(Minghui.org) The authorities in Guizhou have closely followed the Chinese Communist Party since it started the persecution campaign of Falun Gong since 1999.
In 2018, the authorities in Tongren City spent 1.6 million yuan to renovate a three-story facility in the Dengta Neighborhood. The new “Dengta Care Center,” which is about ten miles from downtown Tongren, has a gated parking lot in the front and beautiful landscaping of flowers and trees. At first glance, it looks like a beautiful house. But it’s actually a brainwashing center used to persecute Falun Gong practitioners.
After entering the 24/7 staffed, electronic security gate, one would see an exhibition of posters slandering Falun Gong on the first floor. The interrogation rooms and brainwashing rooms are on the second floor. The third floor has over ten rooms used to detain the practitioners on both sides of the five-feet wide hallway. There are surveillance cameras everywhere in the building, including pinhole cameras inside the rooms.
Each room is less than 150 square feet, with a tiny bathroom less than three feet wide. The ceiling is 11.5 feet tall. Each room has two beds, a small table, a clothes rack and a rubber chair. The wall is insulated with sound-proof foam wrapped with faux leather on all four sides.
Although each room is equipped with air conditioning, it’s never turned on. The only small ventilation opening leads to the enclosed six by three feet balcony outside the room, which has windows on three sides. In the pitch dark room, the purpose of the opening is to let the practitioner know whether it’s bright or dark outside.
The director of the “Dengta Care Center” is Tian Yang, 47. She also serves as the director of Bijiang District Political and Legal Affairs Committee, an extra-judiciary agency tasked with persecuting Falun Gong. In the past ten years, she has been busy traveling around the province to give seminars in various prisons and other brainwashing centers to smear Falun Gong.
The staff members working in the “Care Center” were former employees of judiciary institutions or 610 Office, aged between 40 and 60. Their names and other personal information are strictly confidential. Most of them have worked to brainwash the practitioners for five or ten years and they are die-hard followers of the communist regime. They bring two cellphones to communicate with each other. Paper and pen are nowhere to be found in the building.
Knowing that physical torture or forcible brainwashing cannot shake the practitioners’ faith, the brainwashing center uses chronic loneliness to break the practitioners’ will.
Once a practitioner is taken to the “Dengta Care Center,” they are denied family visitation until they agree to renounce Falun Gong. As long as they remain firm in their faith, they would be detained here with no time limit.
The practitioners are held in the room all day long and each person is watched by two people. When the staff members become bored, they could go out and play with their cellphone, but the practitioners aren’t allowed to step out into the hallway or even open the door. If they don’t renounce Falun Gong, no one, including the staff members, would talk to them. Occasionally, an official from the Political and Legal Affairs Committee would come and threaten to sentence them. The only condition for them to be released is to write a statement to renounce Falun Gong.
According to an insider, the shortest period that a practitioner was detained here was a week and the longest duration was 70 days, before the practitioner was sentenced to prison. Due to strict information censorship, it remains a secret how many practitioners have been persecuted here.
Due to lack of air circulation, the rooms have a very filthy smell. Practitioners who were detained here reported that they felt numb, thirsty, dizzy, weak and with bloated stomachs after eating the food here. Their quickly became emaciated, struggled with declining memory and had dull eyes. They suspected that the authorities mixed toxic drugs into the food.
Before the Communist Party’s 20th Party Congress was held between October 16 and 22, the local police arrested four practitioners on April 28, aged between 60 and 74. They were detained there between 30 and 65 days.
Even after the practitioners were forced to write the statements to renounce Falun Gong, the police continued to harass them and monitor their daily activities after they were released. One practitioner has been forced to live away from home. One practitioner is being watched by someone who stays outside of their home and can’t go out. Another elderly practitioner has suffered a nervous breakdown due to the persecution.