In January 2021, at least 123 members of The Church of Almighty God (CAG) were arrested by the police in the eastern province of Jiangsu. Many of them were detained in hotels, and subjected to torture during interrogation.
A female CAG member was arrested while in a meeting. During interrogation, the police trampled hard on her toes with their leather shoes, and slapped her on the face with book rolls. To extort information about the church, several police officers subjected her to the tortures of “being seated on a chair,” “doing the splits,” and so on.
The officers forced her arms backward, put them on the back of a chair behind her, and pulled her handcuffs downward as hard as possible. Then, they put her feet on the edge of another chair in front of her, so that her body was suspended in the air in the shape of a right angle.
A generation of dizi confronted rogue tax bureaucrats, whose acts at times were reminiscent of the Corleone family in The Godfather.
by Susan Wang-Selfridge
I would like to share my point of view on Tai Ji Men as a cultural-spiritual cultivation institution and its unwavering 25-year journey in pursuit of redress for the violation of taxpayers human rights at the hands of corrupt government bureaucrats in Taiwan. Their prolonged efforts are not only for themselves, but also serve to trail-blaze a safe path for the people of Taiwan to live without fear from governmental officials’ unlawful abuse of power in the form of taxation for personal gain. It is especially significant to talk about the case as we are celebrating the second United Nations’ International Day of Conscience on April 5 and today (April 6) because no human rights can be fully protected unless people’s innate conscience has been awakened.
When I first joined Tai Ji Men, Los Angeles academy in 2005, the organization was in the process of navigating the entanglements of a very complicated criminal case, which also instigated a tax prosecution that had spanned eight years at the home base in Taiwan. In summer 2007, Tai Ji Men was found innocent of all criminal charges by the Taiwan Supreme Court, in a ruling that effectively should have purged the tax issue as well, since the tax case was based on a fabricated criminal indictment by Prosecutor Hou Kuan-jen. However, the tax authority ignored the court’s ruling and reissued the tax bills.
