(Clearwisdom.net) The first time I was illegally detained was in February 2000 for persisting in practicing Falun Dafa. During the detention, I was pressured to give up my beliefs and conscience. If I insisted on practicing, I would lose my job, be subject to "reform through labor," and face spending an unspecified term in a labor camp. When the camp staff could not make me give up Truth, Compassion, and Forbearance, they would coerce my family and relatives into trying to persuade me to stop practicing Falun Gong. The mental pressure from my family was simply heartbreaking. At the time, my child was only one month old. My parents, wife, and brother all tried to talk me into giving up the practice. My father even kneeled down to beg me.
I had to take a step back and promised not to go to Beijing to appeal again. Although I was sent home, I still lost my job, and I was not allowed to associate with other practitioners. Following the principles of Truth, Compassion, and Forbearance is the most righteous thing and I could not do it nobly and openly. I felt really depressed.
A few months later, at the beginning of October, I was abducted and sent to a detention center again. After being detained for a month, I was sentenced to two years of forced labor because I would not give up my belief.
Inside the Yanbian Forced Labor Camp, we were subjected to all sorts of persecution, especially in the education section of the labor camp. It was specifically used to persecute Falun Gong practitioners. There, we were poorly fed, yet had to do heavy and dirty work. However, the police treated those who compromised better than those who did not. Those who compromised ate well and were allowed to buy food and have visitors. Those who did not compromise were stripped of every right. For example, we had to use 20 lb hammers to tear down a house; all day long we were just pounding and pounding. Almost everyone had more than 10 blisters on his hands and some men even passed out from exhaustion. We had to clean the sewage drain, which was full of feces and other filth. We also had to dig ditches and remove concrete structures. Every day we got up at 5 o'clock in the morning and worked until 9 o'clock in the evening. If there was not much to do that day, we would have to sit on small plastic stools and look straight ahead for the whole day without moving. We were scolded or beaten if we moved. The police would read books that slandered Dafa and Teacher to brainwash us. They even forced us to read those books. We would be severely beaten if we refused. If any little thing we were made to do did not please the police, we were beaten or scolded. One practitioner was made to squat down with his arms tied up behind his back at least 1,000 times. Eventually, that form of torture left him unable to walk. Others were forced to hold their heads down and their arms up behind their backs for prolonged periods of time, which was also very painful.
The police used to tie my arms behind my back and then pull my arms up as far as possible. My body and arms were pulling at each other. The extreme pain left me drenched in sweat. When my arms could not be lifted any higher, they tucked a bottle between my back and arms to force my arms to extend even further upward. They also used a plastic rod (about 1.5 inches thick) to repeatedly beat me on the same spot and cause added pain. The pain I endured is beyond description. I could feel each blow even before the rod touched me. They tortured me for an entire morning and my body was completely purple when I took off my shirt. The spot that had been repeatedly beaten was black and the bruise took almost two months to heal. Because my arms had been tied up for so long, they were numb for a very long time. When it was time for our routine physical examinations Li Wenbin, the police officer that had beaten me (the director of the Education Section at the time), took me to another location so I wouldn't be examined for fear his violent acts would be exposed.
The police repeatedly did such illegal things. They made up excuses to extend my sentence by three months. On November 30, 2001, they found a so-called artist to humiliate Teacher and Dafa with all kinds of lies in front of us. We protested and were thus locked up in a separate cell, which was very cold. It had almost no heat during the winter and we were not given any blankets and were often stripped of our clothes. Later, one of us was tortured with electric batons, and so we started a hunger strike. We were then locked into an iron cage that was underneath the stairs on the first floor. It was about 20-25 ft wide and 4.6 ft tall. It slanted in on two sides because of the stairways above, the other two sides were concrete walls, and the floor was made of steel. It was an extremely cold narrow space.
We were tortured like this for three days and then separated. After we separated, practitioner Wang Tiesong was beaten to death on December 4. The police shamelessly lied to his family about the cause of his death.
We could not learn any details about Wang Tiesong's death because the police blocked all information. Probably because of Wang's death, on December 19, all Falun Gong practitioners were suddenly transferred to Jiutai Forced Labor Camp, where the conditions were worse and even more evil than at Yanbian Forced Labor Camp.
There, our sentences were arbitrarily prolonged if we did not give up our practice. The police extended my two-year term to three years. Practitioner, Mr. Guo Yanxiang, was taken to a place where they specifically intensified the tortures against practitioners. He was only allowed to use the toilet twice a day. When he appealed to the director of the camp, Meng XX, Meng prolonged Guo's sentence without just cause.
Beatings, physical torture, slandering, sleep deprivation, substandard food, starvation, and long hours of labor that was physically impossible were used to torture Dafa practitioners. Staff even broadcast and made us read the propaganda they made up. If we refused to read the materials, our sentences would be extended or we would be beaten or locked up. My sentence was extended for three more months because I refused to read the slander (this was in addition to what they usually do every month). Many practitioners had the same experience as I did. Being locked in an isolated cell was terrible. We were given very little to eat. Sometimes, our daily ration consisted of just two small rice cakes (1"x 5"x 0.5") plus watery soup. When the persecution intensified, the police would put a lot of salt in the soup. Practitioners were only allowed to use the toilet twice a day; some practitioners were forced to urinate on the bench in the iron cage inside the cell.
To protest the inhumane persecution, Dafa practitioners often went on hunger strikes as they had no other means and the persecutors would not listen to reason. Practitioners had no way of communicating with the outside world. Hence the police could do any illegal and inhumane thing they wanted. When practitioners were on a hunger strike, the police would brutally force-feed them. The police would ask other prisoners (non-practitioners) to hold the practitioner down and use scissors or another sharp iron tool covered with a piece of cloth to pry their teeth apart. Some practitioners' teeth fell out, which caused a lot bleeding. After they opened their mouths, a plastic tube was inserted. To make it worse, they would pull the tube back and forth because "the tube was not where it was supposed to be." As the tube was pulled up and down, people tended to vomit whatever had been fed into their stomachs. To intensify the torture, they mixed a lot of salt in a cornstarch paste and used it to force-feed practitioners, which made the victims feel extremely thirsty and their stomachs burn. Since there was only one tube for force-feeding, mucous and the vomit from the previous person covered the tube. It would make one feel sick just to look at it. One time when I was being force-fed, a prisoner who was going to do the job looked at the tube and then vomited into the basket that was used to wash the tube. I learned that when they force-fed one practitioner, the cornstarch paste was mixed with dirt and a salt. The practitioner became extremely thirsty and his stomach was burning. This practitioner had become very scared of force-feeding. The police tortured the practitioners like this several times a day.
Practitioners Wu Dexiu, Wu Donglin, and Zhao Xishun, looked like skeletons after being tortured like this for 3-4 months. Eventually, they could not locate Wu Dexiu's veins when injecting liquids. It would take them more than ten tries to locate a vein. Eventually, Wu Dexiu had almost no blood pressure so the police used electric batons to shock him. Seeing that these practitioners were almost dying, the police sent them home to avoid responsibility. These things were common occurrences. I want to talk about more specific examples.
In March 2002, Jiutai Forced Labor Camp started a frenzied and malicious persecution of Falun Gong practitioners. Almost no practitioner escaped the brutal, barbaric, and unbearable tortures. Many practitioners were stripped of their shirts and then shocked with high-voltage electric batons for long periods of time. When the batons ran out of power, the police would recharge them and resume the torture. Some received electric shocks to such sensitive areas as their mouths and armpits. Sometimes one practitioner would be shock by 4-5 electric batons at the same time. Many people's faces ended up deformed and developed large blisters on their mouths, faces, and bodies. Some practitioners had plastic tubes jammed through their rib cages; some practitioners' feet were severely burned so they could not walk; some were not allowed to sleep for many days. Several practitioners were tortured to death by the Jiang's regime using the above tortures. Sun Shizhong from Songyuan City, Jilin Province was beaten to death right after he was sent to the camp on April 19, 2002. The police who were responsible for his death have not yet been caught.
In April 2003, Jiutai Forced Labor Camp started to brainwash some of the practitioners. Practitioners were taken to a reception room upstairs and kept separated from other practitioners. The police told the rest of us that the practitioners were going to have a study class. They even lied to us, saying that drug abusers were sent to the reception room and hence beds and other necessities were moved up there for them. What they were really doing was trying to brainwash the practitioners. Later on, several practitioners protested with hunger strikes and hence the brainwashing session was a failure.
The persecution carried on. If a practitioner refused to salute Meng, the director of the camp, the practitioner would lose points or have his sentence extended. The third team, thus had to shout "Greetings to the Director!" repeatedly for many hours. This happened more than once. In September 2003, the Jiutai Forced Labor Camp set up several new iron cages to hold and torture those practitioners who firmly stood up against the persecution.
This persecution involves tens of thousands of families and has brought people extremely painful losses. Many families were broken and many family members of the practitioners suffered irreversible mental trauma. This evil persecution is humiliating and attacks the sense of justice and conscience of numerous beings. It is suppressing all beings' yearning, support, and pursuit of the most benevolent factors- upright faith and truth.
Teacher Li said in his article "Coercion Cannot Change People's Heart", "Never in history has someone who persecuted those with upright faiths ever succeeded." This evil show is bound to fail in shame. The facts of the persecution will be collected and the head of the criminals, Jiang, and his accomplices will be tried in the court of history. People will no longer be deceived and humankind will return to a truly beautiful future.
