Practitioner Mr. Chen Donglin of Xuzhou City, Jiangsu Province, Tortured in Hongze Lake Prison

In 1999, Jiang's regime started to persecute Falun Gong. Mr. Chen Donglin from Jinan and several local practitioners determinedly went to Beijing to uphold justice for Dafa. On July 23rd, Ms. Chen, and more than 300 other practitioners quietly sat on Tiananmen Square at eight o'clock in the morning. Police officers in uniforms and plainclothes officers arrived and beat them brutally. Some of the practitioners' faces were bleeding; some had their clothes torn to pieces; some practitioners had their hair pulled out; many sustained bruises and swelling all over their bodies. The officers dragged the practitioners to a police van by their hair, beat them with their fists, and kicked them. The kindhearted practitioners were taken to a nearby courtyard. Armed police officers were soon dispatched to the courtyard. They forced the practitioners to sit on the ground and divided them into several dozen groups. The armed officers then surrounded them. Among the practitioners, there were elderly people, children, and a woman who was eight months pregnant. It was mid-summer and they sat under the burning sun. When the pregnant woman asked for a cup of water, her request was denied.

After an hour, the police called in several buses to move the practitioners to another location. When the practitioners arrived at their destination, they found out that they had been taken to the stadium in the Fengtai District of Beijing. More than ten thousand practitioners were already detained there before this group of practitioners arrived. A female police head gave orders to the police officers, and food and other things, including watermelon, were distributed to the police officers.

In the evening, the officers started to interrogate the detained practitioners and found out that practitioners came from provinces all over China. After being interrogated, the practitioners were taken by personnel to the representative officers of their hometowns stationed in Beijing. The remaining practitioners had to spend the night in the stadium, without food or water. When they needed to go to the toilet, they had to report to the police and go to the toilet under police escort. The police set a limit for the number of people who were allowed to go to the toilet at a time.

On the second day, different provincial officers stationed in Beijing dispatched their staff members to take practitioners to their respective provinces. Those practitioners who did not follow their orders were held at the stadium. Those who were taken to their provincial offices were sent home. Their local police departments were notified to wait for them at railway stations. As soon as the practitioners got off the train, they were pushed into a police car and taken to the police station. After almost ten days of interrogation, they were sent back to their original workplaces. Their workplaces were required to put them under surveillance and they were not allowed to leave town.

Mr. Chen Donglin used to work as an electrical analyst at the Cement Factory of the Mining Bureau. After he returned from Beijing, he was assigned to a laborious and arduous position.

In December 1999, Mr. Chen was arrested by local police officers for duplicating videotapes explaining the facts of Falun Dafa The police took him to Xiaoqiao Police Station where they beat him cruelly. After the beating, officers handcuffed him to a tree to further torture him. On the same evening, when Mr. Chen's family went to visit him, Ms. Chen made a few complaints; as a result, the police deceived him into going into a room, where he was beaten savagely. Later, Mr. Chen and several other practitioners were sent to Sanbao Detention Centre in Xuzhou where he was detained for 15 days.

Mr. Chen was released at the end of December 1999. To prevent practitioners from going to Beijing to appeal, local police officers arrested several practitioners without cause. The practitioners were not released until the evening of New Year's Day.

On October 3rd, 2000, Mr. Chen went to Beijing to appeal for Dafa on his own. In Beijing, he met several practitioners from his hometown. They witnessed how the police officers beat and arrested practitioners at Tiananmen Square and sent them to detention centres. Some practitioners were recognised by their local police officers and then sent back to their hometowns.

Mr. Chen was able to escape the search and arrest in Beijing; however, he had to become a fugitive afterwards to avoid arrest. When he travelled to a place in Anhui Province, he was arrested and sent back to Xuzhou City where he was sentenced to three years of forced labour at Fangqiang Forced Labour Camp. Later, he was transferred to a detention centre in Xuzhou. The guards in the detention centre kept interrogating him. Because he was firm in his belief and refused to be "transformed¹," he was sentenced to four years in prison by Jiawang District Court after being held at the detention centre for 18 months. He was sent to Hongze Lake Prison in Jiangsu Province to serve his four-year term. Two other practitioners were sentenced prison, one for four years and the other for three.

Practitioners from the northern part of Jiangsu Province are held at Hongze Lake Prison; practitioners from the southern part are held at Suzhou Prison.

As soon as Ms. Chen arrived at the prison, he was held at the "new prisoners team." He was forced to get up at 3:00 a.m. After a limited time for washing and teeth-brushing, he had to start manual labour. Sometimes he was assigned to sew the pieces of a football together, and sometimes he had to make holiday lights, women's underwear, ribbon bows, or hair bands.

When the detainees had meals or went to the toilet, they were not allowed to exceed a certain time limit. For example, they only had two minutes to use the toilet each time. After they finished their daily tasks, they had to recite the prison rules.

The first detained practitioner in this prison was a native of Yangzhou City. He was sentenced to ten years when he was tried in Beijing. Immediately after he was incarcerated in Hongze Lake Prison, two practitioners from Suining were sent to the prison. Because they firmly refused to be "transformed," they were transferred to other divisions to serve their terms. In an attempt to "transform" practitioners, the prison authorities set up a dedicated division and tried to incite the guards by rewarding them with several thousand yuan if they were able to successfully "transform" a practitioner.

By the time Mr. Chen was sent to Hongze Lake Prison, the prison had established tactics to "transform" practitioners. Many of the leaders and guards from this prison were promoted to be officials in other prisons and forced labour camps because they had a lot of experience in brainwashing practitioners. They first of all studied an imprisoned practitioner's background and then asked former practitioners, who turned against Falun Gong under brainwashing and torture (collaborators) to go to the practitioner's home to pretend to comfort his family members. The whole process was videotaped and then shown to the practitioner involved, in an attempt to "transform" that practitioner by taking advantage of his affection for his family. The officials also had private conversations with practitioners or had several guards threaten a practitioner. Then they ordered the collaborators to force the practitioner to watch slanderous DVD programes and share their "understandings." If the practitioner remained firm, the guards would put him in solitary confinement where the windows and the door are covered with newspaper. The practitioner is completely separated from the outside world and has to eat, drink and relieve himself inside the small cell.

The prison authorities usually ordered criminal inmates to monitor practitioners 24 hours a day. Practitioners are required to write a report on their thinking every day. If the practitioner refuses to be "transformed," the collaborators take turns to instill in him their evil thoughts day and night. For those very firm practitioners, the guards even call a denunciation meeting, to threaten other practitioners who haven't been "transformed."

Note

1. "Reform or Transform" Implementation of brainwashing and torture in order to force a practitioner to renounce Falun Gong. (Variations: "reform", "transform", "reformed", "reforming", "transformed", "transforming", and "transformation")

Chinese version available at http://minghui.ca/mh/articles/2007/1/23/147449.html