Since Jiang Zemin outlawed Falun Gong on July 22nd, 1999, he and his cohorts have made use of State-run radio stations, TV stations and newspapers to report distorted facts about Falun Gong. Being human, my conscience has urged me to go to Beijing several times to appeal. I would like to say these just words on behalf of Falun Gong: Falun Gong is truly a virtuous and great law that has brought goodness to people's hearts, improved the moral character of more than 100 million 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", they would take that person away immediately. When they asked me, I answered in the affirmative and was sent to Changping temporary detention center in Beijing. There, they unjustifiably strip-searched me. Another practitioner had the same thing happen and had over 1,000 Yuan seized. The police said they were only "holding' the money, but the practitioner never got it back.
After several days in the temporary detention center in Changping, Dafa practitioners were sent to detainment centers in their hometowns because we persevered in cultivating Falun Gong. Within a few days after we got there, over 500 other Dafa practitioners (around 200 male and 300 female) have been taken into the detention center. They included university professors, college students, a sixteen-year-old high school student, a blind person, a pregnant women, a lady in her seventh day of recovery after an abortion, and elderly people in there seventies. Up to 90 people shared a not particularly big cell. One toilet, with no covering at all, sat in the corner of this 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 emotionally: "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 for the following: provide by law an environment for practicing, legalize the publication of Falun Dafa books, rescind the arrest warrant for Teacher Li, and release all the innocent detained Dafa practitioners. With these points in mind, we started a hunger strike. For doing so, the persecution on severa practitioners was "upgraded." We were detained in the drug rehabilitation department and then the ward under tight surveillance.
Cells in the ward were all 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 dish water. Undercooked steamed corn buns, covered in 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 between ten and 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 8:30 pm to 6:00 am. 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, Dafa practitioners nobly regarded the Fa as their teacher and 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 loin and back pain so as not to move and disturb others who had managed to fall sleep. We introduced 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 it 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 cried and told me, "If I had obtained 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 the hands and feet together so that they could not straighten their backs. 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 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 on again. During those times, there was no water to drink, and certainly none 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 all 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 at some time. They would last from anywhere 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 4:00 am, 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 planned to have enough grain for 300 people; 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 "fatigue tactics" to keep us from studying the Fa and practicing the exercises.
Studying the Fa and practicing the exercises in the labor camp was extremely difficult. If someone was found studying or practicing, he or she would suffer an 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 superiors: "Those who have been unsuccessful will be temporarily relieved of their post for self-examination." They attempted to force us to renounce Dafa, beating good people as if they were bad. From an everyday perspective, isn't such a government scary? The number of the practitioners who got sentenced and sent to the labor camp kept increasing. They made use of all rooms available to house Dafa practitioners. In some groups, it was even required that two practitioners share a single bed.
Almost all Dafa practitioners in the labor camp were subjected to torture. Some were beaten black and blue. The bridge of one person'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 at a time. Some were electrocuted so that they vomited or lost consciousness. In some cases, the face was directly electrocuted so that it became severely bruised and swollen. There was the smell of burning flesh until the following day. Even more serious, some practitioners were tortured to the point of incontinence. Some were confined to a cell so small 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 present for days.
All of the above went on to force Dafa practitioners to give up and slander Dafa and Teacher Li. Slogans that slandered Teacher Li and Falun Dafa were posted on the windows of the reception room. All visitors to the inmates of 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 because they refused to read the vicious slandering words. (The Falun Gong practitioners detained at the labor camp came from all over the province.)
Power and violence will not overwhelm justice and kindness. Although our human bodies have been bullied severely, our hearts for persevering in the cultivation of 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 so that more and more people will be free from the sufferings of birth, old age, illness, and death, we have no anger or hatred for our hardships. For the opportunity occurring only once in a thousand years, and for making those who beat and curse at us stop their brutal deeds and replace evil with kindness, we have no complaint or regret for the sufferings we have been undertaking.
A Falun Dafa practitioner who was detained in a detection center, a ward and a labor camp
Early October, 2000
