Shocking News from Chinese Journalist: The Persecution of Falun Gong Practitioners in Shanxi Province

(First published in The Epoch Times. The author is a reporter in China.)

Recently, a friend of mine emailed me some news from the overseas media. The news was about public security officers from the electric plant in Huozhou City (Shanxi Province) who were illegally searching Falun Gong practitioners' houses and torturing them for information. After reading this, I felt that the news reported was just the tip of the iceberg. During the last few years, I and my co-workers learned of numerous shocking stories about the persecution during our interviews. In this remote province, many people have been persecuted for practising Falun Gong, many families have been broken apart, and many people have died. The following are just few examples.

In Yuncheng Forced Labour Camp (Shanxi Province) many Falun Gong practitioners should have had a chance to see their families at the Chinese New Year of 2006, but the labour camp officials took this opportunity to torture them and their families. They allowed Falun Gong practitioners' families to come to the labour camp, but when the families were there, the labour camp didn't allow the families to see the practitioners face to face. Instead, they made the practitioners see the families from the back. Then they ended the visits and claimed that this or that practitioner didn't maintain good behaviour in the labour camp, so he or she could not meet with the family members. If they wanted to meet with their family, then they would have to write the "guarantee letter¹" and slander Falun Gong. A practitioner whose last name is Zhang has been jailed there seven times and hasn't seen his family for two years. Practitioner Pan Jing's wife came to visit her husband. She was taken to the visiting room, was forced to take off her clothes, and was sexually harassed by a guard for thirty minutes. She endured the harassment in order to see her husband, but then she was not allowed to see him. She cried at home. If her neighbour hadn't talked her out of it, she would have killed herself.

On November 30th, 2005, Falun Gong practitioners Lu Ming and his wife started a hunger strike to protest the torture in a detention centre in Datong City, Shanxi Province. The guards and seven criminals force-fed them. The torturers inserted plastic tubes into their throats, and then pulled them in and out, back and forth several times. Sometimes they even poked into their bronchiole. Blood sprang out from their noses and mouths. Lu Ming and his wife passed out several times. One week later, they were transferred to another secret prison.

In August 2004, under the chief of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) Political and Judiciary Committee in Shanxi Province, Du, the public security bureau in Taiyuan City (the capital of Shanxi) installed a powerful surveillance and spying system. This system spied on every online computer in the city, and it focused on Falun Gong practitioners' activities. It can spy on and look for a practitioner's physical address, once it detects a practitioner's action on the Internet. In one year alone, more than 100 cases related to practitioners' activities were found by this system. A woman practitioner named Fenglin from Jici City was identified by this system when she was on the Internet. Policemen pretended to be practitioners and talked to her online, saying they wanted to share their cultivation experiences with her at some place. When she got there, she was arrested. Fenglin was first jailed in a detention centre and later transferred to the women's prison in Shanxi. The chief of the prison, Li, talked to her directly, and ordered a female guard to administer some unidentified drug. After having that drug, Fenglin's mind became very unclear, and she wrote more than twenty guarantee letters and repentance letters. The prison posted her repentance letters everywhere in the prison to brainwash others. According to Fenglin's family, she felt very bad about it. After being released, Fenglin suffered a mental collapse and could not recognise her own family.

Normal, healthy Falun Gong practitioners were sent to a mental hospital. In the mental hospital in the Changzhi area, every practitioner was tortured by three different means. The first one was beatings. Guards and criminals beat the practitioners badly. The second torture used was a mind-altering drug. The guards used "avoiding violent behaviour" as an excuse and forced everybody to take the mind-altering drugs, which made practitioners' minds unclear. The guards then asked them to write the repentance letters. The third one was sleep deprivation. Some practitioners were not allowed to sleep for 24 hours, 36 hours and sometimes even 48 hours. It's much easier to brainwash a person who hasn't slept for a long time. For women practitioners, there was a fourth torture--rape. In the mental hospital in the Changzhi area, a 19-year-old girl, Xiao Yi, was raped 14 times in 3 nights. The rapists burned her breasts and private parts with cigarettes. Some young and pretty Falun Gong practitioners who were mentally healthy were driven to mental collapse by being raped many times.

There is a brainwashing centre for Falun Gong practitioners at a place called Pangquangou, which is close to Beiwudang Mountain. It was built as a "key national security project" after a national security conference was held in Taiyuan City. The secretary of the CCP's committee in Shanxi, Zhang Baoshun, the deputy secretary of the CCP's committee in Shanxi, and the governor of Shanxi Province, Yu Youjun, were the direct leaders of this project, which was code-named the "058 Centre." We directly or indirectly learned about several shocking incidences of persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in this centre, including poking practitioners' faces and bodies with needles. The practitioners were forced to take off their clothes and stand in the cold weather and have cold water poured on them, and the guards incited criminals to beat them. The practitioners were forced to curse the founder of Falun Gong every day and tear or destroy Falun Dafa books. They were also forced to slap each other, and they were chained next to the toilet with their heads facing the toilet.

According to the deputy-chief of the Provincial Prison Management Bureau, Zhou, there are 289 confirmed death cases of practitioners in Shanxi. They were beaten to death. I don't know the numbers in other provinces, but this number is already very high. It represents a lot of lives. As reporters, we thought about writing to some departments in the Central Committee of the CCP, and we also thought about reporting those persecution cases to the headquarters of our newspaper in Beijing. We even hoped that those persecutions were committed by local guards and policemen, and that the CCP central committee leaders didn't know about it. But our supervising department in the CCP committee in Shanxi Province wouldn't allow us to report them. They also did not allow us to write to the department in the CCP central committee.

To be honest, most of the reporters don't dare to do so. Many people are afraid of losing their jobs, incomes, and comfortable lives, and they are afraid that they themselves and their families will be persecuted. However, we do have a conscience after all, and we do have some degree of justice. We will announce to the whole world that maybe we don't agree with Falun Gong practitioners on some of their concepts and ways of doing things, and maybe we don't practise Falun Gong, but we are absolutely against the mental and physical persecution of Falun Gong practitioners and the human rights violations.

Meanwhile, we also hope that in the future trials, people will separate us from those who committed the evil deeds and separate us from the evil system. So, I decided to tell the public the truth I know. To protect those victims, all the names mentioned in this article were changed, but the stories are true. Due to limitations, I cannot write about all that I learned, neither can I provide some pictures I took of the persecution. I can only ask friends for help to publish this article. I only hope more people will learn the truth, and the international media will put more pressure on those evil policemen to stop torturing kind people. Maybe one day I will face the international media and tell them everything I know, as Mr. Chen Yonglin did in Australia.

Note

1. "Guarantee Statement": A statement to declare that one is remorseful for practising Falun Gong and guarantees not to practise Falun Gong again, not to go to Beijing to appeal for Falun Gong, and never again associate with any Falun Dafa practitioners.

Chinese version available at http://minghui.ca/mh/articles/2006/3/25/123586.html