Torture Survivor Recounts Her Nightmarish Suffering in a Chinese Forced Labour Camp

The teary Falun Gong practitioner who was demonstrating torture by force-feeding in the following report is Wang Yuzhi. She was once a successful entrepreneur in China and was illegally detained three times, simply because she practises Falun Gong. In July 2001 she was abducted while printing Dafa leaflets and was later sent to the Wanjia Labour Camp in Heilongjiang Province where she suffered all kinds of torture and as a result almost lost sight in both eyes.

Tearfully, Wang Yuzhi recounts her savage, personal experience of being force-fed

1. A former entrepreneur's personal experience

From May 24 to 26, 2004 Falun Gong practitioners in Chicago held a Torture Exhibit entitled "Persecution Meets Principle" in the city centre, which included demonstrations by people who had personally suffered the same tortures. The exhibit combined live actors, artists' renderings and display boards to show some of the cruel torture methods used on Falun Gong practitioners in China today.

Wang Yuzhi, who was accepted as a political refugee to Canada in 2003, once again recounted her nightmarish suffering while being force-fed in a labour camp in China. With tears swelling in her eyes as she spoke, she said,

"During my hunger strike to protest the persecution, the guards who force-fed me used the most savage torture methods on me. Several guards and inmates tied up my hands and feet, and then I was pinned down onto a wooden board. They covered me up with a piece of white cloth, with only my mouth visible. Then they inserted a piece of pipe into my mouth, the same kind people in the Northeast of China use for connecting to a gas tank. At the same time they tried to hold my mouth open with a pair of pliers and a metal device for opening a horse's mouth. In order to force the corn paste into my mouth more efficiently, they stood at a place over two meters high. Because the food was very coarse and the pipe was thin, the food could not go down and it splashed all over the place."

Wang went on and said, "I protested this torture repeatedly, but the police said, 'Jiang is in power and you have no rights whatsoever.' After the force-feeding, perhaps a dozen police officers lifted me up and threw me hard onto the ground. I lost consciousness several times during the torture. Once, when I regained consciousness, I saw myself covered with bruises, and even other inmates sharing the same cell with me wept when they saw my condition. Under such torture, both my nose and eyes started to bleed and run with pus. As a result I became nearly blind and my health was severely damaged."

Wang Yuzhi suffered all kinds of inhumane torture simply because she would not give up her belief in the principles of "Truth-Compassion-Forbearance."

When people asked her if all this was true, Wang Yuzhi said, "What I have personally demonstrated here is only a small portion of the tortures they used. Here in the U.S., we cannot get the thick gas pipe used for force-feeding in China, so we are unable to show you the whole picture of the real torture I suffered, and yet such a method of torture is frequently used on Falun Gong practitioners in China."

It is said that the type of torture Wang Yuzhi suffered is called "destructive force-feeding" and is completely different from that of medical [feeding] treatment for humanitarian reasons. It is a form of cruel physical torture under the guise of humanitarian aid, which is used on people holding a hunger strike. It is aimed at forcing the people being tortured to submit to their oppressors.

According to statistics from Clearwisdom, based on facts leaked out from various sources to date over a hundred Falun Gong practitioners are known to have been tortured to death in Mainland China as a result of such savage force-feeding carried out by guards and common criminals who have no medical training whatsoever. Many more practitioners suffered various after-effect symptoms from force-feeding. Many were force-fed with highly concentrated saline solution, with water laced with hot chili pepper powder, strong white alcohol, cleaning solutions, even urine and human waste. They experienced extreme suffering and humiliation.

Some guards even incited criminals to force-feed Falun Gong practitioners for pleasure. For example, they would ask the criminals to pump air into a practitioner's stomach after he/she had been force-fed, and then ordered them to step on the practitioner's stomach, forcing the saline solution to gush back up from the practitioner's stomach out through the nose and mouth, causing severe irritation to the nose and eyes. The guards got great pleasure from watching the suffering of the victim. Some practitioners lost control of their bowel after being so tortured, and they needed to go to the toilet. However, the guards forbade them to do so, and instead, for sport, they hung the practitioners upside down onto the iron door of a cell.

2. All this is still happening

According to Clearwisdom net, during an illegal police mass arrest of Falun Gong practitioners on February 28, 2004, Xiao Yali from Zhoujia Town, Gu Xiuxian from Lanling Town and Liu Guangzhen from Handian Town were abducted from their homes and died in police custody six days later at Shuangcheng No. 2 Detention Centre. Xiao Yali and Gu Xiuxian died on March 6 and March 4 respectively. Later, a guard from the detention centre revealed that Xiao Yali died from force-feeding, and a doctor named Wang from Shuangcheng City People's Hospital's No. 3 Outpatient Department was directly involved in her death. There were many injuries to Xiao Yali's body, but the police said that she had died from a "heart attack." She left behind her husband, her parents-in-law and five-year-old twins. (http://www.clearharmony.net/articles/200405/19530.html)

At the general meeting of the UN Commission on Human Rights on April 1, 2004, the Chairman of the International Education Development (IED) recounted the sufferings experienced by Falun Gong practitioner Chen Aizhong and his family, and appealed to the UN to set up a special group for the investigation of cases in China, and to appoint a special human rights inspector to deal with cases in China. According to investigations carried out by the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong, Hebei Province is one of the provinces where the persecution is the most vicious. As of May 14, 2004, 97 Falun Gong practitioners from Hebei province were verified to have been tortured to death, including Chen Aizhong and Chen Hongping, a brother and sister. Both of them suffered horrific tortures prior to their deaths. The police used to shock Chen Aizhong with 30,000-voltage electric batons and buried him in snow for as long as three to four hours.

On September 20, 2001, 33-year-old Chen Aizhong died from savage force-feeding at the Hehuakeng Labour Camp in Tangshan City. Police cruelly beat up his sister Chen Hongping. The officers were from the Donghuayuan Police Station in Huailai County. She was beaten so severely that she started to vomit blood and both her legs were broken. She continued to suffer torture for another year and a half at the Gaoyang Labour Camp before she died on March 5, 2003. According to the latest information, Chen Aizhong's mother, elder sister and younger brother were also arrested. His sister Chen Shulan is currently detained at the Tiantanghe Female Prison in Beijing's Daxing County and his mother Wang Lianying is being kept in a local brainwashing centre.

3. I shall pray for them

Torture methods demonstrated on the square include dragging, handcuffing, electric shocking, forcing practitioners to stand on a red-hot iron rod, hanging, the "Tiger Bench" (to break the victim's legs), "Dead Person's Bed," hammering bamboo sticks under fingernails, violent force-feeding, electric cage, forced abortion in advanced pregnancy, administering nerve-damaging drugs and slave labour. All these are only "the tip of an iceberg."

These tragic scenes moved many people to tears. Many passers-by stopped to take a look and read various information about the persecution attentively. A young man said after he looked at the exhibits, " In the past I knew a little bit about the persecution of Falun Gong in China, but I had never seen anything like this before, so close to the torture scenes. I found it very hard to believe that there are still things like this happening in this world. As far as I know, Falun Gong is a very peaceful and kind group. I'm a Christian myself, and I shall pray for them. I hope their efforts can help change the world for the better."

Passers-by moved to tears by the tragic scenes

Several Falun Gong practitioners in Chicago in 2002 have accused Jiang Zemin, the criminal who launched and carried out the fiendish persecution, of the crimes of torture and genocide and crimes against humanity. Since then, lawsuits against Jiang Zemin have been filed in a number of other places as well, including Belgium, Spain, Germany, Korea, and Taiwan.