(Clearwisdom.net)
On August 16th, 2001, I was sent to the Panjin City Labor Camp for a 3-year sentence. As I entered the labor camp, I could hear the terrifying sounds of the electric batons' shocking someone, "zap, zap, zap ...". The practitioners being beaten were Yin Baowen and Liu Guangqing, a technical school teacher, because they refused to practice Tai Chi [Note: As Tai Chi is considered a different school of practice, prison guards use this tactic in order to make Dafa practitioners do something that is against their faith]. They had been beaten every day for more than a month when I arrived. The painful torture and the guards' curses could be heard constantly.
There were posters everywhere on prison cell walls insulting and cursing Falun Gong's Founder and the practice of Falun Gong. I was too upset to keep my eyes straight head in front of those defaming posters. Prison guards often beat practitioners on the exercise grounds. The atmosphere of terror was so thick as one could always hear the sounds of guards repeatedly slapping practitioners' faces. Without being there, one cannot imagine how horrifying it was. These constant tortures alone could mentally destroy a person.
I knew that if we could not keep our strong faith but instead complied with their requests, we would always be victims of their abuses. The authorities attempted to force us to practice Tai Chi, to curse our Teacher and Falun Dafa, to make false statements, and to write the "three letters" [the letter of guarantee, the letter of regret and the letter criticizing fellow practitioners]. In addition, they tried to force us to continually compromise ourselves and our personal belief in Truthfulness, Compassion and Forbearance, which no human being should ever have to do, with the intent to cause us to feel so much shame that we would not practice Falun Gong again, and even feel too ashamed to live. The authorities not only deprived me of my freedom of belief and my physical freedom, but also attempted to destroy my dignity as a human being. Teacher taught us to assimilate to the characteristics of the Universe: Truthfulness, Compassion, Forbearance; while the authorities constantly made attempts to force us to deviate from Truthfulness, Compassion, Forbearance. Our Teacher is saving us and teaching us to be good people and return to our true origin, while they try to drag us into Hell with them. I knew I would never comply with their demands. I am a Falun Dafa cultivator, and I refused to be forced to practice other belief systems and compromise my faith.
On the morning of August 18th, only ten days after I broke my fast, prison guard Chen Changli punched and kicked me in public while I was still very weak. He punched my face with his fist and I could feel my face start to swell up. After I was knocked down, he kicked me, and then he grabbed my hair and bashed my head so hard against a mini-van that the van's paint chipped off on my head. When he was exhausted, he finally stopped beating me. This happened as almost 100 labor camp inmates were going out to work and they all witnessed this event. My fellow practitioners who were present told me that those guards were extremely cruel and scary. This was still not enough; two inmates in charge of monitoring took me back and beat me again. The most vicious was Luan Yong, who repeatedly kneed me in the stomach, I could not even stand the first blow; it was extremely difficult to bear. Later on, when I used the washroom, I noticed that I had lost control of my bowels in my pants. Due to being disoriented, it was a long time before I regained the memory that my incontinence happened due to the sudden, rapid, and brutal beating Chen Changli gave me on the exercise ground.
The guards still continued beating Yin Baowen and Liu Guangqing. Only this time, the Brigade Chief Tang Xiaobiao wanted me to be present during their torture in order to intimidate me. Then they tried to force me to recite the 30 labor camp rules. They said that recitation of rules did not influence my practicing Falun Gong and this was part of the labor camp's regulation. In fact, this was just the first step of their systematic persecution. I said, "I did not commit any crimes; Yin Baowen did the recitation of the rules and he still was beaten up every day. In the end, I would get beaten anyway, so I would like to make things a little simpler by not reciting!" With that, he had nothing to say and threw me into a small cell that was an iron cage (cage-cell), little wider than a single bed; I was hung handcuffed inside the cage-cell to the iron bars. I cannot remember how many times he used the electric batons on me, but each time lasted more than half an hour. The most vicious act was that Tang Xiaobiao ordered the inmate in charge of monitoring to torture me; in summer time, I did not wear much, so each time Luan Yong, the inmate in charge of monitoring came, he would cruelly pinch me all over while I was handcuffed and unable to move. When he was tired of torturing me that way, he left. A little while later, he would return and continue again. He did this so many times that I unconsciously developed a conditioned reflex: I would become very nervous upon his entrance. He tortured me this way many times a day; at nighttime, I was still handcuffed and I had to continue standing there 24-hrs with swollen legs and feet. In the evenings when I fell asleep, the pain of the handcuffs and the constant rattling of the cage would awaken me with a jerk. I could not sleep while being handcuffed and standing there. My legs and feet were so swollen, I could not even wear slippers. While looking at my terrible condition, Tang Xiaobiao said with dismissal, "Your condition is so much better. Liu Guangqing's feet were so swollen that you could not even tell where his heels were." Later, I learned that one month before, Liu Guangqing and Yin Baowen were hung in a small cage-cell for 9 days with 6 of those days non-stop in the hanging position.
I was tortured this way for 3 days and nights. On the fourth day, a director from the Justice Bureau came to the labor camp to monitor the camp's situation. Upon seeing my terrible condition, he asked Tang Xiaobiao to unlock my handcuffs. Tang Xiaobiao reluctantly did that. I thought I had encountered a good person. But later on, I learned he was actually equally vicious. This director directly participated in beating practitioner Ye Ximing. Each time there was a serious breach of laws, physical abuse and collective violence against practitioners, he would hide for a few days and then come back again for another round, thus fulfilling his monitoring and disciplinary duty.
After I was released from the handcuffs, my two hands could not move as before; my left hand was not able to turn on a faucet for a long time. A day later, they got a new idea. They suddenly interrogated me in a room full of police agents. It seemed they all were high officials, saying that I had done other things that needed to be dealt with and they needed to send me to a prison. They tried to threaten me this way. Of course, not just threatening: in the beginning, they used electronic batons on me and then beat me by using their batons. I did not know how many times they had already pummeled me. I only tried hard to bear the pain and instinctively used my hand to fend off the falling baton, so it ended up landing heavily on my arms. I asked, "It is stipulated that you are not supposed to interrogate with torture, right?" One of the agents rushed over and yelled while pummeling me, "Who interrogated you with torture? Who?" When they were beating practitioners, they would leave the door wide open so that everyone could clearly hear the noise of beatings and tortures to scare other practitioners. We were in the middle of these kinds of beatings, curses and threats, day after day. A day was like a year, and a week later, they threw me together with other fellow practitioners and we were punished by forced bench-sitting for long hours with no talking, no moving, no rest, and no break.
Later they transferred me from the small cage-cell to a larger room where I joined my fellow practitioners who arrived here before I did. But in the room, there were posters defaming Teacher and Dafa all over the walls. This was an insult to all practitioners. I could not stand this. Yet, at the thought of tearing them down, I would feel nervous. I was scared at the thought of being beaten again. However, I could not stand this kind of insult. So every day I thought about how to tear them down. There were 3 rooms plus a hallway that had posters defaming Teacher and Dafa. Since I was determined to do this, I decided that I should tear all of them down, so I did not have to do it again. As soon as I made the decision, my heart felt peaceful. Because of the criminal inmates' tight control, it was hard to tear all of them down. During the following week, the Brigade Chief Tang Xiaobiao had beaten me 3 times because he tried to force me to recite the 30 rules, and he threatened to beat me every day.
During one afternoon, the chance was presented to me. I tore down all the posters in the 3 rooms and erased the defaming language on the blackboard. And later the inmate guard became very upset because of this, asking who did this. When I stood up, he started beating me furiously, but he dared not report the incident. Later, though, he nervously reported to the Brigade Chief. In order to prove himself to the Chief, he furiously beat me to cover up for own shortcomings on duty. Then, Tang Xiaobiao ordered him to drag me to a small cage-cell while continually beating me. While dragging me down the hallway, Tang suddenly shoved me by my head and I collapsed onto the ground of bricks. Even though I immediately passed out, they did not stop beating me at the moment. Because I could not walk, they said that I was feigning the blackout. They dragged me all the way to the small cage-cell and handcuffed me inside. Initially, they wanted to handcuff me to the higher ceiling bars, but I'm shorter, so they could not make the handcuffs hook onto the high bars of the cage. Then they started using electric batons on me. After a while, Tang Xiaobiao thought that it was boring to just use electric batons on me, so he tried to remove the only shirt I was wearing. But the strange thing was that he did not continue to use the electric baton on me; he dropped the baton and left. I did not know why, and later when I got chance to see under my shirt, I found that the scars from batons were all over my body. What's more, the baton's iron tip scratched deep bloody scars on my skin because I fought to break away from their tortures. Some of the scars from being tortured with electric batons for extended periods on the same spot were still visible after 4 months, the time when I started a hunger strike. Later on, when I washed my face, I felt something wrong with the shape of my face. I asked the inmate guard to do me a favor and bring me a mirror. When I looked into the mirror, I found my forehead was seriously swollen right above the left eyebrow.
I was shut in the cell-cage again. Tang came up another tactic: he wrote words that defamed Teacher and Dafa on a piece of paper and put it up right in front of me on the door. I would tear it down when I got the chance to use the washroom. So, he would post another paper and threatened the inmate guard that if he could not guard the paper on the door, he would be punished. They were taking advantage of practitioner's kind-heartedness; they used an "implication" tactic to pressure practitioners. For example, practitioners here were forced to do hard labor if they refused to wear the jail uniform. After rounds of violence, practitioners still did not comply. They then forced a criminal inmate in the same shift to beat practitioners, but it still did not work. They then beat the criminal inmate. They were extremely vicious. They would do anything and use any means to reach their evil goals. I was also concerned with the use of "implication" tactics. Later, after I tore the paper down again, I made an agreement with Tang Xiaobiao that he would no longer write any defaming language to hang before me and I would recite their 30 rules. I had a huge swollen lump on my forehead and scars all over my body. They might have lost confidence in trying to get me to renounce my belief. The main reason was that, at the moment, the labor camp police agents had to take exams. So they only hung me during the daytime. They no longer had the energy to take "care" of me.
(To be continued)
For Part 1, see
http://www.clearwisdom.net/emh/articles/2003/1/19/31096.html