Personal Account of Forced Labour and Agonising Torture in Guizhou Province

Because I persisted in practising Falun Gong, I was illegally sentenced to a labour camp for three years. As soon as I arrived at the No. 6 Team of Zhongba Labour Camp, my hair was cut off and two to four drug-addicts were assigned to watch me. They called this "monitoring." They did not allow me to speak with other people. They especially did not allow Falun Gong practitioners to speak to one another or even to be near each other for a short while without talking. They also did not allow us to practise Falun Gong exercises. They divided the monitors into daytime and nighttime groups in order to closely watch us 24 hours a day. They stood beside us even when we used the toilet. With the incitement of the guards, the prisoners assigned to monitor us would do whatever they wanted to us.

My luggage and clothes were often torn open for inspection, and valuable belongings were soon missing. The guards checked with the criminals that monitored me and kept a detailed record of my words, movements, and even my facial expressions. If we protested the guards' illegal or abusive behaviour, we would immediately incur even more severe maltreatment. In the daytime we were subjected to military training for over eight hours at a time. At night they beat us every twenty minutes to deprive us of sleep.

If any Falun Gong practitioners practised the exercises or quietly wrote down Falun Dafa articles from memory, the guards would tie them up and send them to confinement. With the hands tied behind the back, this kind of penalty can disable both the hands if it lasts for over fifteen minutes. Some practitioners were tied up for nearly twenty minutes. I saw some robust drug-addicts start to cry and shout as soon as the rope was tightened when they were tied up in this manner.

The government's policy of re-education through forced-labour stipulates that detainees can obtain 85 Yuan per month for living expenses (85 Yuan is about $10 USD). After deducting 5 Yuan for each incidental expense, actual living expense money given to each person was less than 60 Yuan per month. Under forced labour, we were forced to work long hours at the same task. Guards would deprive us of sleep for three days and nights in order to make us finish the assigned work within their time frame. Exhausted detainees would often fall sound asleep while squatting in the washroom or curled up under a pupil's desk. The suffering was so intense that, at the end of October, one drug-addict committed suicide by hanging himself and another jumped to his death from a building.

Starting in July of 2002, the labour camp police brutally persecuted Falun Gong practitioners. They set up sites at Teams No. 1, 6, and the Confinement Team, and picked out nearly fifty drug-addicts as thugs. In the daytime they imposed twelve hours of military training on practitioners. Four to eight assigned criminals would drag, beat and push practitioners around. Even worse, they would dress practitioners in a military overcoat soaked with water, wrap another military overcoat over that one, tightly tie up the practitioners, and then make them run.

In the evening, practitioners were forced to stand in one corner of a guard chamber of less than two square metres (about twenty square feet) with their feet bound and two to four people to watch them. A few hired thugs would crowd into the small confinement room to force Falun Gong practitioners to stand with both eyes looking straight ahead and to keep this posture for twelve hours. Practitioners would receive a severe beating if they moved even a bit. By 7:00 a.m., another group of criminals would drag practitioners out for military training, which lasted from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. with only fifteen minutes for eating. One practitioner from Bijie district of Guizhou Province was continuously tortured like that for twelve days.

At the end of October 2002, seven policemen, including Yang Renshou, the instructor of the Special Management Team of Zhongba Labour Camp, beat practitioner Mr. Min Jie, from Nanzhou, in Guizhou Province, because he had protested the illegal abuses committed by labour camp police. Min Jie, who was 6 feet tall and weighed over 154 pounds, was beaten until he lost consciousness. Then two drug-addicts dragged him, with his knees scraping the ground, to the Confinement Team more than half a mile away and detained him there. The beating fractured Min Jie's ribs on his left side. Large areas of soft tissue and both knees were badly injured from the dragging. Min Jie's knees had healed by January 2003, but the left side of his chest was still painful in March, and one side of his chest is visibly higher than the other.

After January 1, 2003, guards at Zhongba Labour Camp moved all Falun Gong practitioners into the newly formed No. 5 Team and continued the persecution. Those who persecuted Falun Gong practitioners most brutally included Pan Zhong who was chief of the former Special Management Team that specialised in persecuting Falun Gong and is currently the chief of No. 1 Squadron of the newly formed No. 5 Team, and Huang Xianyue, formerly an instructor of the Special Management Team and currently the instructor of No. 2 Squadron of No. 5 Team.

Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2003/11/10/60363.html