Yu Baorong, female, was born on October 15, 1965. She is from the Quanshan District of Xuzhou City, Jiangsu Province. She joined The Church of Almighty God in 2014. The afternoon of June 9, 2018, as Yu Baorong was in a rented room on Bazi Street in the Gulou District of Xuzhou in a gathering with two other Christians from the Church, eight or nine uniformed officers with Xuzhou’s Tongshan District Xuzhuang Police Station broke through the door and entered the room to arrest them. They then took them to the Xuzhou Economic Development Zone Public Security Sub-bureau to be interrogated separately.
Around 7:00 p.m. that evening, police officers Zhang Xin and Liu Chengwei questioned Yu Baorong on the information of her and the Church. Seeing that she didn’t talk, Liu Chengwei grabbed her hair with one hand, and balled his other hand into a fist, viciously punching her in the face and eyes, and then gritting his teeth and fuming with rage, he smacked her face over and over with an empty mineral-water bottle. He then took off his belt and repeatedly hit her mouth with it, which immediately swelled up and was burning with pain. The area around her eyes became bruised and swollen with blood and her lips also swelled up with blood. (A medical examination later revealed that she suffered nasal mucosal congestion in both nostrils, middle and inferior turbinate hypertrophy, left ear’s tympanic membrane congestion invagination, and absence of the light cone.) Seeing she wouldn’t say anything, the police continued whipping her head a number of times. It wasn’t until 4:00 a.m. that they paused their torture.
The next afternoon, the police took Yu to a hotel to continue their secret interrogation, forcing her to divulge information on the Church. When they realized she still wouldn’t talk, an officer with the surname Zheng viciously hit her left arm with his hand, and Liu Chengwei savagely punched her right shoulder. Yu was gnashing her teeth in pain. Following that, Zheng continued to interrogate her for five days straight, all the while hitting her in the left arm until it was completely swollen and bruised and hurt so much that she couldn’t even lift it. On June 16, Yu was taken into custody at the Sanpu Detention Center in Xuzhou City.
The morning of July 21, the police demanded that Yu Baorong pay bail money of 5,000 RMB (about 750 USD); they then released her on bail pending trial. They warned her: “When you go back home, you cannot keep practicing your faith. You can’t go out of town—you need to come running when we call!” When she got home she lied down on her bed, utterly limp and weak. She was in unbearable pain where the police had beaten her, and after over a month the swelling and bruising in her left arm was barely going down and the color of the bruises was fading a little. It is still painful to this day.
