Personal Account of Two Terms in Beijing Women’s Labor Camp

(Minghui.org) Below is a personal account of a Falun Gong practitioner who was held in the Beijing Women's Labor Camp on two occasions ten years apart, for refusing to renounce her faith. Both recollections reveal the widespread torture and brainwashing carried out under the communist regime.

Despite the abolition of the labor camp system in 2013, the persecution of Falun Gong continues to the present day.

The Beginning

I read an article about Falun Gong in April 1996, and bought the book Zhuan Falun. I read that book and found it great. Whenever I encountered problems, I always thought of the principles of Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance as espoused in Zhuan Falun. It helped me understand the cause and effect of things, and how to treat losses and gains in life.

I began practicing the Falun Gong exercises in 1998 after I became pregnant. At that time, I was resting at home because I had abdominal pain and some bleeding. Every morning I got up early to practice Falun Gong with other practitioners in a small community center garden. I felt relaxed, and my health improved greatly. On the last day of my pregnancy, I still did all five sets of exercises there in the morning. I then went to the hospital to give birth to my healthy daughter in the afternoon. I believed that practicing Falun Gong was helpful to one’s physical and mental health.

After the April 25 peaceful protest in 1999, the situation became tense. When we went to practice Falun Gong from 5:00 to 7:00 a.m. in an open space in Beijing, police officers stood there and watched us. They also monitored the house where we read Falun Gong books in the evening. On July 19 and 20, 1999, we went to Fuyou Street, where the National Petition Office was, to petition the government to allow us to practice Falun Gong freely. We were stopped and bused to remote areas of Beijing. Officers registered our names, ages, occupations, addresses, phone numbers, and so on. Falun Gong was banned officially in China beginning on July 20, 1999.

In my company, the managers of the Editorial Department and Human Resources put pressure on me to stop practicing Falun Gong. They ordered us to write guarantee letters to renounce our practice. My daughter was only 7 months old, so I applied for more maternal leave without pay to avoid the mental stress. I did the Falun Gong exercises at home while looking after my daughter.

First Labor Camp Detention

I was sent to the Beijing Women's Labor Camp for a year and a half in 2001 because I held a banner saying “Truthfulness, Compassion, Forbearance” on Tiananmen Square. At the beginning of my detention I was in the Xuanwu District Detention Center for almost two months, then sent to the Dispatch Department before labor camp. Three months later, I was sent to the Beijing Women's Labor Camp.

In the Xuanwu District Detention Center I was force-fed with nasal tubes many times in a month. The person in charge of force-feeding purposefully used salted oil soup, soy flour with cold or hot water, and some liquid. They handcuffed me to keep me from struggling, and several people helped the man in a white lab coat who looked like an amateur doctor. They tormented me for information, and because I didn’t say anything (including my name), the police could not send me to labor camp. My code name there was B5. In the end, the amateur doctor got my information through deception. If people declared that they would no longer practice Falun Gong, they were released.

I was later transferred to the dispatch department, where people were sent to different labor camps all over the country. It was like a hell, and was used to intimidate people. After we entered a huge black door, the police officers holding electric batons forced everyone to squat in the yard with their hands on their heads. In an open yard, a policewoman ordered me to write a guarantee statement promising not to practice Falun Gong and not to teach others there. I refused.

We waited in the yard for checking in, and everyone’s hair was cut before they were assigned a room. We had to strip for the check-in, after which they took away our clothes. I was nude and had to squat, facing a wall, for the whole afternoon. I felt cold and ashamed. Every morning we had only two minutes to wash our faces, brush our teeth, and use the toilets. No exceptions. Everyone had to bow, hold out our bowls, and say, “Hello Captain” and “Thank you Captain” if we wanted to get food.

After getting up in the morning, we were forced to package chopsticks with paper, or put chopsticks into a slender plastic bag in a dark, dirty room. We had to keep our heads down all the time, and we saw only the shoes of the guards. I thought they were afraid that we might remember their faces.

We were subsequently taken to the Beijing Women's Labor Camp. There, the guards' main task was to “convert” Falun Gong practitioners out of their belief using a variety of means. I was made to sit on a plastic stool and was surrounded from morning to night by several people who pressured me to give up my faith. After sleeping for only three hours each day, I was tired and sleepy. I could nap when I stood or as they were speaking. An elderly female practitioner said she felt “like a lamb in a wolf pack.” One female practitioner was deprived of sleep for nine days, and she was “transformed” while in a delirious state. Another practitioner was forced to write words insulting Falun Gong and its founder on her clothes and underwear.

Each of us had to wrap five thousand pairs of chopsticks or make five kilograms of fishing bait per day. It was difficult for a woman to carry a heavy sack of chopsticks on her shoulder across the yard or up to the fourth floor. The woman would be berated if she dropped the sack or stopped to rest. The whole brigade had almost one hundred people; all but two or three were Falun Gong practitioners.

Towards the end of 2001, I heard that I had lost my job, where I had worked for more than fifteen years. The first time I was allowed to write a letter home, I wrote about our forced labor situation. The letter was returned to me, as the real situation couldn't be written.

My daughter was miserable after I left home. I never thought I would be taken away from my daughter just because I practiced Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance. We just wanted to have good health and be good people. The government and the police didn’t go after criminals, but had instead chosen to suppress good people.

I was luckier than others, who suffered even more. I saw the back of a young woman’s legs beaten purple after she did the Falun Gong exercises at Tiananmen Square. I saw a young man with his hands and feet cuffed to a bed; he had a catheter inserted. He had protested against the brutality by going on a hunger strike for more than 100 days. An armed soldier stood guard outside his room around the clock.

After I left the labor camp, I was visited by a staff member from the neighborhood committee. He told me to make an appointment to go to the police station with him, where they again tried to make me renounce Falun Gong. I left Beijing three weeks later.

Second Labor Camp Detention

I moved back to a different district in Beijing after six years. On June 1, 2011, two officers from the Dongcheng District Law Enforcement Office, along with officers from the Longtanhu Police Station and the director of the Zuoanmen Neighborhood Committee, searched my home. They found several Falun Gong books that I had bought ten years before, and several Falun Gong song sheets, bookmarks, and DVDs. They confiscated all four of our computers, even though two of them were not used by me, and took me away.

That was Children's Day. My daughter and I were planning to go to the park. We were going to have lunch and pick up her medical record, with which she would apply to middle school that month. I truly regretted not having left home earlier. Five years later, my daughter told me that she was so sad that she cried for an hour. She was twelve that year.

I was sent to Dongcheng District Detention Center in the evening, and at the end of that month, I was sent to the Chongwen District Detention Center. In the middle of September, I was sent to Beijing Women's Labor Camp.

It was somehow different than ten years prior. Instead of plastic buckets being used as toilets, the detention cells now had their own restrooms. The detention centers were bigger, and there were more people than there were ten years earlier.

I met many foreigners in the Chongwen District Detention Center. They were from the Philippines, Vietnam, Mongolia, and Uzbekistan. Most were Filipinos who weren’t allowed to call their family or friends. Their food was better than that for the Chinese inmates, as each lunch and dinner included stewed potatoes. One young girl, who was eighteen years old, was constipated. I learned a little English from them and could help translate between them and the guards. When they were brought there, most of them didn’t have cash, enough clothing, towels, toothbrushes, toilet paper, sanitary supplies, and so on. When we sang the song Sailing, “to be near you, to be free,” they cried.

I received my first Reeducation-Through-Labor Decision Paper. I decided to apply for administrative review, because the decision lied about the number of items confiscated from my home – the guards had increased the number to give me a harsher sentence. However, I didn’t know how to apply. I asked if I could contact my husband to find a lawyer. I then received the second Labor Camp Decision Paper affirming the prior sentence, and I was sent to the Beijing Women's Labor Camp. The number of confiscated items on the list was even higher than on the first decision.

The Beijing Women's Labor Camp building was light pink and beautiful outside, but inside it was dark. When the guards shouted, we had to answer “Dao!” (“Here!”) when our name or our cell’s name was called. We were not allowed to use the toilet, and several times, a practitioner who refused to say her name wasn’t allowed to use the toilet for the entire day.

I was forced to sit on a small plastic stool with other inmates watching over me, from morning to night, for almost three months. I had only three or four hours of sleep each day, and was exhausted. There was no clock in the cell, so no one knew the time. Later, my lower legs and feet became swollen to twice their normal size and hurt terribly. The skin in those areas was thin and transparent, like a balloon. I knew that an older woman was having difficulty standing and walking after sitting on a small stool without moving for a long time. I also knew a young woman who had to have pus drained from her swollen legs.

Other means were also used to destroy people’s will. I heard that a woman was put under a strong light and surrounded by three or four women making noises all night, to deprive her of sleep.

Inmate watchers were assigned to help the guards to “convert” me. One of them watched every move I made. Each day, she handed in a paper to the guards with a recording of everything she had observed of me (eating, drinking water, toilet use, my thoughts and feelings, etc.). She also bullied me. She kept the window open during cold days to make me suffer.

I had three female guards on my case for some time. They had different personalities and expertise. I remember that one had studied psychology, one penology, and one philosophy. They were tasked with finding people’s weaknesses and taking advantage of that to “convert” them. Most young, educated female guards came after 2002. These jobs allowed them to be civil servants and to register their permanent residence in Beijing. A small portion of them had worked for many years and had more experience. Each of these guards was like a cog in the huge machine that wouldn’t stop unless they left that machine.

After we were forced to give up our belief, we were forced to memorize and repeat the official lines. We also had to work in the vegetable fields through all four seasons. We were tested from time to time to make sure we were indeed brainwashed. The questions were very tricky and contained pitfalls, as the guards had changed since ten years prior. The guards arranged many activities to fill our minds and time. They didn’t allow practitioners to talk to one another or make eye contact. Each small room had two surveillance cameras, so the guards could watch and hear everything. The guards assigned two or three non-practitioners to each room to monitor and report on us. Every month we were searched, including inside our blankets and under the bed. We had to be undressed, and they searched each piece of paper carefully.

Working in the vegetable fields was much better than other tasks. We used spades to plow the ground and mix in cow dung and chicken manure. For a month’s work, we earned six yuan (less than one US dollar). We had a great harvest of tomatoes, cucumbers, green peppers, eggplants, cabbages, carrots, peanuts, sweet potatoes, etc. Most of the crops were supplied to the guards, and whatever was left was for our camp and the men’s camp.

We could be punished for anything as the guards wished. Once, we didn’t say “hello” to a guard from another battalion and were punished by being forced to shout “Hello, Captain!” more than a thousand times, and write the prison rules three times. At night, people had to recite the prison rules one by one before they were allowed to sleep.

We were once all told to stand, and weren’t allowed to have lunch after working in the morning because we didn’t sing a song loudly enough. The guards forced people to obey them by inflicting these small things and many specified rules. They forced people to change ideas by restricting whatever bits of freedom we had and worsening our conditions. Keeping one’s integrity in the labor camp required a lot of courage and wisdom.

I was released early, in June 2013, because the labor camp system was abolished that year. Most of us went home, but I heard that some practitioners were transferred to brainwashing facilities.

After returning home, I received a phone call from the Longtanhu Police Station. The officer said he was the one responsible for my case. He told me to go to the station to have a talk. I said I wouldn’t go. He said, “Can you tell me what time you'll be at home? I'll come to your home.”

The persecution of Falun Gong practitioners, their family members, and supporters continues, despite the abolition of forced labor camps. People should continue to do more to stop the persecution.