(Clearwisdom.net) A group of us had just been beaten by four guards in a detention center in Yushu City, Jilin Province. Then the guards forced us to stand outside wearing only thin clothes. The temperature was about minus16 degrees Celsius that winter at around 4 or 5 a.m. Another practitioner and I fainted from the severe cold.
My experience while detained in detention centers
Jiang Zemin and his followers started the persecution of Falun Gong on July 20, 1999. On August 26, 1999, I went to Beijing to appeal for justice for Falun Gong. When I got to Beijing I didn't know exactly what I should do. I went to Tiananmen Square in the daytime, and went back to my living quarters at night. One day, the Beijing City government started registering people from out of town. When the police came to our place and asked me and the other six practitioners what we were there for, we answered, we came here to validate Falun Dafa. After registering us, they took us to the Jilin Province Liaison Office in Beijing where our identification cards were taken away. I was then sent to a detention center back in my hometown. My ID card has yet to be returned to me.
The chief and guards in that detention center yelled at us all the time, which made us live in a fear-filled environment. They forced us to do heavy labor such as building a fish pond, digging holes and other manual labor. I refused to obey their orders. They were afraid that other practitioners would follow my example, so after ten days of incarceration, they sent me to another detention center.
Because in that detention center I did the sitting meditation when I was subjected to a torture called "sitting on the board" (forced to sit erect and motionless on a hard board, 18 hours a day), I was put in shackles and tortured with the "big hang up" for more than 20 hours (1). One guard slapped me, making my nose bleed. Later, they allowed another practitioner and me to stand up while others were still "sitting on the board," so we did the standing exercises. We always did the exercises, no matter whether we had to sit down or stand up, and later the guards didn't stop us when seeing us do the exercises.
In order to monitor practitioners, they installed a video camera in every room. The one in our cell did not work, so they changed it to a new one. When they were installing it, two other practitioners and I had the same thought: "It won't work, and they cannot watch us." And it really didn't work! They put another video camera into our cell, and it didn't work either; then they gave up. Now, I know that it was due to our righteous thoughts.
There were other tortures they subjected us to. Once, officers in the Political and Security Section interrogated me. When I stepped out of the room. a guard cursed me for no reason and acted as if he was going to beat me. They also forced me to sew 400 prison uniforms.
After being jailed for 50 days, I was sent back to the first detention center I was in. They were afraid that I would lead other practitioners to disobey their orders, so they locked me and another practitioner, also from the second detention center, into an isolated small cell.
Once, since I did the meditation and recited the Fa, one guard reported this to the chief and to another guard. That guard beat me with a broom and slammed my feet with shackles weighing ten pounds. Then they subjected me to the "big hang up" for over 20 hours. After that, I was detained for ten more days before I was released. In total, I was jailed for more than 70 days.
The torture of being exposed to minus 16-degrees Fahrenheit freezing weather
In February 2000 I was again in a detention center. I saw that practitioners were carrying snow. Other practitioners told me that those practitioners had been on a hunger strike for more than two days in protest of the illegal deprivation of freedom, but the guards still forced them to do heavy labor.
Since all of us did the exercises and recited the Fa, the chief ordered guards to beat us with plastic pipes filled with lead, which made us black and blue. Another time when we did the exercises the guards forced eight of us to wear only underclothes, and four guards beat us like that for one and a half hours. Afterwards they forced us to stand outside in the cold winter with thin clothes on. The temperature was about minus 16 degrees Fahrenheit (-27 Celsius) that winter morning around 4:00 a.m. Another practitioner and I fainted from the cold. Guard Xu claimed, "It is not illegal to make a Falun Gong practitioner die. According to the quotas we received, we can still make three die." Later, when they saw that we were really close to dying, they finally let us go inside. Two more practitioners fainted. We checked our injuries after dawn and discovered that our feet had turned black. We could hardly go to bathroom. Even three years later, one practitioner still had a big tumor on his leg.
The second day, my whole body was in pain and sore, so another practitioner and I did the first set of exercises to refresh our bodies. As a result, four guards took us to a small room. To avoid being seen, they closed the curtain and again beat us with a plastic pipe filled with lead.
In the Heizuizi Forced Labor Camp
Later, I was illegally sentenced to one year in a labor camp. When undergoing the physical examination in the Heizuizi Labor Camp in Changchun they saw that my whole body was covered in wounds, so they refused to take me. The officers from the Political and Security Section in Yushu City begged them to take me; I was therefore imprisoned in that labor camp for seven months.
During those seven months the labor camp police beat us and ordered other inmates to monitor us. The criminal inmates cursed us and sometimes beat us. Their sentences were reduced for torturing us.
Later, a lawyer who is also a practitioner listed all the laws that Jiang Zemin had violated. So, I also wrote a statement of complaint against Jiang and submitted it to the authorities in the labor camp. I also told other practitioners to write such statements. The policemen in that labor camp eventually received more than ten complaint statements, which really shocked the evil.
Once, since we did the exercises in the labor camp, three guards beat me and another two practitioners with electric batons in an office. I felt the electric current entering my body. My heart couldn't tolerate it. It took me two weeks to recover from the beating.
Once, a criminal kicked us for doing the exercises. We had to do heavy labor for 16 or 17 hours every day. Sometimes, if the workload was heavy, we had to work over 20 hours a day. The prolonged heavy labor and short breaks exhausted me.
A few months later, they tried being phony and nice and attempted to "reform" me by appealing to my emotions. They showed me a video of practitioners being "reformed." Since I did not take the "Fa" as Master at that time, I was moved and wrote the "Five Statements" (similar to the Three Statements), although it did not truly come from my heart.
Being forced into homelessness
For half a year after I got home I just hid at home, reading the Fa by myself, and did not validate Dafa with other practitioners. Fellow practitioners came to see me and eventually convinced me to come back to Fa-rectification cultivation. Gradually, I realized that I need to validate Dafa. By then Master's new article, "A Suggestion" (Essentials for Further Advancement II) was published, which awakened me completely and made me see through the evil and phony nice-nature of the guards in the labor camp. I rejoined the immense current of Fa-rectification, and the evil started a new round of persecution against me.
One night at the end of 2001, I was reading the Fa at home, when four policemen broke into my house. They tried to take away the book I was holding, and I refused to let go. Then they searched my house, making a mess, and took away one picture of Master.
On March 7, 2002, at 11:20 p.m., six policemen broke into my house and told me that their supervisor wanted to talk to me. My husband said, "What are you doing in my house so late? You searched my house and made a mess. I will sue you tomorrow!" Since they refused to leave, my husband got up, put on his clothes and said, "I will go with you. I can answer all the questions your supervisor would ask." The policemen saw that my husband was tough, so they left with some phony nice words. We could not fall asleep until dawn. Any noise outside would make us think that they were back again.
Someone said that after leaving my house, the police went to another practitioner's house and took away two practitioners. They released these two practitioners after extorting a few thousand yuan from them.
From then on, there were always four or five policemen coming to my house and harassing me day and night. Because of this, I chose to leave home and became homeless.
Since the police could not find me at home, they asked my relatives but got no information. Their harassment significantly disordered our normal lives. One year later we moved, and our lives became relatively more peaceful. My relatives and old neighbors told me that the police went to my old house looking for me and asking for information about me.
(1) Big Hang Up: There are two forms of this torture: 1) Handcuffed with both hands behind the back and only the toes touching the ground, one is hung up by a rope that is tied to a metal window frame; 2) One hand of a practitioner is shackled to one bunk bed and the other hand to another bed, and the two beds are pulled in the opposite directions. One feels extreme pain as the body is pulled apart.
August 26, 2005
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