Arrested 13 Times, Mr. Jiang Guobo Now in Critical Condition

Name: Jiang Guobo
Gender: Male
Age: 46
Address: Unknown
Occupation: Weifang City Politics and Law Committee official
Date of Most Recent Arrest: February 27th, 2009
Most Recent Place of Detention: Changle Detention Centre
City: Weifang
Province: Shandong
Persecution Suffered: Detention, physical constraint, beatings, force-feedings, given unknown drugs, interrogation, torture, extortion, surveillance, brainwashing, home ransacked
Key Persecutors: Huang Weilian, head of Weifang City Police Department

Mr. Jiang Guobo was arrested at his temporary place of work on the morning of February 27th, 2009. Police officers covered his head with a black bag and manhandled him into the police car. He has been held at the Changle Detention Centre ever since.

During the months since his most recent detention, Mr. Jiang has been subjected to inhuman tortures without letup. During the cold winter nights, he was forced to stand outside all night long wearing only thin clothes until he lost consciousness due to hypothermia. On hot summer days, he was forced to stay out in the open field at the detention centre with no shade at all and became extremely dehydrated, almost to the point of death. He has been chained to the death bed¹ with both feet and hands shackled until he vomited blood and his life was in grave danger.

In this short period of time, Mr. Jiang, who used to be young and handsome, now looks like a 70-year-old man with grey hair and an emaciated body.

He was born in March 1963 and used to be an official at the county deputy level of the Communist Party's Weifang City Politics and Law Committee. He started to practise Falun Gong in June 1995 and benefited physically and mentally. He recovered from a comprehensive disease in both his liver and kidneys, which had caused him to tire easily and to be very weak.

Despite his high position within the Communist Party, this well-respected official has suffered from non-stop persecution. Over 10 years, he has been arrested 13 times and subjected to forced labour three times. He was fired from his job and had 12,000 yuan² extorted from him. Now he is facing the threat of a jail sentence.

Mr. Jiang Guobo has been mistreated for over 10 years

In October 2000, Mr. Jiang went to Beijing to appeal for Falun Gong. On his fifth trip, he was arrested and sent back to Weifang City. He was held in a local detention centre until the end of November. He was sentenced to three years of forced labour and taken to Changle Forced Labour Camp in Weifang City. Sun Kuizhen, the director of the 610 Office (an organisation of special agents just for persecuting Falun Gong) in Kuiwen District Police Department, was responsible for his case.

Mr. Jiang suffered inhuman tortures at the forced labour camp. The following officials at the labour camp were involved in mistreating him: Xu Lihua, head of the labour camp; Zhou Jintian, deputy head of the labour camp; Lu Yibo, head of the Administration Section; Ding Guihua, head of No. 2 Division; Zhu Weile, deputy head of No. 2 Division; and Liu Jianguang, head of No. 1 Team. These officials instigated the inmates, including Zhao Dechang and Shang Jingwei, to brutally torture Mr. Jiang. Once two inmates stomped his knees together, which caused his right knee to be swollen for more than six months. During the coldest part of winter, Zhao Dechang and other inmates stripped off Mr. Jiang's clothing and submerged him into a bathtub full of icy cold water again and again, until his eyes almost protruded out of their sockets. Mr. Jiang has been subjected to this torture ten times. Once, he lost consciousness after being tortured this way for more than ten minutes. He regained consciousness, naked and laying on the floor of a storage room. He heard someone outside of the door saying, "Do not leave any wounds on his body."

Mr. Jiang was in extremely poor physical condition after suffering the inhuman tortures in the labour camp. He was allowed to leave for medical treatment on December 24th, 2000. However, he was taken back to the forced labour camp on March 29th, 2001. He was deprived of sleep day and night and subjected to forced brainwashing. In September 2001, his health was again extremely poor. His family had 5000 yuan extorted from them, and they were forced to sign the guarantee statement to renounce Falun Gong before they could take Mr. Jiang home for medical treatment. Before he was even fully recovered, police once again came to his home intending to re-arrest him. Mr. Jiang managed to escape, and, for more than four years he moved from place to place to avoid arrest.

Around 5 p.m. on April 3rd, 2005, when Mr. Jiang was repairing a motorcycle, he was recognised by a plainclothes policeman from the Weifang National Security Bureau. After police officer Wang Xiaofeng confirmed his identity, more than ten plainclothes officers surrounded him. He was knocked to the ground and beaten before being handcuffed behind his back and shoved into the police car. He was taken to the Hanting District Detention Centre. After refusing to answer any questions, he was shackled to a torture device called the "cross" in the hallway.

The "cross" was constructed with three wooden boards, one in a vertical position and two placed horizontally. The boards were 10 cm wide, 180 cm long, and 3 cm thick. The horizontal ones were installed on the top of the vertical one. Because the horizontal boards are placed on top of the vertical one, they stick out and cause extreme pain to the back of the person tied to the "cross."

Mr. Jiang's four limbs were tightly restrained on the four metal rings installed on the "cross," so tightly that he was unable to move or turn. He started a hunger strike to protest such inhuman torture. Ten or more days later, he was handcuffed and placed in shackles, and six guards and two inmates escorted him to Hanting People's Hospital. There, a tube was inserted into his nose in order to force-feed him. In this context, force-feeding was not used to prolong life but as another method of torture.

He continued to be tied to the "cross" during his hunger strike. For 20 days and nights out of 30 days detention, he was kept tied to the "cross." If he needed to use toilet, four inmates were ordered to carry the "cross" to the yard, and he would have to relieve himself while being tied on the cross. Only when he needed to relieve his bowels was he allowed to be temporarily untied.

During the last 10 days in the detention centre, Mr. Jiang was often in a coma or semi-comatose. For two days, he completely lost sight in his right eye because it was so badly swollen. His weight dropped dramatically, from more than 85 kg to around 50 kg. His backbone was injured by the horizontal boards on the "cross," s he waso unable to straighten his back for more than four months. The skin on his ankles was worn away and bleeding due to the metal rings on the "cross." He still has scars today.

On the morning of November 2nd, 2005, four plainclothes policemen from the "special case" group came to the detention centre. They handcuffed him and took him to Weifang Forced Labour Camp.

Mr. Jiang continued his hunger strike in the forced labour camp. About a month after he was detained in the labour camp, an unknown drug was mixed into the food that was being force-fed to him, which made him dizzy and excited. He was unable to sleep the whole night and still felt dizzy the next morning. He protested to the doctor in the labour camp about it, but they continued to mix the drug into the force-feeding food. The drug made him so dizzy that sometimes he was unable to stand up or sit down. He was afraid to close his eyes because he would feel as if the sky and earth were spinning around. Once he was so dizzy that he was passed out while urinating. He frequently vomited and the stuff he vomited up was yellow, green, black, etc.

During the 2006 Chinese New Year Holiday, he was fed more drugs than usual. On Chinese New Year's eve, after he was force fed, he felt extreme dizzy and vomited five times.

For four months in the labour camp, all kinds of unknown drugs were fed to Mr. Jiang. Some affected his brain, making him dizzy and causing him to have headaches. Others harmed his liver, spleen, and kidneys, causing these organs to swell and cause him extreme pain around the liver area. Some of the drugs made his heart beat unnaturally fast, resulting in chest pains and difficulty breathing. Others gave him extreme stomach pain. Some made his teeth so loose they fell out. The worst ones caused him to lose strength. He felt weak and unsteady on his feet. Both his hands and feet felt like they were paralysed, with no strength at all. He also experienced other symptoms, including sudden intense sweating, feeling extremely cold, unbearable itchiness all over, a high fever, pain in his muscles and joints, diarrhoea, inability to urinate or defecate, etc. These symptoms were just the ones that Mr. Jiang was able to identify. Later the unknown drugs were ground up into fine powder and mixed into hot water or into other substances to keep him from knowing when they were being forced upon him.

The drug that kept him from urinating was especially strong. Mr. Jiang was given that drug non-stop and in increasing doses after the Chinese New Year. Their goal was to make Mr. Jiang stop his hunger strike or die due to the inability to urinate.

Besides being fed with drugs, Mr. Jiang was fed with large amounts of salt and hot pepper water several times around December 2005. Once after he was fed in the afternoon, he vomited into the garbage basket in the evening. So much salt had been put into his food that the next morning he saw visible salt residue on the waste paper in the basket.

After more than four months in the forced labour camp, Mr. Jiang's health had deteriorated so quickly and so profoundly that he was taken to the hospital to be examined six times. Each time his heartbeat was around 110 and even high as 120. His condition was critical.

In mid-December 2005, after being force-fed with unknown drugs in his food, Mr. Jiang had extreme stomach pain. He was also sweating profusely and he had heart discomfort. Around 11 p.m., becoming alarmed by Mr. Jiang's condition, the guard on duty called Zhu Anle (male, 44 years old, head of the Administration Section of Changle Forced Labour Camp) and the labour camp doctor, Liu, to the solitary cell to look at him. Mr. Jiang told them that he knew that unidentified drugs were being added to his food, especially the one that was harmful to the heart. Zhu Anle repeatedly denied this, saying that there was no drug added that affected the heart. While trying to cover up what had been done, he accidentally leaked something that he was not supposed to say. He said, "I'm quite sure that there was no drug given to you that would affect your heart, because the doctor always lets me know what kind of drug he is going to use before he does it. They didn't tell me they were going to use such a drug lately." He suddenly realised what he was saying and stopped talking. He quickly turned around and left the cell. Doctor Liu followed him and left without saying a word.

In March 2006, Mr. Jiang was in such bad physical condition that the prison authorities allowed him to be bailed out for medical treatment. Through practising the exercises, he recovered. He asked to resume his job at his original work unit, a notarisation division. In the beginning, Song, head of his work unit, responded, "You can come back to work after your forced labour term expires." However, after his forced labour term expired, he asked again and was told that the officials in the judiciary bureau wouldn't allow him to resume his job. He went to the bureau and was told that the 610 Office had ordered that his request be denied. Mr. Jiang had to support himself, so he worked as a temp at different places to earn a basic living.

However, on the morning of February 27th, 2009, he was arrested again where he was working.

According to an internal source, after Mr. Jiang was arrested, he was immediately taken to Changle People's Hospital to be examined. He was diagnosed with severe, Type B liver disease, which is highly contagious. Nevertheless, he was still sent to the detention centre. The guards in the detention centre wore non-reusable gloves and sprayed disinfectant before they removed his clothes, shoes, and pants and dragged him to the detention cell.

In the following days, Mr. Jiang felt like he was in a dark hell. He suffered inhuman tortures and unimaginable pains. He went on a hunger strike to protest the mistreatment. The guards called several criminal inmates to tie him onto a death bed and carry out brutal force-feedings, which made Mr. Jiang keep vomiting. It was said that Mr. Jiang's family members visited him several times, but only in the presence of guards, who monitored everything they said, which was further harassment to make him suffer mentally. Once, the guards removed his warm jacket and forced him stand outside the cell with just thin clothes on. It was freezing outside, and during the night he became so cold that he lost consciousness.

Mr. Jiang refused to co-operate with any interrogation. The guards put him out in the open field on hot summer days. After he was dehydrated almost to the point of death, as soon as he resumed consciousness they immediately interrogated him overnight. They were attempting to get "criminal evidence" against him while he was not in his right mind. Mr. Jiang was taken back to the cell and again shackled to the death bed with both hands and feet locked to the metal rings, until he vomited blood and was at the edge of death.

Huang Weilian, head of Weifang City Police Bureau, is said to be directly behind Mr. Jiang's case. According to an internal source, Huang Weilian suspects that it was Mr. Jiang who wrote an article exposing his crimes, and he had Mr. Jiang arrested in retaliation. He wants Mr. Jiang to die in detention.

Note

1. "Death Bed" torture: A practitioner is tied to a bed with his hands handcuffed above his head to the bed rails, and his legs tied with thin nylon ropes. The rope is then tightly wrapped around the practitioner's body and the bed, from his legs to his chest. The rope is wrapped so tightly that the practitioner has difficulty breathing and eventually loses consciousness.

(Note: The "death bed" in Weifang Detention Centre is a metal frame about 20 cm wide with a wooden board on the frame. It is constructed in such a way that there is no opening for one to pass urine or excrement. Chen, head of the No. 1 Ward, intentionally instructed the labour camp doctors--including Kang, Zhu, and Han--to put a drug into the force-feeding food that would make the victim defecate immediately. Chen would clamour, "Let him soil his trousers!")

2. "Yuan" is the Chinese currency; 500 yuan is equal to the average monthly income of an urban worker in China.

Chinese version available at http://minghui.org/mh/articles/2009/11/10/212305.html