34-Year-Old Woman Tortured to Death Two Months After Her Arrest in 2007

Ms. Jiang Pai slipped into a coma on the morning of Saturday, June 23, 2007, while she was being detained for refusing to renounce Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline being persecuted by the Chinese communist regime. Her cellmates noted that she was incontinent, and her body kept shaking.

As there were no in-house doctors on duty over the weekend, the inmates begged the guards to seek medical care for her. Yet she wasn't taken to hospital until either Monday or Tuesday. Some officers beat her and pulled her hair while she was undergoing a MRI scan.

Ms. Jiang’s parents arrived on the night of June 26 to see their daughter handcuffed and shackled to a bed in the intensive care unit. Two officers were watching her around the clock. She remained in a coma and was put on oxygen. Her feet were swollen and had bruises. She was unable to eat and would cough out even a few drops of water.

A doctor told her parents that they couldn't find out what caused her condition, and they could only manage to sustain her life by giving her IV medications.

The anxious parents rushed between the local police department, Procuratorate, and court, demanding the release of their daughter. To their despair, those agencies all gave the same response, “We have to follow the legal procedure.”

Ms. Jiang never regained consciousness. She passed away at Daqing Oilfield General Hospital in Heilongjiang Province at around midnight on June 28, 2007. She was 34 years old.

Eleven years have passed since Ms. Jiang's death, but her family and friends' memories of her haven’t dulled over time. Instead, more witnesses have come forth and provided information on her last days, which helped to reconstruct the story to commemorate this brave soul.

Ms. Jiang Pai

Arrested after Being Lured Back to Her Former Workplace
Ms. Jiang's death came only two months after she was seized by the police at her former workplace. She had been forced to take a buyout seven years prior, in 2000, for refusing to renounce her faith. In order to avoid arrest, she was forced to leave her home and wander about in the years that followed.

Her parents worried about her safety day and night while she was away. They were simply delighted when her former employer, Daqing Petrochemical General Factory, promised to return the job back to her. They would have never expected this empty promise would end up costing her life.

At her parents' request, Ms. Jiang came back home. In her early thirties, how could she not want to settle down and have a normal life like all her friends, who got married and had children one after another.

Full of hope, she went back to work on April 26, 2007, only to be seized by the police who had been wanting to arrest her for years.

Four days following her arrest, on April 30, she was taken to Daqing Detention Centre. It is unknown where she was held during that four days and whether she was tortured.

At the detention centre, officer Feng Haibo, from the Daqing Domestic Security Division, came frequently to interrogate her about her teaching other Falun Gong practitioners how to circumvent the communist regime's Internet censorship and visit overseas websites, and about her providing technical support to those who were mass-printing Falun Gong materials in their homes. All of this was absolutely unacceptable to the communist regime.

Even two weeks before Ms. Jiang passed away, two inmates carried her to the interrogation room to answer the police's questions.

Tortured in the Detention Centre
Ms. Jiang was very healthy and fit before she was arrested. Like a typical northeastern girl in China, she had a natural optimistic and outgoing temperament, and always had a smile on her face. She was smart and had superb memory.

But when she appeared in the detention centre, she was pale and emaciated. She kept coughing and vomiting, most of the time with blood. She often lost consciousness.

According to inmates who were held in the same room with her, she told them that Feng Haibo had put a book on her abdomen and whipped the book with a rubber tube as a form of torture.

The beating was more than enough to cause injuries to her internal organs, but the book provided padding between the rubber tube and her abdomen, to prevent visible external injuries.

In addition to the beating, the police also shocked her with electric batons and force-fed her with mustard oil.

A few years after Ms. Jiang's death, Domestic Security Division agent Feng Haibo said to almost every Falun Gong practitioner he arrested, “Do you know how Jiang Pai died? She was put on the iron chair for three days, and she kept doing a ‘break dance’.” Feng was referring to the convulsions caused by the electric shocks applied to Ms. Jiang.

Another police officer said, “We force-fed her with mustard oil three times. Tears gushed from her eyes and her nose kept running – that was when she began to answer all the questions we asked her.”

Compared with pepper water which is sometimes used during forced feedings, mustard oil causes much greater pain and damage to the victim's body.

Those who are fed with mustard oil don't have visible traces of the torture, but the internal injuries it causes are hard to recover from. The victims have difficulty breathing, and suffer from chest pain, coughing, and the inability to swallow, as if their oesophagus is being burned by boiling water.

Another Falun Gong practitioner, Ms. Liu Ying, a nurse from Daqing city, once described her experience of being fed with mustard oil at the detention centre: “The police bought the mustard oil, which was imported from Japan, in the middle of the night. With a large syringe, they injected the mustard oil into my nose.

“I immediately felt a very intense, scorching pain in my chest. I felt as if my internal organs were shaking. I couldn't open my eyes. My head was exploding. I was going crazy. Words can’t describe how painful it was.

“After I lost consciousness, the police poured cold water on my body to wake me up. Then they again force-fed me with the mustard oil until I passed out again. They repeated the torture several times. While force-feeding me with mustard oil, one officer said to me, ‘Do you know Jiang Pai? This was what we did to her. She was even put in an iron chair which was plugged into electricity while being force-fed with mustard oil.’”
Force-feeding Accelerated Death

With severe injuries to her internal organs, oesophagus, and respiratory tract, Ms. Jiang was unable to take in any food or even talk. And this was considered by the detention centre authorities to be “a hunger strike in rejection to their management.”

Never intending to give her a chance to recover, the subsequent force-feeding by the detention centre guards hastened her ultimate death.

Force feeding was a well-established and excruciating torture method employed at the Daqing Detention Centre to punish detainees who refused to listen to the guards. Most people who were force-fed vomited blood or bled from the nose. Yet the detention centre provided no medical treatment for these victims.

While force-feeding Falun Gong practitioners, the guards and inmates also verbally abused them to increase their sufferings.

With a lack of proper medical training in performing forced feedings, a simple mistake by the guards sometimes killed the victims.

Three Falun Gong practitioners, Ms. Lu Xiuyun, Ms. Wang Shuqin, and Ms. Yang Yuhua, passed away due to forced feedings between 2002 and 2005, but with a death quota, no one from the detention center was held responsible for their deaths.

Ms. Jiang's roommates recounted that she once said while in a coma, “See, my mom brought delicious food to me. There is so much food. Come over and let's enjoy the good food together!” With unendurable pain, endless hunger, and egregious torture, Ms. Jiang could only enjoy the warmth of family love in her dreams.

Left Unattended on the Verge of Death
On May 22, 2007, one month after her arrest, Ms. Jiang, who had remained in a coma for days, was taken to the Daqing People's Hospital for medical treatment.

The doctor wrote on the diagnosis sheet that her vomiting of blood and coma was caused by a gallstone, which was an attempt to hide the tortures she had suffered.

A few days later, officer Feng brought Ms. Jiang back to the detention centre to continue the interrogations.

With limited capacity to provide her with proper medical treatment at the detention centre, Ms. Jiang's parents applied for medical parole for her.

Zhang Yiqing, the deputy head of Wolitun Police Station, who also participated in Ms. Jiang's arrest, denied their request. “Everyone else can apply for medical parole, but Jiang Pai can't.” He also threatened her parents with a heavy sentence for her.

After repeated interrogations and force-feedings, Ms. Jiang's health condition rapidly declined. By the morning of June 23, 2007, according to her roommates, she began to have signs of death after falling into a deep coma. She was left unattended for two days, and the inmates could only watch as this young, innocent life was being slowly taken away by death.

Body Cremated
After Ms. Jiang passed away, her parents were left in the searing grief and deep regret of asking her to come back home.

Officers Feng Haibo and Zhang Yiqing said to her parents that Ms. Jiang committed suicide because she faced a heavy sentence for her crime against the government. Another officer from the Domestic Security Division, Li Yuchun, said she died from a brain infection, and yet the head of the detention centre stated that the cause of death was a heart attack.

Her parents, taken over by the immense sadness and sorrow for Ms. Jiang's sudden death, were completely at a loss and believed the obviously contradictory narrations, then signed the documents prepared by Feng to cremate her body.

Ms. Jiang’s body was cremated on the tenth day following her death, in a heavily-guarded funeral home.

Instead of feeling remorse over Ms. Jiang's tragic death, Feng Haibo often threatened other practitioners he arrested by saying, “It is I who beat Jiang Pai to death! But I'm still the head of the Domestic Security Division! I can arrest anyone I want and sentence them to however long I want!”

While many police officers' consciences have awakened and the officers have stopped taking part in the persecution in recent years, Feng Haibo still holds on tight to his position and continues to actively persecute Falun Gong practitioners in order to gain promotions.