I am a Falun Dafa practitioner. On February 8, 2001, I went to safeguard Dafa in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. When I arrived there during the flag-raising ceremony there was a large crowd of spectators. We (other practitioners and myself) thought this was ideal timing, so we opened the banner with "Zhen-Shan-Ren" (Truth, Compassion, Forbearance). At the same time, we shouted, "Return the good name to our Teacher! Falun Dafa is great!" Uniformed and plainclothes police dashed toward us. They hit me so hard that I fell to the ground. Undaunted by the violence, I continued to shout loudly, "Falun Dafa is great." A policeman threw a punch at my mouth and then covered my mouth with his hand. After some brutal beating, they forced me into the police van.

Right after we entered the police station near Tiananmen Square, several policemen started beating me and another practitioner like crazy. They hit us so hard that the steel rods they used were bent and the wooden sticks broken. The fellow practitioner's head was badly cut; blood was all over his face. At the hospital, doctors had to use seven stitches to sew up the wound. The police refused to pay for the treatment, so the practitioner had to pick up the bill. Later they asked me to identify the abusers, but none of the bad policemen showed up. When several practitioners refused individual interrogation, the policemen started another round of beating. Afterwards, they handcuffed the four of our male practitioners to a fence for several hours. They did not allow us to use the restroom until noon after our repeated request. At lunchtime, our request for a meal was refused outright and they insulted us with profanity.

Around 5 o'clock in the afternoon, we were sent to Xicheng District Detention Center in Beijing. At 8 pm, the police from the Pre-trial Department of District Police Sub-Bureau started the interrogation. To protest the illegal detention, I refused to reveal my name and address. The police resorted to gruesome torture. They used an iron chain to tie my waist onto a chair so I couldn't move. They then grabbed my fingers and bent my arms backwards so they can handcuff me. A policeman stepped on my handcuff and bent my body backward. He pulled my hair and struck my head against the wall. I protested at the top of my lungs, "How could you violate the law when you are supposed to enforce it? Do you know it's against the law to abuse people?" The policeman became furious and he hit me even harder. With his foot stomping on my handcuff harder, his fist reached into my underwear and pinched me at my rib area. He said, "This is my special torture to criminals. I like to see how long you can endure." This torture was extremely painful. It went on for hours. Several times he had to take a break to catch his breath. He also said, "I only caused you internal injury and no one could tell."

During the torture, a police chief from the Pre-Trial Section came to check the progress. When he learned that I remained silent he said angrily, "We must succeed tonight." The bad policeman called in five more policemen to intensify the torture. They beat me up so hard that they broke the chair I was in. At that point they loosened the chain on my waist and pinned me to the floor. Some police stepped on my head and others stepped on my legs. Two police pinched me at my ribs at the same time while laughing and cursing. Throughout this ordeal, a police chief from the Pre-Trial Department was sitting there and paying no attention to this torture. Finally, they stripped off all my clothes and were ready to do more severe torture. Perhaps the department chief still had a little conscience, because he stopped the police by saying, "Enough."

Seeing that the hard way didn't work, they changed their tactics. The chief of the Pre-Trail Department came in person and tried to get my name and address. However, when I told him about the police brutality against me, he said that they were just doing their job." He tried to convince me that all they want to do was to make sure I have no criminal record. His trick didn't work. The police abuser wrote a fake record and left. Around 1 am, I was sent back to the detention center. The iron chain on my waist bruised my chest badly and I was really hurting. I tried my best to walk to the cell. In the cell, the head inmate did not allowed me to sleep. I had to stand on "duty" for 6 hours everyday.

To protest my illegal detention, I went on a hunger strike. The guard insisted that I violated the prison rules and asked me to sign a waiver to release his liability for my life. I said no. He got so mad that he hit my head and face with a key and a shoe. He then locked me up with heavy metal chains as if I were a dangerous criminal. Wearing that, I could not walk or stand straight. At the fourth day into the hunger strike, they decided to force-feed me. They inserted a tube into my nose, and caused my nose to bleed. That afternoon when I used the restroom, I found myself bleeding. The force-feeding must have caused some internal damage. On the sixth day of my hunger strike, I felt dizzy and had trouble walking. Fearing that I might die in custody, they took me to a van at midnight and dropped me off at Beijing's West Rail Station to let me go home by train. I strongly asked about the 400 Yuan [about US$45] they took from me, they returned just 100 Yuan.

This was a perfect example of what Jiang Zemin calls "China's best era for human rights." A kind-hearted citizen was tortured like this because he went to Beijing to clarify the truth. Is this the way China's human rights policy is supposed to be? Let us reveal more truth of the persecution in China and let more kind-hearted people help to stop these crimes.

A Practitioner in China