Ms Sun Chuilian and Ms Liu Tongling Tortured to Death in 2003 at the Heilongjiang Women's Forced Labour Camp

Falun Gong practitioner Ms. Sun Chuilian was twenty-eight years old, from Ningan City, Heilongjiang Province. She was sentenced to a labour camp in May or June of 2002. While in the camp, she suffered long-term torture. She was subjected to various forms of physical torture such as electric shocks and being tied to an iron chair (1). She was forced to squat from 5:00 a.m. to 12:00 a.m., during which time she was only given two meals. The torture lasted for seven months. Afterwards, Ms. Sun carried on a two-month-long hunger strike to protest the abuse. During the hunger strike, she was subjected to the iron chair torture and she was severely injured as a result. Soon after she was released, Sun Chuilian passed away around the end of 2003 or early 2004.

Ms. Liu Tongling was fifty-two years old. She worked at Daqing Oil Refinery Plant in Heilongjiang Province. She was sent to the Harbin Rehabilitation Centre (now renamed Heilongjiang Women's Labour Camp) in October of 2003. During more than a month of detention she was ruthlessly beaten up and subjected to tortures, including electric shocks, force-feeding and exposure to extreme cold. In November of 2003, Ms. Liu died on the iron chair in the basement. She did not have trousers or socks on when she died.

The Heilongjiang Women's Forced Labour Camp is a provincial subordinate labour camp, temporarily formed for brainwashing Falun Gong practitioners. It has the designation of "transformation base." On November 12, 2002, the then-director, Chen Guiqing, explicitly said that any means will be employed in order to "transform" practitioners. "Willing or not, they will be 'transformed.' "

For very determined practitioners, the police deprived them of sleep and forced them to undergo brainwashing until 11p.m. or midnight. They then would continue brainwashing them at 4:00 a.m. Some were even subjected to this mental torture for three months. If they didn't cooperate with their tormentors' unreasonable demands, practitioners would be taken to the stockroom with shelves on both sides and only room for one person to pass. Both of their hands would be shackled on opposite shelves for nine days. Some practitioners refused to recite the labour camp rules. As a result, they were repeatedly forced to stand with both hands behind them, handcuffed to heating pipes. In this position they could neither squat nor stand. There was no room for their head and arms to move, and their arms would soon become numb.

Police officers took the determined practitioners to the basement one by one and brutally tortured them: they handcuffed them to an iron chair, stripped off their coats and made them sit in cold water, stuffed their mouths with a cloth bag and taped it shut and used electric shocks on them. As a result of such torture, practitioners suffered severe injury including disabled legs, their face and all four limbs would become numb, their eyesight failed, their teeth fell out and their feet were badly injured. Practitioner Jiang Rongzhen from Jixi City was tortured to death in November of 2002.

Note:

(1) Iron Chair: The "Iron chair" is made of iron pipes. Victims are restrained on the iron chairs with both arms and legs tied for a long period of time, see illustration at http://www.clearwisdom.net/emh/articles/2002/1/9/17577.html

Chinese version available at http://minghui.ca/mh/articles/2005/5/1/100864.html