(Clearwisdom.net)
I'm a female Dafa practitioner from Shijiazhuang City, Hebei Province. On July 20, 1999, I went to Beijing to appeal for Falun Gong, and I was arrested and detained in Baoding City for one day without being given anything to eat or drink. The policemen released the police dogs several times to intimidate us.
On July 22, 1999, I went to Beijing to appeal again and was arrested on August 1. I was detained in the Shijiazhuang City Liaison Office in Beijing for one day and then taken back by my work unit. After that, my work unit used every possible way to harass me, and refused to allow me to go to Beijing, to practice Falun Gong or to concentrate on my work. The authorities also applied pressure on my husband.
During the night of September 8, 1999, someone made a threatening call to my parents-in-law. They were terrified and called everywhere to try to contact me. At that time I was working the evening shift, and my family was so worried that they stayed up the whole night.
On the morning of October 10, 1999, I was practicing the Falun Gong exercises with another fellow practitioner by the gate of a park. The plainclothes police arrested us. They searched us and confiscated the Dafa book and cassette tape player. We were illegally detained for 7 days. During the period of detention, I went on a hunger strike to protest, and we were forced to do heavy labor.
On October 19, 1999, I went to Beijing to appeal and was arrested on October 26. I was moved from place to place for over a month. After that, the security department of my work unit often came to harass me, causing great inconvenience to my family. They also came to my home with the police to abduct me, scaring my parents and children. We could no longer live a peaceful life. The management at my work unit also pressured my husband and caused great mental stress to him, forcing him to eventually file for divorce. Our family was thus broken up, and it hurt my child greatly.
In February 2000, I joined a group practice, and I was subsequently arrested and detained in the First Detention Center of Shijiazhuang City for one month. The prison guard forcibly took away our Dafa books. We went on hunger strikes to protest. After the one-month term expired, the police asked my work unit to detain me in the guesthouses of my work unit. I requested to be released immediately. The next day, my family came to ask for me and I was taken home. Just as I got home, over a dozen policemen came and abducted me to the police station. I was detained there illegally for a week, staying in a small, damp and dirty room with male inmates.
In March 2000, I was sentenced to three years of forced labor and sent to the 4th unit of the Shijiazhuang Labor Camp. In that camp, other practitioners and I were forced to stand still against the wall, not allowed to speak or practice the exercises. We were handcuffed, tied up, shocked with electric batons, beaten and kicked, and locked up in solitary confinement. If we went on hunger strike, we would be brutally forcedly fed.
In March 2001, more than twenty practitioners and I were transferred to another labor camp in Hebei Province. In this labor camp, the Falun Gong practitioners were handcuffed to the ground for over 60 hours. We were forced to bend down and be handcuffed to the rings attached to the floor, unable to move at all. While being handcuffed in this position, more than a dozen police came to assault us. Some used electric batons to shock us, and some just beat and kicked us. My face was nearly unrecognizable from the beatings.
I was detained in that labor camp for over 5 months. They subjected me to long-term sleep deprivation. We went on hunger strikes to protest, and the guards force-fed us with excrement. I was forced-fed twice with excrement, and afterwards, I had a fever of over 40 degrees Celsius (about 104 degrees Fahrenheit) and serious diarrhea. Under the severe physical and mental torture, I suffered a mental breakdown. The labor camp, afraid of taking responsibility, asked my family to take me back home in August 2001. When my family came to get me, they could hardly recognize me. My family had to send me to the mental hospital for treatment, but it did not have any effect. So they took me home again. With the help of fellow practitioners, I started to read Zhuan Falun with them and gradually recovered.
Jiang's regime used such inhumane methods to torture me into a mental collapse. It was Dafa that helped me back to health. The unjust persecution is vicious, but nobody can shake Falun Dafa practitioners' beliefs.