My Life Hung by a Thread While Police Beat Me and Used Dangerous Methods to Revive Me

I am a Falun Gong practitioner from Guangdong Province. On the morning of October 31st, 2001, shortly after a flag-raising ceremony in Tiananmen Square, I opened a banner that read "Falun Gong is good" toward the crowd. Seconds later, two armed policemen rushed toward me, tore away my banner and shoved me into their car. I was taken to Qianmen Police Station. The police there interrogated me for information including my name and address and took my picture by force. I refused to cooperate. A policeman walked up to me and slapped my face with all his strength. There were dozens of practitioners arrested that day. They were all beaten and verbally abused. They deprived us of food and water all day and we had only one toilet break. One policeman suddenly threw scalding hot water on us.

That night, more policemen came and we were transferred to Miyun Detention Centre. We were forced to sit on the ground. Then the policemen forced us to have our pictures taken, assigned numbers to us and threatened us, saying, "I will let you all taste true Fascism," and " I will see whether you will talk or not when I use the electric baton." They began to interrogate us one by one. Two male policemen interrogated me. They showed me a picture album at the beginning with pictures of people who had been tortured to a bloody mess. It was horrifying to see. He threatened me, "If you do not cooperate, you will look like those in the pictures." I did not react. He suddenly slapped me very hard for a long time (the marks on my face did not fade for ten days). He stripped my clothes until I was in my underwear and began savagely beating me, I was quickly beaten to the ground and passed out. He began to curse. Even though my body was not able to move, my mind was clear. I heard two more policemen come in, they seemed to be carrying clubs or electric batons. They hit the floor with their batons and said, "Too bad, we no longer need to use the batons." Then four began playing card games and cursing. The weather in Beijing was already quite cold and there was no heat in the room. I was lying on the cold cement floor with bare feet. My body began shaking violently, which turned into severe convulsions. They came back and put my clothes back on. It seemed that quite a few policemen walked around near me. They stepped on my fingers, and took turns pressing on my eye sockets. They wounded one of my eye lids, but still could not wake me up. One of them said, " It is quite painful to have one's eye sockets pressed on like this. Even my fingers hurt. It looks like she is not going to make it." They pulled me by my hands off the ground and took me to a jail cell. My trousers were all torn. Someone covered me with a blanket. I stopped convulsing, but my limbs were icy cold and stiff. My life was hanging by a thread. The jail cell mates told me that I looked dead to them.

A prison doctor came, he attempted to take my pulse and said, "No problem, she won't die. There is no need to send her to the hospital." He suddenly covered my mouth and nose with his hand and held them for a while. He attempted to suffocated me to see whether I was faking my death. I did not move at all. I felt no air in my body, but I had no sense of suffering and my mind was still very clear. The prison doctor muttered, "Falun Gong practitioners are unusual." Maybe he thought my physical state did not match medical common sense.

The others in the cell suddenly became very quiet; the prison doctor's action shocked all of them. Dozens of inmates and two practitioners were my witnesses that day. The policeman who had beaten me was afraid to take responsibility if I died. He insisted on taking me to the hospital. They used a pungent gas to wake me up and took me back to the jail cell. By that time, it was 4 a.m.

I was exhausted and fell asleep. When I woke up, I began a hunger strike and demanded my unconditional release. They no longer interrogated me and I was released six days later.

After personally going through this near death experience, my belief in Falun Gong is even stronger. Even the prison doctor thought I would have surely died had I not been a Falun Gong practitioner.

Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2009/9/1/207544.html