Prison Inmate Bears Witness to the Torture of Falun Gong Practitioners in China's Liaoning Province Women’s Prison

I am a resident of Shenyang City, Liaoning Province. I am not a Falun Gong practitioner. After I was found guilty of a minor offence in 2002, I was given a jail term of one and a half years, and was put in Liaoning Province Women’s Prison. The persecution of Falun Gong practitioners was rampant at the time and practitioners were being systematically arrested and sentenced. I want to record what I saw in prison, and how the guards persecuted Falun Gong practitioners.

Numerous practitioners went on hunger strikes to protest the persecution, and to uphold their steadfast faith. The prison authorities used non-practitioner inmates to monitor practitioners. I was also assigned to watch one practitioner with three other inmates. This practitioner would not say a word, but sat there with her legs crossed. As soon as she closed her eyes, the other three prisoners would poke her with toothpicks. Sometimes, they twisted and pinched the inside of her legs, and deprived her of sleep the entire shift.

I could not stand watching them humiliate that practitioner any longer. So I told the guard that I did not want to monitor her anymore, and asked the guard to let me work outside. The guard asked me why I wanted to work, and I explained that I could not stand watching them torture the practitioner any longer. She then said that she could move me to a different location. However, I was instead transferred to a section where practitioners were tortured even more brutally.

The new location locked up practitioners who had been on hunger strikes for days. I saw one practitioner who was bed-bound with her limbs tied to the four corners of the bed. A wooden board was placed on her body with three heavy metal pipes to weigh it down-- one on her forehead, one on her torso, and one on her ankle. Four inmates balanced on top of the metal pipes as if they were sitting on a seesaw. The practitioner’s forehead and feet were bleeding due to the heavy pressure from the weight on her body. It was a very sad and miserable scene to watch.

Outraged, I shouted, “This is brutal! All she did was practise some exercises. She hasn’t committed any crime deserving the death penalty. Why do you treat her like this?” I had completely forgotten that I was just a prisoner locked up in a prison. The prisoners sitting on the practitioner’s body would not listen to me, and one of them asked, “Who are you, a guard?” I kicked that prisoner. The force made her lose her balance and she fell to the floor. Not knowing where I got that much power from, I decided to lift the board off the practitioner and threw it aside. At that moment, a guard came down and yelled at me.

I also witnessed how the prison's so-called “nurses” force feed practitioners on hunger strikes, pumping vile mixtures through tubes inserted violently through their nostrils. When the tubes were removed, they were full of blood. I saw this with my own eyes. After the nurses left, I tried to talk the practitioners into eating. One practitioner told me that I would get good returns for helping practitioners, and that their Master Li would protect me. I thanked her. A few days after that, the prison authority reduced my jail term by three months.

Several years passed, and everything had been going well with me. Being busy with everyday life and household chores, I failed to take further action on remembering what I had seen in jail. Last winter however, I went to see my cousin’s husband who was ill. While chatting with them, my cousin talked to me about Falun Gong. I finally understood everything. So I am now writing down what I saw to expose the evil things I witnessed to the world so that everyone will learn about the crimes that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has committed. People around the world need to demand for justice and support Falun Gong.

Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2011/6/25/242974.html