Recalling the Haunting Memories of Two Years of Torture and Persecution

When I went to Tiananmen Square in Beijing to display banners and appeal for Falun Dafa according to my constitutional right at the end of the year 2000, I was twice illegally detained and brutally tortured. The first time, eight policemen from Qianmen Police Station took turns interrogating me because I had held up banners about Falun Dafa. They tried to force me to tell my name and address by deceiving me, intimidating me, and denying my use of the washroom. I was unconditionally released after two days since I resolutely refused to cooperate.

Three days later, I went to Tiananmen with banners again and was detained in the Fangshan Detention Centre. First, I was handcuffed to a chair with my hands behind my back, unable to stand up. I was then interrogated by both a man and woman. I refused to cooperate with their demands, so they beat me hard, stomped on my feet with their heavy boots, denied my use of the washroom and deprived me of sleep for forty-eight hours of continuous interrogation. Ten days later, two policemen interrogated me. One of them slapped my face several times with great force. I saw stars and everything went black. He pulled my arms and crossed them behind my back, pulling them up and making it impossible for me to stand up straight. While I was bent over like this at a 45-degree angle, he handcuffed my forearms, closing the handcuffs as tightly as possible and pinching my arms. He hooked another set of handcuffs to the first one, and locked them above to the bar of the metal chair, causing immediate sharp pain in my arms and hands. On top of this, he kept kicking at the handcuffs and knocking them back and forth. He jabbed at my neck with a key, pulled my hair, poured water down my shirt, and burned me with cigarettes,causing me agonising pain.

Handcuffed like this for almost eight hours, I felt the blood circulation to my hands being cut off. The handcuffs were so tight that they had trouble unlocking them after the day's interrogation. When the first cuff was finally unlocked, my hands could hardly move. Before he unlocked the second cuff, he shook it hard, causing marks on my hands that turned purple and swollen with blood blisters. I lost feeling in one finger and only recovered it after two months. Though they tortured me the same way while I was on a hunger strike the next day, I still resolutely refused to cooperate with them or give my name or address. After 23 days of illegal detention in Fangshan , the police finally released me.

In March 2001, I prepared to go to Beijing again, but I was intercepted at the train station and sent to an asylum. The day after I arrived at the asylum, two female instructors shocked me with long electric batons, attempting to force me to tell my name and address, but I refused resolutely. Holding my head down with her foot, she handcuffed me with hands behind my back and shocked me repeatedly, then cruelly sprayed me in the face with a hot pepper spray. I could not open my eyes with the burning pain! My eyes and nose ran profusely and I almost suffocated. My face and hands were swollen and full of scars. The asylum had three rooms designated for detaining Falun Dafa practitioners, labelled with a sign on a blackboard reading "rooms for insane people."

Of the more than ten rooms in the asylum, only these three were not provided with running water, and we were not allowed to take a shower or bath. One practitioner did not have a bath in nine months of detention. Dafa practitioners imprisoned before I came told me that the instructors gave them only a tiny bit of food at the two meal times each day. There were eight people living in one room, with a toilet hole about eight inches away from the concrete bed. We were given less than two buckets of water for both drinking and washing. In order to save water, we dared not flush the excrement. Instead, we pushed it down with wooden sticks. Several days after I arrived, the instructor assigned a mentally unstable person to our room. This person took away the blanket and used it to clean the toilet and floor. We asked the instructor to replace it with a clean one, but he refused, so we went on a hunger strike to protest. The instructor had four drug addict prisoners from the male section drag me out and force-feed me. They pinched my nose tight to prevent me from breathing, and I nearly suffocated. They put metal tubes and water bottles into my mouth, bruising it badly. While force-feeding me, the instructor trod on my ribs and feet, laughing wildly. I was covered in porridge, but still denied a bath.

On the fourteenth day of our hunger strike, more than ten of us were put into a big mental hospital one after another. We were sent to a big bungalow in the back section, where the asylum sent mentally unstable people and drug addict prisoners, with males and females in separate cells. I saw that the instructor lent handcuffs to the doctor to handcuff us. Several days later, the doctor let seven drug addict youths from the male cells into our women's cell. Punching and kicking, they beat us with metal rods, leather belts, metal pipes, and wooden sticks. Two practitioners were beaten until they lost consciousness. One of the practitioners suffered from temporary memory loss.

I was beaten so severely that I could not get out of bed for several days, and even had difficulty turning over. Several others were seriously injured and bruised all over. A male practitioner also suffered brutal torture. Another practitioner lay in the clinic, unable to stand up. A servicewoman told me that one practitioner had been beaten to death here.

The doctor forced us to write "Thank-you" letters to the hospital for helping us to "recover." He often had the drug addict prisoners give injections to the insane patients, granting them freedom to come and go as they wanted in the hospital. Sometimes we tried to clarify the truth about Falun Dafa to them, but they shouted that they would quickly make us unable to speak and that they were not responsible if someone was beaten to death here. Being a mental hospital, anybody who refused to tell his name and address would be treated as an insane person.

In October of the same year, I was illegally sentenced to one year forced labour for distributing truth clarification flyers. Since I did not cooperate during the labour reform period, they imposed "strict control" to persecute me, confining me to the room, where I was forced to relieve myself into a bucket. They also often deprived me of food, once for four straight days. When some practitioners insisted on going to use the washroom, protesting against the instructor's inhumane denial of our using the facilities, the instructor gave the practitioner a long shock with the electric baton. Although this "strict control" was groundless, they used it for trivial things. I once was "strictly controlled" just for smiling and greeting a Falun Gong practitioner. The instructor claimed I was "sending signals."

The instructor sometimes convinced collaborators, former Falun Gong practitioners who have stopped practising due to brainwashing and torture, to beat Falun Gong practitioners. When I condemned them for this, the instructors said, "We don't have enough people here, so we have the right to do this." When I asked for a pen and some paper to write a complaint letter, the section head said that I had no right to use the complaint box, though the forced labour camp has regulations that entitled each detainee the right to do so. Later on, a large group of drug addict prisoners were collected to control us. Forcing them to study the so-called criticising materials and to watch videos slandering Dafa, the instructors asked them to read these materials in front of us. Those who refused to listen were dragged to the office and shocked with electric batons by the instructors.

Because I refused to cooperate during the period of forced labour "reform", two months were added to my term. When the term was up, I was taken to the local brainwashing class and illegally detained there for more than one month because I refused to write the so-called "Guarantee Statement" [A statement to declare that he or she is remorseful for practising Falun Gong and guarantees not to practise Falun Gong again, not to go to Beijing to appeal for Falun Gong, and never again associate with any Falun Dafa practitioners.] I was released unconditionally before the Spring Festival.

Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.cc/mh/articles/2003/5/4/49641.html