The Abuse, Torment and Humiliation Suffered by Female Dafa Practitioner At Gaoyang Forced Labour Camp

I'm a Dafa practitioner from Hebei Province. Because I refuse to give up practising Falun Dafa, I have been arrested and have been incarcerated in detention centres many times. Officials from the local "610 Office" and from the police department listed me as "the main target." Police officers and persecutors from the "610 Office" came to my home to harass me on every so-called "sensitive date" [national holidays, Party conventions, and other special events during which more practitioners are likely to appeal].

At about 4:00 p.m. on June 27, 2002, the township head Li Shuzhong, the head of the police station Pan Zhongliang, together with deputy head Song Zhihua, kicked my door open and broke into my home. These three guys fiercely pushed me into a police van and sent me to Qinglong County Custodial Centre. Seeing this, my fellow township citizens who were on the spot when this happened all said with resentment, "What kind of society is this? She is a kind person and practises the principle of 'Truthfulness-Compassion-Tolerance.' What's wrong with that? They arrest and beat people at will and break up a good family. Alas! During the years when Jiang Zemin was in power, the number of workers being laid off kept increasing, while nobody does anything about the corruption and bribes. This country has been turned upside-down and is in an awful state." The next day I was sent to Hebei Province's No. 1 Forced Labour Camp, called the Tangshan City's Kaiping Forced Labour Camp, without any due legal proceedings.

The guards in the Kaiping Forced Labour Camp attempted to brainwash me by depriving me of sleep for as long as over 15 days at a time. I staged a hunger strike to protest. Guard Jia Xiumei then tied me to a tree to beat and force-fed me. I kept my firm belief in Dafa and continued to hunger strike for almost five months. Then Kaiping Forced Labour Camp officials suddenly sent me to the Hebei Province's Gaoyang Forced Labour Camp.

I was extremely weak after I was sent to the Gaoyang Forced Labour Camp. In order to "transform" me and to force me to give up practising Falun Dafa, the guards forcibly took me outdoors to do "sports activities." When I was dragged outside I shouted loudly, "Falun Dafa is good!" Guards Wang and Yang from the team immediately removed their hypocritical masks, hit and kicked me, and designated two "clamps" * [prisoners] to watch me. As the prisoners there had been influenced by that kind of environment for a long time, and with the additional lure of their terms' being reduced, as soon as the guards told them to watch Dafa practitioners, they would understand what to do. The "clamp" Fan Linli did not allow me to urinate. When she discovered that I urinated while cleaning the toilet, she kicked me. I fell to the ground. She took off her shoes to beat my private parts with the sole of her shoes and did not quit until my private parts were swollen and bleeding. This is one example of the debased methods that Gaoyang Forced Labour Camp used - to instigate the prisoners and bait them with a reduction in their terms in order to force Dafa practitioners to renounce their belief and to meet the "transformation rate" their superiors require for obtaining rewards and bonuses.

Two days later the guards again handcuffed me for force-feeding. The prison "doctor" Bai inserted a 4-foot-long plastic tube into my stomach, which was about the size of a finger in diameter. When I refused to cooperate with them, the "doctor" shocked me on the face with an electric baton, and kicked my face with his feet until the skin was broken and bleeding and my face turned black and blue.

They tortured me this way for over a month. Once, when I shouted "Falun Dafa is good," under the instigation of the team leader, prisoner Jiang Hong gagged my mouth with her socks and made my mouth bleed. My hands were cuffed behind my back and I was heavily beaten. At that time I had already been unconscious and had lost bladder control. One day, team leaders Huang and Li, together with Zhang, cornered me by a wall. Each of them took a wooden rod to brutally beat me and also shocked me with electric batons. They also lit a fire in front of me and took photos of me, using this to fabricate stories to deceive people. When we were in a vegetable field, guard Duan ordered two prisoners to dig a hole beside me, saying that they would bury me alive, using this as a threat to get me to "transform."

Under instigation from the team leader, prisoner Zhao Lijun once wrote words that defamed Teacher and Dafa on my face and clothes with Chinese ink. She hung a placard on my chest, with words that abused Dafa and Teacher, parading me around to show everyone. She took me to every cell and humiliated me with verbal abuse.

These incidents are the exact manifestation of Jiang Zemin's policy of "defame their reputation, bankrupt them financially, destroy them physically" in his persecution of Falun Gong. Such deep pain is unimaginable, unless one personally experiences it. One will remember this for the rest of one's life.

During one forced feeding, chief guard Zhang instigated prisoner Zhao Lijun to pour porridge into my clothes and untie my pants to pour porridge in them. This lasted for four days in the cold winter, and the porridge and my clothes froze together. They also poured soy milk powder dissolved in water onto my face. One night, chief guard Huang took me to a sand pile and threw my body, which weighed less than 77 lbs., onto the sand. After his demonstration, he ordered several prisoners to lift me up and harshly throw me many times onto the sand pile. Doing this can damage a person's internal organs without leaving any sign on the surface of the body. During this process the guards also shocked me with electric batons. They cuffed me to a ring on the ground afterwards. This kind of torture went on until after midnight and continued for many nights.

During one forced feeding, eight of them, including chief guards Yang, Wei, Li, Zhang, Ma and several prisoners knocked me to the ground and forcibly opened my mouth with pliers. As a result, a tooth was knocked out and my mouth was filled with blood. The force feeding lasted for one to two hours everyday, followed by shocks with three or four electric batons, and being cuffed to a ring on the ground. Besides this, during the day I had to do heavy labour, such as sifting sand and washing the toilets (washing six cess pits with 10 basins of water per pit), and other torment. During my hunger strike, chief guard Li forcibly poured chilli sauce and vinegar into my mouth and then taped my mouth shut. Guard Chang often poured alcohol into my nostrils [Falun Dafa practitioners do not smoke or drink alcohol].

On the night of May 15, 2003, guard Huang took me as a target to practise his fighting technique. He ran towards me and kicked me heavily on my chest. I was knocked down several meters away and fell to the ground. He repeated this several times and my chest turned black and blue. He then used wine bottles to beat my legs. Another night, chief guards Yang and Li dragged me to the outside of an abandoned house, cuffed me to a metal frame and then left. Shortly afterwards, a figure with messy long hair, looking half demon and half human came to frighten me. This was another attempt to make me lose my sanity and give up practising.

One day after finishing sifting the sand, guard Zhang took me out and to a room full of slanderous pictures and posters of Dafa and Teacher. Within half an hour, eight guards came in, including chief guard Yang, guard Huang, chief guards Zhang, Li, Ye, Ma and Zhao. They forced me to kneel down on the Falun picture on the centre of the floor and tied my arms behind my back. One guard used his legs to pin down my head, and two chief guards tied my upper body up with a thin rope. If my arms were not in the very painful position that they wanted, they would kick my arms back and forth. My hands turned black within five minutes of the torture, and the thin rope tightened and cut into my flesh. This torture is commonly known as "tying with ropes." In two days, the guards applied this kind of torture on me eight times, which is considered to be extreme and shocked all who heard about this. [the thin ropes pull ones arms up very high behind the back and have been known to break the bone] Up to now, the scars this torture caused are still clearly visible.

I had never given up the hunger strike. The guards were very fierce and malicious; they applied all kinds of torture in order to force me to give up my belief. I could not even speak anymore after they tortured me for over seven months, yet they used beatings and intimidation in an attempt to make me speak. For example, they forcibly brushed my teeth with urine, used a soiled menstruation napkin to cover my mouth, and in order to deprive me of sleep, they taped open my upper eyelids. In addition, I was forced to do heavy labouur everyday. As a result of all kinds of torture, I became slow in reacting and the guards all said I had become dull-witted. Only then did they call my family to pick me up. The guards extorted money from my family and forced my family to write a guarantee letter that they would not blame any of my resulting health problems on the labor camp.

I held the hunger strike for 15 months and was inhumanly tortured for 15 months. Eventually, I came out of the labour camp.

I am only one of the tens of thousands of Dafa practitioners being persecuted in China. Due to the limit of my educational level, the above is just a simple sketch of my experiences.

*Clamps: Several common prisoners are designated to monitor, brainwash and torture the practitioners and deprive them of sleep, forbidding them to practise the Falun Gong exercises, etc. Those prisoners were called "clamps." Usually it amounted to "three clamping one," but there were also occasions where "four clamping one" or "five clamping one" would be applied, and it means that several "clamps" monitored one Dafa practitioner. They followed and monitored practitioners' every move. They "accompanied" practitioners when eating, sleeping, working and doing other activities, even when using the toilet and taking showers.

Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2003/10/11/58689.html