Ma Yuquin: Worthy of the Kingdom

China Aid Association
May, 2001. Ma Yuquin and her family were sleeping when police burst into her house and arrested her, her son and her daughter-in-law. The police left her five-year-old grandson alone with nobody to care for him. When a fellow Christian named Yu Zhongju (27) dropped by the house, she too was promptly arrested (China Aid investigators report that sister Yu was beaten to death in custody).

“They wanted me to hear my son’s cries,”� she said. “It broke my heart.”�

On November 26, 2002, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof reported from the remote region where police were interrogating Sister Ma: “She never broke when she was tortured with beatings and electrical shocks. Even when she was close to death, she refused to disclose the names of members of her congregation or sign a statement renouncing her Christian faith.”
The physical abuse nearly killed her. But the mental torture was even worse. Throughout her ordeal, Ma Yuqin could hear the sounds of her son being tortured in the next room. Each could hear the screams of the other. Recalling this, Sister Ma began to sob.
“They wanted me to hear my son’s cries,”� she said. “It broke my heart.”
According to interviews with church members and statements smuggled out of prison, dozens of church members were arrested at the same time and were beaten with clubs, jolted with cattle prods and burned with cigarettes. When they fainted, buckets of water were poured over them to revive them. Interrogators stomped on the fingers of male prisoners and stripped young women prisoners naked and abused them.
“They used the electrical prods on me all over,” Sister Ma said, fighting back the tears again. “They wanted to humiliate us.”
Kristof learned firsthand that, “This kind of treatment has been common in China for more than half a century. Citizens whose only crime is worshiping God are burned by cigarettes and beaten with clubs.”