October 2000

Since Jiang Zemin outlawed Falun Gong on July 22nd, 1999, he and his cohorts have made use of all state-run radio stations, TV stations and newspapers to report distorted facts about Falun Gong. My conscience urged me to go to Beijing to appeal. I would like to say the following on behalf of Falun Gong: "Falun Gong is truly a virtuous teaching that has brought goodness to people's hearts, improved the moral character of tens of millions of people, and brought tremendous benefits to society."

When I was appealing in Beijing, policemen asked pedestrians if they were Falun Gong practitioners. If someone answered "yes", the police would take that person away immediately. When they asked me, I answered "yes" and as a result I was sent to Changping temporary detention center in Beijing. There, they strip-searched me. Another practitioner had the same thing happen to her and had her 1,000 Yuan seized by police. The police said they were only "holding" the money, but the practitioner never got the money back.

After several days in the temporary detention center in Changping, practitioners were sent to detention centers in their hometowns because we persevered in practicing Falun Gong. Within a few days after we got there, 500 more practitioners (around 200 male and 300 female) were taken into the detention center. They included university professors, college students, a sixteen-year-old high school student, a blind person, a pregnant woman, a lady in her seventh day after miscarriage, and elderly people in their seventies. Up to 90 people shared a particularly big cell. One toilet, with no covering at all, sat in the corner of the cell, immediately next to a row of beds. At night, people had their feet crammed up to the toilet.

Although it was crowded, the cell remained in perfect order, clean and tidy. Observing this, the guards couldn't help saying: "Falun Gong is really a group of good people." The guards gradually changed their stiff attitudes.

Many fellow practitioners have persistently appealed to the Chinese government attempting to make the following requests: provide a lenient cultivation environment, legalize the publication of Falun Dafa books, rescind the arrest warrant for Teacher Li, and release all the innocent Falun Dafa practitioners detained or sentenced. With these points in mind, we started a hunger strike. Because of this, the persecutions against us were "upgraded." We were detained in the drug rehabilitation institution under a tight surveillance.

Cells in the institution were about ten square meters. Each cell had two beds, a passageway in the middle and a toilet in the corner. Twenty-five, and in some cases thirty practitioners were packed into one cell. The pumpkin soup we were fed resembled dirty water. Undercooked steamed corn buns were covered with dirt and rat droppings accompanied the soup. During the day, we were not allowed to walk on the ground; they forced us to sit. Nighttime was shear torture. They called it "knife squeezing fish." Everyone but the head of the cell had to lay on one of the double-sized beds on his or her side. Each bed, wooden and unpadded, held ten to twelve people, with their chests and backs pressed up against one another. Only one or two quilts covered each bed. We had to be in bed from 8:30pm to 6:00am. We could neither sleep nor roll over at will. Only every two hours were we allowed to turn our bodies.

Non-practitioner prisoners in the ward always swore at people. In contrast, Falun Dafa practitioners conducted themselves according to "truthfulness, compassion, forbearance." While eating, we would rather endure hunger than vie for the several pieces of pumpkin at the bottom of the pot. During the night, we endured severe back pain so as not to move and disturb others who had managed to fall sleep. We introduced Falun Dafa to other prisoners and told them the principles of being a good person. The criminals saw with their own eyes the great benevolence and forbearance of "Falun Gong". They said that they would never have believed there existed such good people if they had not seen them with their own eyes. Our behavior educated and changed them. They became more and more civilized, no longer vying for food, wasting grains, or using dirty words. One criminal told me, "If I had obtained Falun Dafa earlier, I would not have committed such a big crime."

We were not allowed to study and practice in the ward. If we did, we were forced to wear heavy handcuffs and shackles. Some were even locked with hands and feet together so that they could not straighten the back. Several practitioners were chained together and left to eat, sleep and use the toilet in that manner. We commonly endured beatings and foul language. The lack of water was most unbearable. It was provided every morning and evening for a half an hour. The head of the cell assigned a person to fill up several plastic buckets for drinking, washing clothes and rinsing toilets throughout the day. But sometimes, we had to stretch the bucket water for two or three days because the water failed to come. During those days, there was no water to drink, and certainly no water to wash the face or rinse the toilet. Therefore we had to put sheets of paper in the toilet to manage the waste.

The windows remained open all day and night even in the coldest months of the year. The cell was no different from a pigsty. Because of bad hygienic conditions, almost all the prisoners were infected with scabies that would last from one month to as long as half a year. They were especially itchy at night when they felt like ten thousand arrows piercing through the body. The detention center is really "hell in the human world".

Every "Falun Gong" practitioner was interrogated several times during the detention in the ward. Because we continued to cultivate Falun Gong and declared our innocence, we were sentenced to 1, 1.5 or 2 years of forced labor in a labor camp.

In the labor camp, the situation became more severe. The guards forced us to work from early in the morning, 3:00 or 4:00am, until midnight. Speaking while working was prohibited and resulted in beatings and curses. Sometimes, if we attempted to wash ourselves in the morning, the guards would curse and beat us. Mealtime was only three to five minutes. We simply poured food into the stomach, un-chewed. According to one guard, the government originally prepared grain for 300 people, but there were 600 people in the labor camp. Therefore, during the first several months, grain was the major hardship in the labor camp. Unbearable hunger, along with exhaustion from labor made some practitioners lose consciousness. They used "sleep deprivation tactics" to keep us from studying Falun Dafa teachings and practicing the exercises.

Studying Falun Dafa and practicing the exercises in the labor camp was extremely difficult. If someone was found studying or practicing, he or she would suffer immediate brutal beating. Practitioners were always beaten so that blood flowed from the nose and mouth. As time passed, the guards became even more severe because of intense pressure from their supervisors, who threatened them that if they could not stop practitioners from practicing, they would be temporarily removed from their posts for self-examination. They attempted to force us to renounce our beliefs, beating good people as if they were bad. Isn't such a government frightening? The number of the practitioners who got sentenced and sent to the labor camp kept increasing. They made use of all rooms available to hold detained practitioners. In some groups, it was even required that two practitioners share a single bed.

Almost all practitioners detained in the labor camp had experienced tortures. Some were beaten so severely that their bodies were full of wounds, and became black and blue. The bridge of a practitioner's nose was fractured. Some were tied to bare iron beds (with no mattress or bed coverings - and so dubbed "dead people's beds") for several days. Some were electrically shocked and they vomited or lost consciousness. In some cases, the faces of some practitioners were shocked by electric batons and became bruised, swollen and disfigured. The smell of burnt flesh was present until the following day. Even more seriously, some practitioners were tortured to the point of incontinence. Some were confined to a cell so small that they could not completely stand up, squat or lie down. Yet they had to eat, live, defecate or urinate in the cell. The urine and feces remained three for days.

All of the above was to force practitioners to give up and slander Falun Dafa and Teacher Li. Slogans that slandered Teacher Li and Falun Dafa were even posted on the windows of the reception room. All visitors to the labor camp were required to read the slogans. Some visitors (Falun Gong practitioners) who had traveled by train for several hundred miles had to go back with tears in their eyes before they could meet their loved ones because they refused to read the vicious slanders. (The Falun Gong practitioners detained at the labor camp came from all over the province.)

Power and violence cannot overwhelm justice and kindness. Although our human bodies have been bullied severely, our hearts for persevering in the cultivation of Falun Dafa will never change. Although we have lost our personal freedom, our firm belief that "justice will definitely overwhelm injustice" will never change! For the promotion of the universal principles, and for more and more people to be freed from the sufferings, we have no anger or hatred for our hardships.