(Minghui.org) When Ms. Yuan Yumei completed a five-year prison term in July 2025, she was emaciated and her back was hunched due to years of abuse. Once a healthy person, the 56-year-old Xingning City, Guangdong Province, resident, who was born in 1969, looked much older than her age.
The prison authorities threatened Ms. Yuan not to disclose her ordeal to the outside world. She decided to reveal what she went through during her prison term.
Ms. Yuan was arrested on July 25, 2020, after she was reported by several students for giving them informational materials that exposed the Chinese Communist Party’s ongoing persecution of her faith, Falun Gong. She was sentenced to five years and fined 50,000 yuan in late 2020.
Abused in Prison
Soon after her appeal was rejected on March 1, 2021, Ms. Yuan was admitted to the Guangdong Province Women’s Prison. During her first year there, she was subjected to brainwashing almost every day. She was forced to watch videos that slandered Falun Gong and listen to lectures given by professors who repeated the lies about Falun Gong.
Ms. Yuan refused to say she did anything wrong by practicing Falun Gong. The guards targeted her for retaliation because she protested the daily brainwashing.
The guards arranged four inmates, who were all trained in persecuting Falun Gong practitioners, to monitor Ms. Yuan around the clock. To have their prison terms reduced, they used various means to try to make her renounce her faith. They accused her of having the audacity to oppose the government and one threatened to make her life miserable every day.
The inmates beat and cursed Ms. Yuan as soon as they got up every morning. She held firm to her faith, so they did not let her sit down. She had to stand or squat in a certain way every day or she was punished.
For a long time, the inmates did not let Ms. Yuan sleep. Whenever she dozed off, they hit her, stabbed her with pens, or poured cold water on her (in the winter). Once her face hit the ground and another time they slammed her head against a metal door. On one occasion, an inmate kept kicking her face because she closed her eyes at night. Her lips bled profusely as a result.
Ms. Yuan lost her appetite one winter and the guards instructed the inmates to take her to the prison hospital to have her blood drawn. After the results came in, they claimed that she was sick and ordered her to take pills. She said she did not have any illness and refused to comply.
The inmates took her to the bathroom and twisted her hands behind her back before force-feeding her an unknown medication. Her throat bled every time and her arms hurt.
Unable to cope with the force-feeding, Ms. Yuan eventually agreed to take the medication on her own. She later stopped taking the pills and went on a hunger strike when the inmates ordered her to yell “I am criminal Yuan” before she was allowed to eat, shower, or use the restroom. The inmates then “helped her shower” by pouring buckets of cold water over her in the winter.
They also force-fed her. Once they shoved the feeding tube down her throat so violently that she almost suffocated and her heart almost stopped beating.
Past Persecution
Ms. Yuan has been repeatedly targeted since the persecution began in July 1999. Prior to her latest prison sentence, she was given two years of forced labor in April 2001 and and three years in July 2003. After she was arrested in May 2004, she was held at a brainwashing center. Months later on October 25, she was arrested again and admitted to the Mizhai Detention Center. In 2012 she was arrested again on December 20 and detained for 15 days.
Related Reports:
Seven Guangdong Residents Sentenced to Prison Between Late 2020 and August 2021
How Guards in Guangdong Province Women's Prison Torture Falun Dafa Practitioners
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