In October 1999, I was on my way to Beijing to validate Falun Dafa and appeal to the government to stop the crackdown. The police forcefully pushed me into a police vehicle in Tiananmen Square. They took me to a precinct and left me with a few practitioners in the courtyard with no food or water for the entire first two days and nights. We were not even allowed to use the restroom. All of us refused to disclose our names and addresses. As a result, several police kicked us brutally. One of my toes was injured, and the nail became dark and came off later. I was in so much pain that I could not catch my breath. The police stood there and laughed hideously. They also said to me with hatred, "You deserve it. You deserve it."
I was later transferred to the 7th Division of Harbin Daoli Police Branch, where I was unlawfully detained for over three months. The prison guards and other criminal convicts launched their persecution on practitioners, and the prison was a living hell for us. We were once taken out of the cells because we practiced the exercises; a group of policemen and policewomen swarmed in and slapped us with all their strength. They also applied a torture technique they referred to as "little white dragon," which inflicts severe trauma to the inside organs or bones with no obvious injury to the skin. After our backs and faces were swollen, they kicked our lower abdomens until they were too tired to do it anymore. Then, they made us wear shackles that weighed over 40 pounds.
They took us into the cell and started "yanma" on us. Yanma is a form of sitting torture where we sit one next to another on hard wooden planks without any cushions. We were forced to sit from early in the morning until 10 p.m. Our buttocks were bruised, which was very painful when we tried to sit down later.
At the end of the year, some of their superiors came to inspect the prison, and I told them that we demanded immediate release because we violated no law. The leaders stopped walking around and said to me, "You are Falun Gong practitioners, aren't you?" All of us at this time said, "Yes. We are. Falun Dafa is a righteous Fa, and its practitioners committed no crimes. We demand that the arrest warrant on our Master be revoked, and we be unconditionally released." They did not even dare to look straight at us and left without a word.
We never changed our mind to go to Beijing again. As a result, they sent us to Wanjia Labor Camp of Harbin City.
The labor camp was worse than a Nazi concentration camp. A large convict savagely beat practitioner Wang for doing the sitting meditation exercise. Wang's screams woke up all the practitioners. We were locked in our cells, so all we could do was gather at the door, and bang and shout, "Stop beating him. Stop beating him." We saw Wang the following day at the meal break. His face was all bruised and swollen.
A female practitioner named Yang refused to tell Guard Zhang anything. Zhang ordered the cell heads, who are convicts, to take Yang to the restroom to beat her. They kept hitting her until she was lying there and could barely move. But it was not over. They asked her if she would be tough again, and Yang did not say no. At this time, the cell heads were so mad that they started punching her chest and groin areas. Yang was covered with blood, and they locked her in a separate cell because they were afraid that other practitioners would see the wounds. They changed clothes for her and wiped off the blood in her cell. She was not allowed to come out of the cell until her swollen face got better.
The police often showed up in our cells all of a sudden to catch us reading the book. They would take away all of the Falun Dafa books and materials. We started a hunger strike and group practice to get our books back. They started using batons to hit us, but we continued. Finally, the guards took some of us into other separate cells called "Small Cells."
In the Small Cells, the female guards gave us a little bit of corn porridge twice a day in order to starve us. They also forced us to sit in an iron chair. They yelled at us, "Male prisoners can't even sit for two days in a row, and let us see how well Falun Dafa practitioners can do." A practitioner named Pan sat in it for seven days and seven nights. Another practitioner, Wu, sat for 9 days while Wu's hands were shackled to the back of the chair. The torture and starving did not remove a tiny bit of our determination to be Falun Dafa practitioners. We endured the 46-day inhumane torture. The guards had no more fancy tortures, so they took us back to our normal cells.
The guards could not swallow the defeat, so they took us back to the "Small Cells" again. This time, they multiplied their efforts. First they put us up and handcuffed us to the iron gates from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m., and our hands, feet and legs were all swollen from the shackles at the end of the day. Then, we were not allowed to wear any shoes on the cold and coarse cement floor. They had us on the gates for a month, and they also made fun of us while we were up there. Is this what the TV program claimed that the "government cares for practitioners as teachers to students, and doctors to patients?" Is this what Jiang Zemin called "to rule the country with virtue?"
We were starving everyday in the Small Cells. One practitioner saved a handful of corn bits and passed them to other practitioners to eat. No one wanted to eat it, so we just passed it around. A policeman saw it, and he threw the bits away. He asked where the bits were from, and he also told other guards.
The police thought of another way of torture: noise. They took a tape player and put it on the center of the Small Cell, and turned the volume up to the maximum and played slanderous propaganda against Dafa. When one side of the tape was finished, a female guard walked in to flip the tape. She had to rush out because it was so loud for her. We requested that this noise torture be stopped. They totally ignored us and continued the torture for over a month. One female guard said to us with much hatred, "We will turn you into idiots, and we will kill you."
The persecution at Wanjia Labor Camp kept escalating. They built another Small Cell, which consisted of 18 rooms. The walls of the rooms have water flowing down, so that the rooms are damp and dark. No beds are in the rooms and practitioners have to sleep on the wet, cold floor. Practitioners were kept in the Small Cell for over 100 days. One day, when all the prisoners were standing in the open waiting to take X-rays, they saw that a row of practitioners were taken from the Small Cell. All the other prisoners quietly watched them when they were taken back to the cell. One criminal convict could not help but to say, "They are heroes." He did not say it aloud, but he was full of respect and support.
Many female practitioners detained at No. 2 Detention Center of Harbin are on a hunger strike to demand their release and to validate the Dafa. The prison authorities were afraid of any deaths among the hunger strikers. They sent them to Wanjia Labor Camp for further persecution without any legal procedures.
Practitioners from China
March 10, 2001
