(Minghui.org) Falun Gong practitioner Ms. Liu Hong from Wendeng City, Shandong Province was arrested in January 2015 and recounts her torturous experience in detention.
Arrest and Detention
Ms. Tian Lisha and I distributed Falun Gong informational materials on January 9, 2015. Someone reported us to the police, and we were arrested and taken to the area's domestic security division. We were interrogated and had blood samples taken from us. We were then taken to the Wendeng Detention House later that night.
I went on a hunger strike and demanded to be released immediately. Ms. Tian and I refused to wear the prison uniforms, so the guards refused to give food to Ms. Tian. She was transferred to a detention center on the fifth day and I was taken on the sixth day. However, I was first taken to the Wendeng City Hospital for force feeding.
Torture Re-enactment: Force Feeding
Failed Scheme to Make Inmates Hate Practitioners
Immediately upon arrival at the detention center, I was taken to a solitary confinement cell because I talked loudly about Falun Gong. The cell was without any light, and there was a metal ring on the floor and a urinary barrel.
I was on a hunger strike for six days. The authorities were afraid to take responsibility for anything, so they took me to a regular cell two hours later. I refused to wear the prison uniform and continued with my hunger strike. I demanded to be released, as I had not committed any crime and freedom of belief was granted by the Chinese Constitution.
They tried every conceivable method to make me eat. Every cell was provided three barrels of hot water each day. They announced during one morning broadcast that no hot water was provided to the No. 7 cell, the one where I was held. They tried to make the inmates hate me. However, no one in the cell blamed me but were instead disgusted by the scheme concocted by the detention center officials.
Liu Zhongxiao, head of the detention center, was livid and called me to his office.
“I have a wife and children to take care of.” He pounded the table and demanded that I stop the hunger strike. “You could cause me to lose my job and bring my family financial problems.”
I explained that I am not a criminal. “It is my decision to eat or not,” I added. “You should release me, and if you truly love your family, stop persecuting good people. Otherwise, what you do may affect them because it's a heavenly principle that good is rewarded with good and evil is met with evil.”
Force-Feeding
I was taken to the Wendeng City Hospital for force-feeding three or four days later. The two nurses from the hospital then demanded that they force feed me in the detention center in front of my cell mates.
The scene was chilling. My screams from pain echoed throughout the center; however, a nurse still claimed that it was easy to insert the feeding tube into my stomach. I was told that the nurses asked Lin Zhihua, the detention center doctor, whether the tube was going to stay in my stomach later. Lin answered no and said to the nurses that she would give them the reason later.
“Insert it and pull it out again and again. Is this to make her suffer,” the nurses said to each other.
A division head said that it would be fine if I was released because of the hunger strike. However, if not, they would be implicated if anything unbecoming happened, so they could not let that happen.
Bailed Out
I was taken to the Wendeng City Hospital because I went into a coma after being forced fed twice in the detention center.
I was placed in shackles in the hospital. Two armed police and two female guards monitored me, and there were two shifts each day. The window in the patient room where I was held was covered to prevent people from looking in at me.
I had tried to clarify the truth about Falun Gong to those who were assigned to monitor me. Some knew that practitioners were kind people. Still, they obeyed orders and did not know the terrible consequences for participating in the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) persecution of Falun Gong.
I was put on an IV drip day and night. My blood vessels were deflated so it was difficult to insert a needle.
After 25 days in detention, I was extremely weak and on the verge of death. The officials finally allowed me bail out on medical parole.
