(Clearwisdom.net) Since July 20, 1999, when Jiang's regime started the persecution against Falun Gong, hundreds of Falun Gong practitioners have been imprisoned in the Third Brigade of the Beijing Women's Forced Labor Camp for insisting on practicing Falun Gong. They have been mentally and physically tortured. I want to tell the world's people about the suffering of practitioners in that camp. I hope people will gain an understanding of the evil hidden behind the so-called "great education."
The cost of building the Beijing Women's Forced Labor Camp was exorbitant. It has the appearance of a beautiful garden from the outside. The buildings are red, the grass is a beautiful green and there are bright flowers. One can also see fitness equipment. It is called "Reform School" and it is difficult for people to believe that it is a repulsive forced labor camp. This is how the Jiang Zemin regime covers up its evil nature. One can feel the evil and horror once one is inside the camp. The camp's policy is to "defame practitioners reputations, bankrupt them financially and destroy them physically." To keep up the appearance of a wonderful place, there are no iron bars on the windows, but the windows are of reinforced glass. In every corner, there is a surveillance camera and a microphone to monitor practitioners' every move.
We were in the clutches of the third brigade. The captain Jiao Xuexian and the assistant captain Huai Chunhong were very cruel to practitioners. There were many practitioners in their 50s or 60s. The guards used military techniques against practitioners. Practitioners were not allowed to brush their teeth and groom themselves for more than 5 minutes. A meal had to be eaten within 10 minutes. Practitioners were not allowed to eat any more after 10 minutes. Those elderly practitioners with bad teeth had to swallow their food without chewing it. Jiao Xuexian said the practitioners should not be "too comfortable." Before the meals, practitioners were required to sing songs about the greatness of the CCP or admit to having committed crimes. Practitioners often sang the truth about the CCP and the guard would then glare at them. The food was awful, but when important people visited, the food would be much better. The sanitary condition was even worse. Practitioners could only wash their clothes once a week and their bed sheets once a month. Many practitioners suffered from severe eczema. However, there were rooms that looked clean and had modern toilets in the bathrooms. Nobody was allowed to used those; they were for demonstration purposes only.
Practitioners were often forced to work overtime. Most of the time, we had to weave high-quality wool gloves, sweaters and scarves. They required very high quality work because the products were meant for export. The captain would not tell practitioners the destination of these products because they were well aware that slave labor is against international treaties. Sometimes we had to work more than 10 hours a day. Older practitioners who couldn't see well and those who had never weaved before still had to make up a certain amount of work. To hide these activities, the lights were turned off at 10 pm, but the practitioners had to start to work again at 4 am. We not only suffered mental and physical abuse, we were forced to become the camp's moneymaking machine. The third brigade was the demonstration team. When outsiders visited, the captain would hide the work and read books to us, pretending we were studying. This was a common occurrence.
One time a foreign reporter came to the camp to interview those there. Jiao Xuexian relocated the steadfast practitioners, those he considered "dangerous," and the elderly practitioners whose hair was gray, to another building. They did this every time someone important came to visit. One time they messed up the schedule, and the practitioners ran into the reporter on their way back to the building. The captain made the practitioners do the demonstration exercises.
The guards usually did not want to dirty their hands by torturing practitioners. They ordered drug abusers and "transformed practitioners" (practitioners who have succumbed to torture and brainwashing and renounced Falun Gong) to do the dirty work. Practitioner Ms. Zhang Yijie was brutally tortured in the third brigade. She used to be a director in a commercial company. In order to make her give up Falun Gong, a drug abuser heavily whacked her chest. She could barely breath and was in a dire situation. Another time, two drug abusers pushed her on a bed and used a fly swatter to hit her private areas and lower abdomen. Her lower body became swollen and she was unable to walk normally for a long time. Jiao Xuexian found these two drug abusers to be very useful.
Zhang Yijie rarely had a good night's sleep in the third brigade. The guards often used the excuse of "educating her" to prevent her from sleeping and still wanted her to work at the same speed as the others the following day. The only time Jiao let her sleep longer was the night before her husband came to visit her. The guards often prevented her from going to the restroom, drinking water, eating or buying food. Every so often the guards would lock her up. Once a practitioner who had been "transformed" took the only piece of bread Zhang had for a meal, crushed it and threw it in the grass. Then she asked Zhang to pick it up. To pressure her, Jiao forced more than 100 practitioners in the brigade to stand outside on a cold winter day until midnight. All this did not make Zhang renounce her belief. Because of her firm belief, her "sentence" was prolonged for 10 months and she was sent to a labor camp where practitioners were treated even more cruelly.
Every Falun Gong practitioner in the third brigade suffered different torture methods. The intensity of the torture was different for different practitioners. The guards deprived the practitioners of their freedom of belief and their rights to rest and eat. I was allowed to write home once a month and that letter was read before it left the camp. This was the deprivation of freedom of communication. Every time a family member visited, the practitioner would be thoroughly searched and was not even allowed to wear shoes. The guards were afraid that their evil conduct would somehow be reported outside the camp. The camp searched the dorm rooms from time to time. They especially inspected the notebooks, as they were deeply concerned that practitioners passed Teacher's new articles around. After the search, the dorm was a total mess.
Recent college graduates were hired to persecute practitioners in the camp. They used to be innocent. In order to live in Beijing, they took a job at the camp. They were instilled with hatred towards Falun Gong before they began to work and they gradually lost their conscience. Officer Yang Jie often scolded the practitioners and physically abused the practitioners regardless of their age. Yang blew cold wind on practitioners, asked former practitioners to pour cold water on them, forced them to stand against the wall, and squat or walk for a prolonged period of time. Yang's cruelty was no less than that of the senior captains. It was hard to believe that this was a recent and highly educated college graduate.
The physical abuse was endurable, but the mental abuse was unbearable. After we arrived at the third brigade, the guards told us we were there to have our "mental problem" resolved. The guards first arranged a few transformed practitioners to greet us, and then we had to listen to the endless attack and slander of Teacher and Falun Dafa. They attempted to distort Falun Dafa and make us feel that "transformation" was a higher level of practice. They would do anything to make us guarantee that we would not practice anymore. Because of the long time sleep deprivation, once practitioners sought comfort or started to have attachments not based on the Fa, they tended to lose righteous thoughts and do something regrettable.
The guards often forced us to watch videos that slandered Falun Dafa and later discuss it. They wanted everyone to say things against Dafa. Here, even the poorest practitioners had to buy ink and paper because we had to write down our thoughts, keep a weekly diary, and were given all kinds of "homework" to report our thoughts to the government. We did not have freedom of belief. If we wrote down what we really thought, we were tortured more severely. Many of us went against our own conscience and promised not to practice anymore under pressure. We did not change our minds and often used all kinds of methods to protest the persecution and to resist the brainwashing.
We knew we benefited from Dafa, and we were sorry about our wrongdoings against Teacher and Dafa. Therefore, many people became depressed. However, we couldn't cry there. We were not allowed to cry, no matter what. Once the guards found out, they would think our thoughts were "not safe" and we needed to receive "more help." The guards watched our faces every day. They would put their firm supporters near practitioners whom they considered "dangerous individuals" during class, and had them report everything the practitioners did or said.
A young mother's little girl came to visit her. Guard Huai Chunhong asked the girl, "Your mother left you. What do you say about your mother? Is she a good or bad person?" The girl replied loudly, "My mother is a good person. You guards only arrest good people." The child was telling the truth. However, Huai assumed that her mother put her up to it. After that, the young mother was singled out for more persecution.
When the guards realized that neither physical tortures nor brainwashing could make practitioners give up their belief, officer Xu came up with more sinister methods. Xu set up an experimental class in the third brigade and taught absurd things, trying to confuse the practitioners' thoughts and make them lose their righteous thoughts. All of the practitioners refused to cooperate and firmly resisted it. This experimental class failed and was thus discontinued.
Jiao Xuexian often shocked the practitioners with electric batons and scolded them every time he spoke. Due to the pressure from international society, the camp used so-called "civilized management" to cover their wrong doings. Although Jiao often ordered other captains or drug abusers to beat and physically punish practitioners, he pretended that he knew nothing. Jiao ordered a prisoner to brutally beat practitioner Zhang Yijie one day. Shortly after that, he put on another face and celebrated Zhang's birthday twice. Jiao often said that he was a "gardener" and even wrote a poem flattering himself as the "spring rain."
In the camp, the guards were Jiang's immediate persecutors and those "transformed practitioners" were the guards' helpers. Wang Yi, a former English teacher at Beijing Jiaotong University, cruelly persecuted practitioners after he was transformed. In order to transform the practitioners, Wang would do anything. He would lie about how many things he had done for Falun Gong and tried to make a good impression. In Jiao's eyes, Wang was more useful than most of the other captains. Jiao often gave him rewards. Jiao even used Wang's experiences in transforming practitioners to prepare materials for his speeches to other brigades.
A practitioner had just arrived in the third brigade when she wrote the Guarantee Statement. After she realized what she'd done, she voided that statement immediately. In the following year, she went through pain and torture that ordinary people cannot imagine even in their wildest dreams. Despite all the tribulations and the threat of a prolonged sentence, she firmly held on to her belief. She was released on time and went home openly and nobly. After 2003, many more practitioners delivered "Solemn Declarations" (statements declaring that anything agreed to as a result of torture and persecution is null and void) in the camp and expressed their firm and unshakable belief in Dafa. Coercion cannot change people's hearts, and the brainwashing was a total failure.
Without hesitation, I solemnly declare that everything I did or wrote against Falun Dafa in the Beijing Female Forced Labor Camp due to the high-pressure persecution is null and void.
The writer notes: After I recorded my mother's experience with the input of another lady, I felt deeply saddened. My mother's body and mind changed greatly after she practiced Falun Gong. She became healthy, optimistic and felt fulfilled. I couldn't understand how my mother could be tortured like that just because she firmly believed in "Truthfulness, Compassion, Forbearance." Jiang Zemin, because of his extreme jealousy, persecutes Falun Gong and practitioners. Jiang's tyranny, stupidity and cruelty is shocking. My mother's experience is not only her tragedy, but also that of her family and all Chinese people. The Chinese people are denied their most fundamental freedoms of thought and belief.
After my mother came home, she was often silent and her mind wandered. She felt guilty because she compromised her faith against her will during the persecution. She always believed in Teacher and Dafa. I support my mother in her wish to continue practicing, because I know it is the purpose of her life. Through studying Mr. Li Hongzhi's book and articles and pondering on my mother's life experience, I understand now that following Truthfulness, Compassion and Forbearance is the purpose of my life too.