wang Jing: Prisoners of conscience are meat on the chopping block, vulnerable to medical malpractice
Wang Jing, a volunteer for the Chengdu rights website “June 4 Days Network”, went to the Jilin Provincial People’s Hospital many years ago when she was serving her sentence and was forced to do bile removal surgery; and the hospital often uses trainee doctors to practice on prison inmates, and low-level medical accidents occur frequently. She believes that Jilin Guowen Hospital is a private hospital, there is no open-heart surgery qualifications.
Wang Jing: “I myself was almost killed during the medical parole identification and external consultation. In my room, four people died one after another. One Falun Gong practitioner had a broken bone and came back from surgery with a completely crippled arm. For us political prisoners, whom the government abhors, they are going to strike in it and take your life easily in the name of medical malpractice, and you are equal to the meat on their chopping board.”
Wang Jing and Guo Hongwei met at the Jilin Provincial Petition Bureau about a decade ago, and together they participated in the “25 petitioners storming the provincial People’s Congress” in 2013. At that time, Guo Hongwei was cynical, good at collective action and solidarity with the visitors, “judicial corruption caused him to sit in jail for five years. I always heard him say, ‘These officials, public prosecutors and lawmakers are all sucking the cream of the people and harming them. At that time Xi Jinping proposed to rule the country according to the constitution, and we all quite embraced him, but all of us were sent to prison.”
Huang Hanzhong: Guo Hongwei Tragically Persecuted by Jilin’s Public Prosecutor and Law, Calling a Stag a Horse
The tragedy of Guo Hongwei’s family began with a wrongful death case in 2005. He was sentenced to five years in prison after reporting Xu Wengui, an official at the Longtan District Prosecutor’s Office, and his family and friends for writing false hospital bills and embezzling state benefits while working at the Songdian River Power Plant in Jilin Province. He said he had been tortured during his prison term with “little ghosts shaving their heads” and “death beds”.
In 2016, the paralyzed Guo was sentenced to 13 years in prison for extortion; his mother, who is in her eighties, was sentenced to six years in prison for provocation and obstruction and was released on medical parole in 2019; and his sister, Guo Hongying, was sentenced to five and a half years in prison in 2019 for provocation and obstruction and is still in prison.
Guo Yinqi: “Because of the protection of state property, three members of our family were sentenced, our wives were separated and our families were broken. This was caused by the prison with the support of the public prosecutor and the law. The prison guards threatened to pack you up if you don’t confess, and you won’t even know how to die. Jilin Province public prosecutors and law enforcement to shield each other, joint black hand on our family, just can not win the case, the officials protect each other, to put you to death. Now the lawyers are afraid to reach out, afraid of losing their jobs. We are now helpless.”
Huang Hanzhong, a lawyer representing Guo Hongwei in the first and second trials, told the station that Guo Hongwei’s case is an outright political persecution, a sensational case of injustice, and was even used by CCTV in 2018 as a “negative example” of a family-style blackmail of the local government, which is simply a thief crying out for a thief.
The actual fact is that the actual case is a wrongful, unjust case that should not be sent to jail. The so-called more than 300,000 extortion, a serious hypertensive patient, can not even stand up and walk on their own, extorting more than 5,000 police officers of the Public Security Bureau, is not a joke? He believed that the five-year sentence was unjust and could be resolved through judicial appeals, but he had long visited several levels of courts in Jilin, and they would not let Guo Hongwei copy the case file for various reasons.”
Guo Hongwei’s death has sparked concern for a number of detained prisoners of conscience who are critically ill. Yin Xu’an, who had been held at the Daye Detention Center in Hubei for nearly two years, suffered from a variety of illnesses, including high blood pressure and diabetes, and had been critically ill several times. Zhejiang pro-democracy activist Lü Geng Song, who had been sentenced to 11 years in prison, suffered from necrosis of his gallbladder and necrosis of the dental pulp in six of his teeth, and was found to be unusually weak by friends and relatives who visited him on April 10 this year, “fearing that he would not survive the remaining four years of his sentence.”
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