The Persecution I Experienced and Witnessed in the CCP's Detention Centres and Labour Camps

Recently, Falun Gong practitioners have exposed the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)'s crimes of harvesting organs from living practitioners. As a Falun Gong practitioner who was persecuted in Mainland China, I would like to utilise what I personally experienced and witnessed to verify the worst persecution in history and attest to the existence of secret concentration camps.

When I was incarcerated in mental hospitals and labour camps for practising Falun Gong, my mental strength was extremely low due to the prolonged persecution. Six people I knew had died as a result of the persecution. Many of my friends were sentenced to labour camps and prisons. Countless numbers of my friends were fired from their workplaces, threatened by the police and sent to brainwashing sessions for practising Falun Gong.

I was jailed in the Dongcheng Detention Centre in Beijing, the Tuanhe Dispatch Division in Beijing and in the Xin'an Women's Forced Labour Camp in Beijing from April 2000 to April 2001. Over 500 of the people held in the detention centre were Falun Gong practitioners. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) utilises its national machinery to impose the genocidal persecution of Falun Gong all over the country.

At the time of my release from the labour camp, more than 1,000 Falun Gong practitioners were incarcerated there. The youngest was 18, and the oldest was in his 70s. Policemen beat and cursed practitioners at will because this kind of behaviour is condoned by the CCP. The torture took many forms - including drastic verbal abuse, beatings, force-feeding, beatings with electric batons and heavy manual labour. Practitioners were deprived of sleep and forced to face a wall. Sometimes they had to knit sweaters in the dark. If they refused to renounce Falun Gong, they would be locked in solitary cells, which were dark and measured only 4 square feet. The tortures drove people to the point of mental collapse and destroyed people's souls. Human language cannot describe the CCP's fiendish crimes.

In September 1999 I attended an unprecedented Falun Dafa Press Conference in Beijing. Practitioners exposed the truth of the persecution to the international media. After that, Jiang Zemin issued an order--"Don't let a single one get away." All of the 30 practitioners who went to the press conference were arrested and sentenced. Two practitioners, Ding Yan and Cai Mingtao, have already died from the persecution. I escaped, fortunately, and went to the Falun Dafa International Conference in Guangzhou in November 1999. I was arrested for going to this conference and jailed in the Dongshan Detention Centre in Guangzhou. Almost 100 practitioners were arrested and sentenced. Later I was sent to the Siping Mental Hospital in Jilin, where I was forced to take strong psychiatric medications and electric shock treatment for one month. Due to the torture, I lost part of my memory for more than two years.

In April 2000 I was arrested for holding a banner on Tiananmen Square. Thousands of Falun Gong practitioners went to Tiananmen Square daily at that time to appeal for Falun Gong. The CCP set up a special police station on Tiananmen Square to arrest and jail Falun Gong practitioners. That police station had many separated cells secured with metal bars. Many Falun Gong practitioners from all over the country were imprisoned there. I saw a policeman in that station slap a female Falun Gong practitioner with his shoe, which badly scared her 4-year-old child.

When I was held in the Dongcheng Detention Centre I saw practitioners being arrested and sent to the detention centre every day. As stated above, over 500 of the detainees were Falun Gong practitioners. The policemen took a nightly head count to keep a tally of the number of practitioners.

Since the CCP persecutes practitioners' families and pressures all practitioners' workplaces, many Falun Gong practitioners refused to tell their names, hometown and address when arrested in Beijing to prevent implicating their local officials and workplaces. Practitioners were numbered and held in detention centres, which became very crowded.

Practitioners were later sent away. I thought they had been released. According to the CCP's policy, each person who gets sentenced should be sent back to his local prison or labour camp. But practitioners who went to Beijing to appeal and were arrested were randomly sent to the Xin'an Women's Forced Labour Camp in Beijing. Some of them were sent to the Northeast of China and other places. Now I realised the reason the CCP didn't send them back to their hometowns - if their family members do not know where they are, the CCP can easily harvest their organs.

The policemen who subjected practitioners to illegal trials said, "We will send you to the desert. Killing you is just like killing an ant." From what they said, combined with the witnesses' testimony, the existence of secret concentration camps is quite likely. There are likely many concentration camps, such as the one in Sujiatun, all over the country.

From the detention centre we were sent by bus to labour camps. On the way there, two of us were handcuffed together. We were forced to kneel, facing the seats, with our hands on our heads. From the outside it looked like the buses were empty, but the buses were actually full of Falun Gong practitioners.

All practitioners who were sent to labour camps were first sent to the Tuanhe Dispatch Division. This division, set up like a Nazi concentration camp, is where Falun Gong practitioners experienced excruciating tortures. Criminals customarily stay in this camp only for one month before being sent to other labour camps. But 11 practitioners from outside of Beijing who told their names were kept in this division for more than six months. Some of them were even there for almost one year. They first got there in the middle of winter in January 2000. They were sent to the labour camps in December 2000. Since they had winter clothes when arrested, in the summer time they had to cut off their long trousers to make them into shorts.

More than 95 per cent of people who were kept in the Tuanhe Dispatch Division were Falun Gong practitioners. Policemen took all the Falun Gong practitioners individually to a dark solitary cell. Two policemen armed with electric batons forced practitioners to admit their "guilt" and write "guarantee letters" to renounce Falun Gong. Practitioners would suffer an electric baton beating if they refused to cooperate. I was assaulted with the electric batons for more than 30 minutes. My back was burned and my head was also injured. The burn was so bad that I could not lie on my back to sleep. In the daytime we were forced to bow down as low as possible, with hands on our heads. We had only ten minutes to wash up every morning and night, and we didn't have any chance to take showers. We were forced to do manual labour--wrapping chopsticks. We had to wrap chopsticks with a piece of paper that said, "Sterilised." We needed to finish a certain quantity every day; otherwise we were not permitted to sleep.

The CCP used all kinds of methods in the division to brainwash us. They compelled criminals to torture us physically and torment us mentally. They also tried to make us renounce Falun Gong with incentives of financial benefit. The prolonged mental and physical torture almost made me lose my mind. I gradually lost normal thoughts and the dignity of a human being.

If a visitor accompanied by an agent from the CCP arrived at the labour camp, he or she might see lawns, flowers and fish-tanks. All of those are the CCP's tricks to deceive people. A practitioner might tell a visitor that the CCP saved him or her. From my own experiences I can tell you that after suffering the long term ruthless mental and physical tortures inflicted by those CCP agents, one's spirit could really be killed, and he or she- who used to be a kind person- may appear to be tearfully grateful to the CCP, simply because the CCP didn't kill him or her. The evil of the CCP is beyond normal people's imagination.

The CCP's genocidal, inhuman persecution is the worst in history. It must be stopped immediately. We strongly call for an investigation in China. Considering all the lies that the CCP has perpetrated, we request an independent investigation. Our investigation of the CCP's persecution of Falun Gong should not be pre-arranged or interfered with by the CCP.

Chinese version available at http://minghui.ca/mh/articles/2006/5/13/127598.html