(Clearwisdom.net)
By Collin Binkley
September 25, 2008
Before he came to the United States, graduate student
William Huang served five years in Chinese prisons because of his religious
beliefs. Now free, he is speaking out against the oppression and torture he
faced.
Huang began following the spiritual practice of Falun Gong 10 years ago while he
was senior class president at Tsinghua University, one of the top universities
in China. Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual practice based on
meditative exercises that are meant to improve both body and mind.
"It is a peaceful exercise rooted in traditional Chinese culture,"
Huang said. "Its main principles are
Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance."
In 1999, while Huang was a first-year graduate student, the Chinese Communist
Party banned Falun Gong. Within weeks, the government began a campaign of
persecution and propaganda against the 70 million Falun Gong practitioners in
China.
During the crackdown, Huang and other students at Tsinghua University were
barred from registering for classes and were sent home to "reflect" on
their choice to practice Falun Gong. After being readmitted to classes three
months later, Huang was suspended from the university because he continued to
practice Falun Gong.
"I went home for about three months ... and in the end I became homeless
because the university didn't permit me to go back to school and I had no work
at that time," he said.
In October 2000, Huang left Tsinghua University and moved to Zhuhai City, where
he wrote about the persecution as a volunteer reporter for The Epoch Times,
an international news agency that reports news without being censored by the
Chinese government. But two months later, the Chinese Communist Party arrested
Huang and nine others from The Epoch Times for "subverting the
political power of the state."
Huang served the first two years of his five-year sentence at Zuhai Detention
Center, where he was forced to make decorative flowers and crack pistachio nuts
for 16 to 20 hours every day. "The environment was very dirty and small,
with over 20 prisoners in a very small room, about 10 square meters," Huang
said.
To protest his imprisonment, Huang participated in several hunger strikes,
eventually leading to force-feeding by prison officials.
"They locked my wrists and my ankles into a kind of plank, like a cross,
with my wrists and ankles chained on the four ends," Huang said. "And
they used pliers to open my teeth and used chopsticks to stick food in my throat
and pour liquid into my mouth. It was very painful."
Prison officials also deprived Huang of sleep and beat him with electro-shock
batons.
In 2003, Huang was transferred to Sihui Prison, where he again was forced to
perform slave labor until he completed his sentence in 2005.
"Perhaps because of the pressure of international society and the efforts
of overseas Chinese, at last I was admitted back into Tsinghua University in
2006 and resumed my studies from 2006 until 2008," he said.
At the beginning of this year, Huang obtained a six-year student visa to study
mechanical engineering in a graduate program at OSU. While in Columbus, he has
joined the Falun Dafa Practice Group at OSU, which meets Wednesday evenings at
Buckeye Village.
Lucia Dunn, a professor of economics and member of the organization, said there
are other group members who have faced similar persecution. "We have
another person in our group who was arrested," Dunn said. "It's a very
common story."
More than 3,000 Falun Gong practitioners have died "as a direct result of
the persecution campaign that the Chinese Communist Party launched in
1999," according to Falun Gong's official press source, faluninfo.net.
"Although I have experienced so much, it's just the tip of the iceberg of
what mainland Chinese are enduring," Huang said. "Many practitioners
were tortured even worse, even now." Huang said his future after he
graduates is uncertain because he has spoken out in the US and that he cannot
return to China until the persecution ends.
September 25, 2008
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Category: Accounts of Persecution
