(Minghui.org) My name is Yang Qingfang and I am from Chengde City in Hebei Province. I was illegally arrested on September 16, 2001, because I went to Tiananmen Square to do the Falun Gong exercises. I was taken to a forced labor camp, but the labor camp authorities refused to accept me because I failed their health examination. I was then taken back to my workplace. I was told that I would be arrested again when my health improved. I left home to avoid being arrested and went to Shenzhen City.
I was arrested again in November 2003 when I was seen handing out Dafa materials. I refused to tell the police my name, so they used the name “Li Shufang” for me and sentenced me to two years of forced labor. I was taken to Guangdong Women's Forced labor Camp in Sanshui, Foshan City.
Forced to sit until at night for over 60 days
I was put in solitary confinement as soon as I arrived at the labor camp. Two guards and two criminal inmates, who were assigned to monitor me, tried to force me to renounce my belief. They did not allow me to sleep until after midnight every evening.
Two weeks later, I was transferred to the “Attack Team,” a unit created specifically to intensively brainwash and persecute practitioners. I was put in a single room and monitored by four guards and two inmates. They forced me to watch videos slandering Falun Gong every day and tried to get me to write guarantee statements to stop practicing. When I refused, they forbade me to sleep. As soon as I closed my eyes, they would bang on the table to make a loud noise to wake me up. I went on a hunger strike for five days and nights and became very weak.
We were forced to squat down on the floor and report to the guards each time we needed to use the restroom, eat or sleep, otherwise we wouldn't be allowed to do those things. I refused to squat and report to the guards, as I knew that I hadn't broken any laws. I knew that they were wrong to lock me up in the first place. As a result, I was forced to sit on the floor at night. I put a sheet of paper on the floor and a thin cotton sheet on top of it. I had to stay like this for a long time and was not allowed to sleep until after midnight.
This went on for over 60 days. I was not allowed to use a blanket, lean against something or lie down. Sometimes, the guards and inmates even took away the cotton sheet I sat on.
My hair was pulled out by the handful
I was later transferred to Division 3, a division specially set up to persecute Falun Gong practitioners. There were more than three hundred practitioners detained there, and I was locked in solitary confinement on the 4 th floor. I was moved to the 5 th floor after a few days. There were only two rooms on the 5 th floor and it was very dark there. A practitioner from Maoming was locked in one room and I was locked in the other. While she was being tortured, the guards would turn the volume of the TV set in my room to the highest level, for fear that I could hear what they were doing to her. Later, this practitioner was taken home when she was in critical condition. Her family later sent me a letter informing me that she had passed away ten days after returning home.
One day, female guard Dai Shanshan and a few others surrounded me and started to pull my hair. It was pulled out by the handful and scattered all over the room. They also swore at me and were laughing. I felt severe dizziness and my ears were ringing. In the evening, I was dragged to a neighboring building. Dai Shanshan said, “Nobody can hear you here, you can scream as loud as you like.” She then called in a few others to torture me. I was forced to sit on the floor the whole night. Dai later said to me, “I pulled your hair out. Go ahead and report me!”
A freezing night at the duty office
When I was transferred to Division 6, Zhang Xiaoying, the head of the division, ordered me to squat down as soon as she saw me. I said, “I've never squatted down since I came here.” She then ordered me to stand still. I didn't take any notice of her, so she instructed inmates to “deal with me.” I was dragged back and forth along the ground until they became very tired and had blisters on their hands.
After the guards finished work, they locked me in the duty office. I was forced to sit on the tiled floor with nothing underneath. They opened the window so that the cold northerly wind would blow straight at me. I was shivering with cold. When I tried to take off my shoes and put them underneath my bottom to use as a cushion, the guard on duty stopped me. I spent a freezing night in the duty office. I went on a hunger strike to protest this mistreatment. Guard Zhang came with four or five others and dragged me to the clinic to force-feed me. My shoes were taken off, and my feet was scratched and bleeding.
Collective punishment
I was later transferred to Division 2, where deputy division leader Si was very cruel to practitioners. She tried to incite hatred among the more than 300 people in the division against Falun Gong. At the general meeting after work, all inmates were forced to squat down to listen to her. I refused to do so. The inmates monitoring me tried to get me to squat down with them. I said: “I'm not a criminal. I haven't done anything wrong. I won't squat. I've been in a number of divisions and have never squatted down.”
At the evening roll call, I refused to take part, so the guards forbade the whole team of inmates to sleep for days and forced them to squat for long periods of time. They did this in an attempt to get the inmates to hate me for their suffering. I tried to reason with the guards in front of the whole team. I said: “This is what the Party did during the Cultural Revolution, inciting the masses to infighting. If one person is accused, then the whole family is executed. I take full responsibility for my action, and it has nothing to do with the inmates.” The guards then got the whole team to answer when my name was called at the roll call.
Force-fed for 108 days
As I often went on a hunger strike, force-feeding became a common occurrence for me. I was held down on the ground by about half a dozen people and my mouth was pried open with a metal object and kept open with a gag. They then poured rice porridge and drugs into my mouth. Initially, I held my breath and tried not to swallow. Then I took a breath and spat out what they had poured into my mouth. Porridge, drugs and milk powder spewed everywhere around my neck, on my clothes, in my hair, and it smelled awful. They force-fed me once every 15 minutes and left the gag in for the entire morning, causing me extreme pain and discomfort.
I was tied to a bed and force-fed for four or five hours every day. By the 27 th day, my heart-rate increased and I had difficulty breathing. They gave me some treatment and put me on oxygen, but nothing worked. So they took me to Sanshui Central Hospital for emergency treatment. A kindhearted doctor asked how many days I hadn't eaten. A guard replied, “27 days.” The doctor seemed very surprised and asked, “Why didn't you bring her here earlier?” No one answered.
After force-feeding and using a mouth gag on me for 27 days, they continued to do this for another 81 days through a tube inserted into my esophagus. They were very vicious. Each time I was held down by five or six people and tied to the bed. Sometimes they couldn't insert the tube properly, and the finger-thick tube was inserted and pulled out several times. Sometimes it was inserted into my windpipe and I felt like I was being suffocated. Some fellow practitioners have died as a result of the tube being inserted into their windpipe.
The tube was left in my esophagus for a whole week at times, and when they did change the tube it had already turned black. To make sure I would not pull the tube out, they tied up both my hands, and later, my feet too. At night, inmates would tie my arms and legs to the bed. As time went on, people from the clinic didn't come for days and told the inmates to force-feed me. I warned them: “You aren't trained to do this. Do you have a medical profession ID? Can you take responsibility if I die as a result of your force-feeding?”
While I was on hunger strike, the guards also forced me to watch others eating in the canteen.
Dragged to the hospital
One time, a few people carried me to an ambulance and took me to a hospital. Guards Si and Liu pulled me from the ambulance and dragged me along the ground, each holding one of the handcuffs on my wrists. The handcuffs cut into my flesh, causing me excruciating pain. They dragged me to the elevator, and when we got to the 2 nd floor, they continued to drag me to see the doctor.
A guard said to me, “You have to pay for all the medical costs, including hospital treatment and force-feeding.” I said: “I didn't want to come here. You've brought me here. I'm not ill, but you are persecuting me. I won't pay a cent. One day you will also need to compensate me for my mental and physical suffering.”
I weighed 80 kg when I was first taken to the forced labor camp, but I weighed less than 35 kg when I was released. Two of my teeth became loose and much of my hair was pulled out. I was very weak and my arms and hands were disfigured after being tied up for long periods of time. This is how I was persecuted for upholding my belief and refusing to give in to the Chinese Communist Party.
