Behind the Pleasant Facade: Falun Gong Practitioners Tortured and Used as Slave Labour at Labour Camp in Henan Province

From the outside, the No. 3 Forced Labour Camp in Xuchang, Henan Province is a pleasant place with good-looking buildings and garden courtyards. If you go to the camp for a visit, you can listen to the officials and the "People's Police" talk about the facility. They will tell you how well the prisoners are treated and how the staff "educate inmates, use persuasion to help the inmates change, and how the inmates are remedied." They will also tell you how they have improved the conditions in the forced labour camp so that the inmates are happy to be there. However, insiders and the people that have been held at the camp have an entirely different view of the No. 3 Forced Labour Camp. From a folk rhyme that is circulating in the area, we can get a sense of what the place is really like. "The No. 3 Forced Labour Camp in Xuchang is a demon's training barracks. I'd rather spend three years in jail than one day in the No. 3 Forced Labour Camp."

In reality, this camp is a base for persecuting Falun Gong practitioners. When practitioners are dispatched to the camp, they are sent directly to the No. 3 Division, which is designated for torturing Falun Gong practitioners. The division is headed by Shi Baolong and Tan Junmin. Once in the No. 3 Division, the practitioners are locked up and tortured using all sorts of tools and methods. The torture is designed to force the practitioners to give up their beliefs. For as short as two weeks and as long as more than one month, the practitioners are assigned two personal cangues (1). These two criminals continuously monitor the practitioners and don't allow practitioners to speak to each other. Even eye contact is forbidden and reason for punishment. In the evening the personal cangues sleep with the practitioner between them. If the practitioner wants to go to the toilet, the three of them have to go together after obtaining prior approval.

After getting up, the practitioners are required to do clean up and are forced to recite an oath before breakfast. Breakfast starts at 7 o'clock, lasts for 15 minutes, and then inmates assemble to go to the workshops. The practitioners must fulfill their production quotas in the required time. The daily output value of each practitioner is set at ten yuan (2). Lunch starts at 11:30 am and inmates go straight back to work after eating. Dinner is at 5:30 pm and after dinner the practitioners work until 10:00 pm. Sometimes they have to work overtime, which means they have even less time to rest. Besides manual labour, the practitioners are also subjected to brainwashing. Every Tuesday and Friday they are forced to take part in "political and cultural studies," which are indoctrination sessions. The practitioners have exams once a month and are expected to write confessions. If they refuse to write confessions, they are considered to have violated the camp regulations and to be opposing the government. Even when practitioners write a confession, if the guards don't consider it good enough, the practitioners are beaten with rubber batons, given electric shocks, and tied up with ropes in painful positions. The more steadfast practitioners are forced to wear a device that severely restricted their movements, tied to benches, and to wear a helmet that blasts propaganda at high volumes. Practitioners are usually left like this for a week. It is common to see a lot of practitioners limping or walking around with cuts and bruises on their faces in the camp. You can see that the faces of some practitioners are deformed because of lumps and swollen tissue. Anyone that has been detained in the No. 3 Forced Labour Camp has seen such things.

On April 28, 2003, under the "Spring Thunder Campaign" co-organized by the "610 Office" (3) and the Ministry of Justice, the No. 3 Forced Labour Camp in Henan Province began a new round of persecution against the detained Falun Gong practitioners. Yan Zhenye, director of the camp, announced a directive at a camp meeting. Jiang Qingtai, Deputy Director, personally headed the campaign. He selected police officers from all of the administrative or technical offices to cooperate with the campaign of the so-called "assaulting fortified positions" (trying with every means to force the most steadfast Falun Gong practitioners to denounce their belief in Falun Dafa) in each division. All of the divisions selected guards to form groups specializing in carrying out the campaign. Other policemen were also asked to join the campaign. Head of the "610 Office" of the No. 3 Forced Labour Camp Li Xinjie and Dong Jianchao organized the guards that were selected carry out the persecution. They also ordered the guards to take a collective oath that they would resolutely fulfill their "glorious" tasks. If they failed, they would be penalized monetarily and otherwise.

Usually five to ten guards would attack one practitioner at a time. Their method was to choose a practitioner in the evening and try to force the individual to give up cultivation. They sealed the practitioner's mouth with tape first. The guards would then use high-voltage electric batons to shock the practitioner, torture them by tying them up in painful positions, and use rubber batons to beat the victim on successive nights. They also invented a torture called "Roasting a Whole Lamb" (4). After torturing the practitioners for the whole night, the guards would sleep during the day. Meanwhile the practitioners were expected to work all day and still fulfill their quotas. Then, another group of guards would take over and start what they called "attack without violence." The main purpose is to deprive the practitioners of sleep. After a month of such treatment, some practitioners lost the use of their hands from being bound for so long. Some couldn't walk; some suffered from neurological disorders or suffered from some deformities due to the torture. Others suffered broken bones. Still others lost feeling in their hands for several months, causing them to need help in basic tasks such as putting on their clothes and using the toilet.

Falun Dafa practitioner Wang Jingyu from Linying County, Henan Province has a deformed eye because of the severe beatings he received. Another practitioner had to be carried into a hospital by four criminals after being beaten severely. However, when he came back from the hospital, the police guards continued to abuse him. In the No. 3 Forced Labour Camp, slogans such as, "If You Refuse to Be Reformed You Only Have One Path Left, That Is to Die" are posted everywhere.

Yan Zhenye, Director of the No. 3 Forced Labour Camp, announced just before a fireworks display to mark the Lantern Festival on the 15th of January 2004, "In 2003 the No. 3 Forced Labour Camp earned a total of 2,480,000 yuan," which was a record high. In 2003, each guard in the camp received a bonus of 10,000 yuan. Let's presume that just half of this 2,480,000 yuan was generated by the work of the 700 detainees in the camp, and among them more than one hundred were "bought" from the Zhengzhou Forced Labour Camp in 2002 for 850 yuan each. Then how much does one detainee have to manufacture to earn that much money? One hair band is made up of 220 aluminum tubes and the practitioner only earns 1.5 yuan for each band. Then how many bands does the practitioner have to make to meet the quota of 300 yuan profit a month? Besides the slave labour, the practitioners have to endure physical torture, brainwashing and mental torture. Shen Jianwei, political instructor of the Police Section, and Section Heads Jia Zigang and Zhao Zhimin are known to routinely abuse Falun Gong practitioners.

There are at least three hair product companies, including Henan Rebecca Hair Products Inc, that use the labor camps to make their goods. From the packaging one can see that these products are distributed to Asia, Europe, Africa, and the United States. "HAIR TO GO, New Jersey, U.S.A " is one of the brand names used to sell these products.

We, the Falun Gong practitioners, detained in the No. 3 Forced Labour Camp, ask everyone to show your support by calling on China to stop its persecution of Falun Gong.

(1) Cangue, the name of an instrument of torture, is now used to indicate the person who was designated to supervise the behavior of practitioners.

(2) Yuan: Chinese currency, the monthly salary for an average Chinese urban worker is about 500 yuan.

(3) "610 Office": A bureau specifically created by the Chinese government to persecute Falun Gong. It has absolute power over each level of administration in the Party, as well as over the political and judiciary branches.

(4) "Roasting a whole sheep" is a kind of cruel torture method. The guards handcuff the practitioner's hands and feet, and then hang the handcuffs from a horizontal stick. They have subjected practitioners to this cruel torture for as long as a week.

Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.ca/mh/articles/2004/6/3/76257.html