Police Officer Fired for his “Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Disloyalty” in Practicing Falun Gong

Zha Zhuolin was fired for practicing and seeking justice for Falun Gong, being told that he should first be loyal to the party.

Zha, a 57-year-old in Yuzhou City, Henan Province, is an army veteran that had served in the police force for 21 years before being fired from his job on August 19, 2020. He was due to retire in two years.

In 2015, Zha filed a criminal complaint against Jiang Zemin, the former head of the Chinese communist regime who ordered the persecution of Falun Gong. Because of his complaint, the 610 Office, an extralegal agency created specifically to persecute Falun Gong, ordered the local police department to punish Zha.

Zha was given a warning and never again given a bonus, which would have amounted to over 100,000 yuan by 2020. He was also ordered to write a statement to renounce Falun Gong, but he refused to comply, and was then later fired.

Zha joined the army when he was 19 and served there for the next 17 years, winning many awards before becoming a police officer in 1999. He worked very hard and cracked many difficult cases involving drug trafficking, murder, and robbery.

Due to years of hard work, he developed many ailments, including high blood pressure, migraines, a frozen shoulder, and a herniated lumbar disc. He sought many forms of treatment, but none of them did much good.

With no hope in sight, he decided to give Falun Gong a try in 2013. To his surprise, all of his symptoms soon disappeared and he returned to good health.

By striving to live by Falun Gong’s principles of Truthfulness, Compassion, Forbearance, Zha stopped taking bribes and no longer put himself above others. When he was dealing with a drunk who verbally abused and almost hit him, most of his colleagues lost their patience and were about to lock the person up, but Zha remained calm and peacefully resolved the issue. Those who witnessed the incident were impressed by his demeanor, as many police officers in China are known to be violent and corrupt.

After Zha filed his complaint and was punished by the local police department, his supervisor often talked to him and threatened Zha with both his and his wife’s jobs to try to persuade him to give up practicing Falun Gong.

In June 2020, Xu Wei, the police chief, and Wang Xiaowei, director of the Domestic Security Office, made a final attempt to pressure Zha to express his attitude about Falun Gong. Zha replied that he didn’t do anything wrong by following Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance and trying to be a good person.

Wang said, “You are a police officer. You are different [from the general public]. The first rule for a police officer is to be loyal to the Party.”

When Zha said that the constitution guarantees freedom of belief and that there is no law in China that says practicing Falun Gong is a crime, Wang stopped him and said he didn’t want to talk about the issue of freedom of belief or the law. Wang emphasized that he only cared about being loyal to the Party and that whoever still practiced Falun Gong would be deemed disloyal.

Shortly after that meeting, Zha was ordered to turn in all his police equipment and his job was put on hold. Two months later, he received a formal notice that he was fired.

Zha filed a motion to protest the decision. He said “If a society can’t tolerate the values of Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance, then it is a dangerous society. This is not a persecution against me personally—it is a suppression of universal values.”