Mr. Huang Min Tells of the Cruel Tortures He Suffered in Forced Labour Camps for Five Years and Seven Months

My name is Huang Min. I am a 37-year-old man living at Dagang Petroleum Field, Tianjin City. I graduated from Jilin University of Technology in 1991. In the summer of 1997, I had the fortuitous opportunity to learn Falun Gong. I have never been ill for over nine years. Ever since I started to practise Falun Gong, I have been very healthy and agile.

On July 20th, 1999, the Chinese Communist Party started to frantically oppress Falun Gong. Wherever I looked and each time I watched TV, read the newspapers, or listened to the radio, I saw the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) smear campaign and hate propaganda against Falun Gong. On September 30th, 1999, I went to Beijing to appeal for Falun Gong, but I ended up being imprisoned for nearly two months before I was sentenced to two years of forced labour. On November 2nd, 1999, I was sent to Shuangkou Forced Labour Camp in the Beichen District of Tianjin City. When I completed the two-year term, they did not release me. Instead, they transferred me to Yushan Forced Labour Camp in Ji County for another year. Afterwards, the police from Gangdong Police Station in the Dagang District of Tianjin City picked me up from the camp and imprisoned me for 30 days before transferring me back to a detention centre.

Next they sentenced me to another three years in Dasuzhuang Forced Labour Camp in the Dagang District, Tianjin City. At the time there was a rule for Falun Gong practitioners in Tianjin City—those that the police were unable to sentence to prison would be kept in the forced labour camp forever if they refused to give up and renounce Falun Gong in writing. After being incarcerated in Dasuzhuang Forced Labour Camp for a year, all the male practitioners were transferred to Shuangkou Forced Labour Camp and the female practitioners to Banqiao Forced Labour Camp. I was imprisoned there until April 6th, 2005. I was incarcerated for five years and seven months altogether, during which I suffered from violence and inhuman abuses numerous times. I will only describe some of the most typical abuses.

While in Changping Detention Centre in Beijing, I was incarcerated, along with over 30 other practitioners, in one large cell. One day we were concentrating on studying the Falun Gong books when a prison guard discovered us. After a while, he brought in over 20 prison guards, some with weapons in their hands. They hit every practitioner in sight. After brutally beating us for over 30 minutes, they robbed us and confiscated our Falun Gong books. Nearly everyone of us was injured over every inch of our bodies. Some practitioners' hair was plucked out by the handfuls.

Once at the detention centre, the police put the determined practitioners in the same cells with criminals and ordered the inmates to abuse the practitioners. Every morning after we finished cleaning the cell, the criminals would punch and torture us. There were many kinds of abuse. For example, I was sandwiched by two criminals who were standing facing each other. The one in front of me repeatedly punched my chest, which caused me to back down. Then the one standing behind me repeatedly punched my back. They punched me back and forth as though I was a human volleyball. Another torture involved kicking at my outer thighs with their knees until my inner thighs became severely bruised. Afterwards, I was unable to stand or walk. Another type of torture involved forcing us to bend forward 90 degrees while they punched hard on our lower backs with their elbows. Another type of torture was to punch at our sideburns. There was also a torture that forced us to stand with our backs against the wall with a quilt or a pillow on our stomach while the felons repeatedly punched our stomach. Another torture involved the criminals holding my fingers together with toothbrushes between my fingers and rotating the toothbrushes. After a few rotations of the toothbrushes, the skin and flesh on the fingers broke open. After a few days of the aforementioned types of torture, a healthy practitioner would be severely injured beyond recognition. Later the prison guards told the felons to stop the tortures. They may have been worried that the forced labour camps would not take us if we were dying.

After I was transferred to Shuangkou Forced Labour Camp, I faced worse treatment and torture. The 13 of us were the first group of practitioners sent to Shuangkou Forced Labour Camp. Among us there was a t20-year-old young man named Jia Zhiming. He was sentenced to two years of forced labour because he asked the State Appeals Office in Beijing to pass his letter to Zhu Rongji, Premiere of the Chinese Communist regime at the time. Because he knew he was completely within his constitutional rights to send a letter to the State Appeals Office, he refused to sign the court's verdict. On the very first day in Shuangkou Forced Labour Camp, Jia Zhiming was subjected to several rounds of brutal beatings. On the first night there, he was subjected to electric shock with stun batons for a few hours. His painful moaning and the noise of electric batons broke the intense silence in the cells, sending chills and fear into everyone who heard his cries in the dark. Jia Zhiming was a very robust and burly young man. After more than a year of torture in the camp, he became a sack of bones beyond recognition.

A few days later, the prison guards corralled the 13 practitioners in the toilet. Regardless of our age, we were each stripped of our pants and spanked a dozen times with a large wooden plank. There was an unwritten rule in the camp: Each newcomer must be subjected to beating, keep his head down in the first month and learn the "rules" of the game. The first month was the most painful. Because we have never been imprisoned in a forced labour camp, we didn't know how to perform the hard labour. Hence, we were unable to complete the assigned labour. Oftentimes we had to stay up for a few nights in a row to complete the work. During the first month, we often fell asleep when we were walking or standing and, thus, fell down. There was violence everywhere in the camp. In addition to deducting points from us, the criminals would beat us when we didn't perform hard labour well, walk in formation well, or worked slowly. But violence would not reduce the endless long-hours of extremely demanding hard labour. Moreover, we were surrounded by criminals who constantly fought each other for power, formed factions and cliques, and had fights between factions. Anyone who lives in such an unrelenting hostile environment becomes extremely careful, and nervousness pushed us to the brink of mental collapse. Each day felt like a year. Every day we went out to do hard labour at 6:00 a.m. and oftentimes did not return to our cells until 4:00 a.m. the next day. Even those of us who worked fast had to stay up until midnight. During periods of time when we were given more work, we often had to stay up for several nights in a row.

Around March 2000, the practitioners incarcerated in Shuangkou Forced Labour Camp started a group hunger strike as a nonviolent means to protest the imprisonment and as a way to have the authorities come in to learn the truth about Falun Gong. The Forced Labour Bureau sent people to listen to the report about our group hunger strike, but left without doing anything. Some prison guards did not even care about us at all. They even declared, "You don't have to eat, but you have to work or face my stun baton." We completed our daily work assignments despite the hunger strike. It was not until the fifth day of the group hunger strike that the prison guards started to respond. They took out several practitioners whom they thought were leaders of the group hunger strike and subjected them to brutal beatings, electric shocks, and the torture of forced-feeding, which is the number-one cause of death of Falun Gong practitioners incarcerated in forced labour camps. This group hunger strike lasted for seven days and got the attention of all the criminals and prison guards. How could these practitioners perform such physically demanding hard labour without eating? Although we were working on handcrafts, they were physically demanding. Every day we worked from 6:00 a.m. until 2:00 to 3:00 a.m. the next day without any break. Later the head prison guard in our group allowed us to go to sleep at midnight out of fear that we might collapse [and delay the handcraft production that produces revenue for the camp].

In May 2001, the horror was escalated to a new level. The CCP ordered all the forced labour camps to start forced brainwashing sessions and make all the practitioners attend. They tried to make us admit in writing that it was wrong to practise Falun Gong and to renounce Falun Gong in writing. In the morning, we were forced to attend the brainwashing session. In the afternoon, we were forced to practise strenuous formations. Each inmate was given a part in the brainwashing work. Some were responsible for beating, some for cursing. At night, we were divided into small groups, each subjected to fierce criticism, verbal insults, and curses. When we showed the slightest objection, we would face the inmates' violence right away.

There was a fellow practitioner named Chang Tianxiang imprisoned in my cell. Because he refused to do the "homework" of defaming Falun Gong, he was hauled to the toilet, where the inmates brutally beat him for over two hours. Each time he passed out, the inmates splashed cold water over him to bring him to consciousness and continued the beatings. They repeatedly beat him until he was bruised all over and had completely passed out. Finally Chang Tianxiang agreed to renounce Falun Gong against his will while he was in excruciating agony and was not clearheaded. They even audio-recorded what he said. But this was not the end of the torment. Before Chang Tianxiang recovered his health from the brutal beating, the inmates stripped him naked and paraded his [severely bruised] body back and forth in the corridor for everyone to see! It was their intention to intimate all the practitioners and show us the consequences of refusing to renounce Falun Gong. It was not until we later boycotted the brainwashing sessions as a group and managed to report the abuse to the on-site prosecutor that they punished several inmates that beat the practitioners.

The prison guards stopped at nothing to make us renounce Falun Gong. They even promised a big reward or a reduction of prison term to the inmates who beat practitioners. They assured the inmates that there would be absolutely no consequences for their actions. As a result, many practitioners were beaten until they became handicapped or even died. Two older practitioners that I knew of, Mr. Chen Baoliang and Mr. Meng Jixiang, were beaten to death in the camp.

Later, more and more practitioners were sent to Shuangkou Forced Labour Camp, so they had to transfer some of us to other forced labour camps. In mid-September 2001, I was transferred to Yushan Forced Labour Camp in Ji County, Tianjin City. A month later, they started to pressure me with violence in order to make me renounce Falun Gong. The prison guards had four inmates brutally beat me on an average of six rounds a day. When they realized that beating would not work, they resorted to different means of torture. They kept hitting my wrists and finger joints with a pair of forceps used to pick up cotton in the workroom until all the soft issues and tendons were badly swollen. In addition, they hit me on my ankles and toes, the areas that are more sensitive to pain. They made a hammer out of copper wires and used it to hit my head until there were bumps all over my head. Finally they poked my fingertips with large sewing needles until my fingers bled profusely. They also kept chopping the nape of my neck and Adam's apple with the sides of their palms. I thought my Adam's apple must have been broken into pieces. For a very long time, I could not utter any sound and my face was swollen up like a balloon. But the prison guards jeered at me, saying I had gained weight [on account of my swollen face]! I started a hunger strike to protest and eventually I became a sack of bones and weighed less than 88 pounds. They stopped beating me, but they resorted to the torture of forced-feeding. At first, they used a non-medical tube as thick as an adult male's index finger for forced-feeding. They tried to stuff the thick tube in my nose, but of course they couldn't get it in. My nose bled profusely as a result of the torture. Eventually the inmates standing nearby could not bear to watch the torture. They said, "Stop it! He is a human being after all!"

Next they resorted to chopsticks and a wooden club as thick as a finger. They used them to pry my mouth open and pour the food in, but I broke them in half with my teeth. Then they changed to a stainless steel spoon to pry my mouth open. Each time they scraped a piece of skin and flesh off my upper jaw and caused a lot of bleeding and pain. They pried my mouth open twice a day. At first they force-fed me with nutritious food, but later they force-fed me with hot pepper juice mixed with lard, a lot of salt, and cornmeal. It had a dark colour and was the consistency of soup. The extremely spicy soup inflicted a lot of pain.

When none of these torture methods made me renounce Falun Gong, the on-site medical doctor told me that I needed more nutrition and he would give me glucose injections. But he added an unknown drug to the glucose. When I refused the glucose injection, about five inmates held me down while the doctor forced the injection. Later the head of the brainwashing class, Liu Julong, told me that they had discussed for two months and made a few plots. In short, they decided to put me on psychiatric drugs. At the time the on-site medical doctor's name was Wang. The inmate that assisted him was named Lu Gang. When the drug did not work, they came up with a new plan. I had been on a protest hunger strike for a few months. The doctor said I must be ill from hunger striking for months, so he used it as an excuse to take me to a hospital for a blood test. After I was brought back to the camp, he said my blood sugar level was very high and he suspected that I had diabetes. The following day, he wanted to take my blood again, but I refused him right away. I told him that I was not ill and I did not have any symptom of diabetes. I added that he shouldn't draw blood from me because I was very frail after several months on a hunger strike. They wouldn't listen. The following day, they had about five men haul me to the doctor and hold me to the ground while the doctor took my blood with a large syringe. After 30 minutes, he took another large syringe of blood from me. That morning he took six large syringes of blood from me in the name of "medical treatment." That concluded his so-called "medical treatment."

In October 2002, the police from Gangdong Police Station in Dagang District picked me up from Yushan Forced Labour Camp and detained me for 30 days before they sentenced me to three years at the Dasuzhuang Forced Labour Camp in the Dagang District. In late 2003, I was transferred back to Shuangkou Forced Labour Camp. As a result of years of incarceration, torture, and protest hunger strikes, I had become almost disabled. I suffered from problems in my lower back, legs, and neck. I had to walk very slowly. It has been over a year since I was released, but I still cannot perform any physical work. My lower back and legs are always sore.

I was halfway into a hunger strike when I was transferred from Dasuzhuang to Shuangkou Forced Labour Camp. Once there, they resorted to an even more sneaky torture—complete isolation. I was under the watch of two inmates around the clock in an isolated room. I was made to sit still on a small stool from 6:00 a.m. to midnight every day. Except when I used the toilet, I was forced to sit still on the stool. After over four years of torture, my health was on the brink of collapse. I could no longer endure such an inhuman torture. I finally succumbed to the torture and renounced Falun Gong in writing against my conscience and told a lot of lies. I hereby declare again that everything I was forced to say and write during the incarceration to be null and void. I shall be diligent in my cultivation practice and live up to the title of a Falun Gong practitioner. I shall make up for the losses I have caused and purge the disgrace I have brought to myself.

There used to be a No. 5 Team in Shuangkou Forced Labour Camp, formed in 2000. It was notorious for its terror and violence. Later, a practitioner named Zhu Gang was put in this team. The authorities resorted to torture and violence, but they were unable to make him succumb. They were furious. They hung him up in the air and stuffed lit cigarette butts in his nose. When they finally released him from hanging in the air, they took out six cigarette butts from his nose. Finally they admitted defeat and sent Zhu Gang to a psychiatric hospital. They spread a lie that practising Falun Gong had made Zhu Gang crazy.

In early 2003, the Forced Labour Bureau started the so-called "100 days of intensive brainwashing." From January to March 2003, they focused entirely on making all the imprisoned practitioners renounce Falun Gong. Put simply, it was another wave of ruthless persecution. According to practitioners transferred from Banqiao Forced Labour Camp, the on-site medical doctors and the inmates-turned goons worked together. The inmates kept beating practitioners until they passed out or were in mortal danger. Then the medical doctor would resuscitate the victim so that the inmates could continue beating him while he was conscious. They repeated the process until a practitioner succumbed and renounced Falun Gong. At Shuangkou Forced Labour Camp, they used multiple stun batons to shock a practitioner. They tested it on a pig first. Using eight stun batons at the same time, the prison guards killed a pig. Hence, they decided to use "just" seven stun batons to shock one practitioner at a time. They put a black cloth over each practitioner's head and hauled him to a small shack, where the prison guards shocked him with seven stun batons at the same time. The practitioner's skin was burned and turned black. The room was filled with the smell of burning flesh.

Several years have passed, but these methods of torture continue to be used on Falun Gong practitioners in the forced labour camps all over China. The persecution against practitioners still exists. This brief summary of the torture I suffered is nothing but a drop in the bucket. The aforementioned torture was but a small part of the persecution I have faced. I wrote this article because I would like the world to know the truth, that the Chinese Communist regime's persecution is far more inhuman than the Cultural Revolution. It is my wish that, together, everyone will pay attention to, condemn, and end the Chinese Communist regime's persecution in order to bring light and justice to the human realm! I sincerely hope that everyone will remember the following message that countless Falun Gong practitioners have sacrificed their precious lives to tell the world: "Falun Gong is good!"

Chinese version available at http://minghui.ca/mh/articles/2006/10/24/140818.html