NEW YORK, January 6, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) In October 2004, LifeSiteNews.com published a special report on the torture of a woman imprisoned by Chinese authorities for her opposition to that country’s one child policy. Mao Hengfeng, who has campaigned for 15 years against the brutal government scheme, has had her sentence in a Reeducation Through Labor (RTL) Camp in Shanghai increased by three months according to a human rights organization.
The New York based group, Human Rights in China (HRIC), has been monitoring the situation. They revealed in a report dated January 4th that Mao had been tortured and despite international attention the case has received, her situation in prison has not improved.
After becoming pregnant with her second child in 1988, Mao was fired from her job at a soap factory. She was taken by her employers to a psychiatric hospital where an attempt was made at a forced chemical abortion. Mao’s child survived and was born but she was arrested later for petitioning against the one child policy. In April 2004, Shanghai Municipal Public Security Bureau sentenced her to the camp for 18 months.
HRIC sources say that when Mao refused to sign a document acknowledging thought reform, camp officials threatened to reduce her family visits and telephone privileges.
The recent increase in Mao’s sentence appears to be another sign of retrenchment by the Beijing government in regard to human rights issues, said HRIC president Liu Qing.
Read LifeSiteNews.com special report: https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2004/oct/041008b.html
Read the statement from Human Rights in China https://www.hrichina.org/public/contents/press?revision%5fid=19619&item%5fid=19617 Hw