Guards at the Tangshan City Kaiping Forced Labour Camp Severely Torture Falun Dafa Practitioners

In 2001, Team Four of the Kaiping Labour Camp in Tangshan City illegally detained over two hundred Falun Gong practitioners in the hospital building.

During the 2001 Spring Festival, the labour camp guards tortured all the practitioners. They beat practitioners up and then let them freeze in the hallways.

The afternoon before the Chinese New Year, Section Chief Jianzhong Zhang, followed by two other officers, broke into a room where Ms. Shugui Dong was sitting in lotus practising the Falun Dafa meditation exercise. They asked Shugui Dong to take her legs down. Dong did not move. A guard came forward, stepped on Dong's head and dragged her to the ground by her hair. Lili Ma, Liandi Zhu, Mingxia Chen, Yanfei Fu, Dewen Meng and others tried to stop him, but he slapped Ms. Lili Ma so hard on her face several times that her ears were ringing. The guards continued to beat up other practitioners. If a practitioner came forward to persuade them to stop, they would beat this practitioner. Before the guards left, the last six practitioners who were beaten all shouted, "Stop beating people! They are beating people!" Shugui Dong's head was swollen with a huge bump that was painful for over ten days.

On the first day of the Chinese New Year, Officer Jianzhong Wang [Note: The same first name as Jiangzhong Zhang's but different last name] again brought his followers to create trouble for the practitioners. On the second floor of Team Four, they used electric batons to shock Yanfei Fu and Dewen Meng before they beat them, forced them to take off their cotton jackets, and tied them up in the hallways. Eventually there were forty to fifty practitioners tied up in the hallways. On the third day of the Chinese New Year, I was ordered to go outside because I was found doing the exercises. When I went out, I saw over twenty other practitioners standing there. On that day, Shugui Dong's face and eyes were swollen from a beating by three or four officers because she had taken the lead in calling out the exercise verses. The other twenty practitioners were also beaten up. Practitioners were routinely tortured with great severity. In order to protest the persecution, over one hundred practitioners went on a hunger strike as a group. This incited the police to even greater ruthlessness as they persecuted practitioners who had become weakened from the hunger strike. They force-fed the practitioners. Those who did not co-operate would be beaten up and cursed. Once, Director Deshan Xu personally beat up the practitioners who did not cooperate with the force-feeding. A guard named Huiqing Zhang sat on Lili Zhang and used electric batons to shock her face, neck and breasts.

In June 2001, Tangshan's Kaiping Labour Camp learned a whole new system of torture from Shijiazhuang and Baoding labor camps in order to finish the task of "transforming" the practitioners (that is, to force them to give up their belief) based on Jiang Zemin's directive, "If you beat them to death it will count as suicide."

I was in Group One of Team Four. We practitioners were very weak after the long-term hunger strike. Even in this condition, the guards still beat us up, hung us up, handcuffed us, and let us freeze. On June 8, they did not allow us to return to our group. Instead we were handcuffed in the freezing hallway in very painful positions. Some of us were forced to squat down behind the back of a chair. Some of us were forced to stand up and be handcuffed to a chair. We could not bend our legs. If one of us bent her legs, the guards would kick everyone in the group. At that time, Yaxiong Fan, who has since been tortured to death, did not co-operate. Jianzhong Wang and another guard beat him up until he lay on the ground and could not move. After that, they tied Yaxiong Fan to a chair. In order to force us to write the guarantee statement to follow the regulations of the prison, they not only did not allow us to go to the washrooms, they also force-fed us with porridge three times a day, two bowls of porridge each time when previously they had force-fed us just one bowl of porridge twice a day. On that day, Shugui Dong asked to go to the toilet at 7:00 p.m., but Police Officer Shi refused to let her go. Not only that, they force-fed her twice with ice-cold water! If anyone did not cooperate, three to four policemen would pinch the practitioner's nose shut to force-feed her water. Then they forced all of us to sit on little stools outside on the exercise yard, where we froze until 10:00 p.m. when the guards came to handcuff us to the chairs in the hallways. Shugui Dong was in urgent need of going to the toliet, but guards Jianzhong Wang, Jianzhong Zhang and Shi, who tried to force her to write the guarantee statement to follow the regulations, just would not let her go. Finally, when Officer Shi saw that no matter how urgently Shugui Dong needed relieve herself, she would not write the guarantee statement, he simply took away the key to the handcuffs. From midnight until 2:00 a.m., Shugui Dong suffered. At last, thinking that these guards must not have human hearts, she pulled the handcuffs up on her arms (which cut deeply and eventually left scars), and relieved herself under the chair. Beginning June 10, the guards forced us to sit on a small stool for over 20 hours each day, from 6:00 a.m. until 2:00 a.m.. In addition, we were not allowed to take a nap. If one of us closed our eyes, Police Officer Tian would use a small baton to beat the person up. It happened to be rainy and the practitioners were wearing thin vests and underwear, but no one would write the guarantee statement to follow the regulations of the prison, even though whoever wrote the guarantee letter would be allowed to go to sleep. After several days, the practitioners were frozen and exhausted. Their buttocks were swollen and painful whenever they sat on the stools. Four days later the police decided that this technique did not work, so they tried to "talk" to the practitioners. When this tactic did not work either, they started to beat the practitioners savagely. They used a specific room, usually with three or four male officers together, to beat us up and electrically shock us. By that time, I had been deprived of sleep for ten days and nights. Jianzhong Wang announced that, if the Party would allow him to bury the practitioners, he would choose me and bury me first. The TV has reported how well they are treating Falun Gong practitioners such as "educating and saving them." Actually the true situation is exactly as I have described.

Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2004/7/7/78864.html