(Minghui.org) The authorities have designated a detention center in Harbin, a northeastern city in China, as a brainwashing and “transformation” center to target Falun Dafa practitioners. Practitioners are tortured and deceived in efforts to force them to give up their belief.
Harbin Number 2 Detention Center, also called the Women's Detention Center, was renamed the “Harbin Anti-Cult Education Transformation Center” at the end of 2017. It can hold 50 female practitioners at a time. Sources say that the authorities are awarding 50,000 yuan (US $7,800) for every practitioner that is “transformed”
Falun Dafa, also known as Falun Gong, is a mind-body exercise that improves health and elevates one's spiritual and moral standards. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) banned the practice in 1999 and has arrested, imprisoned, and tortured them in its attempts to force them to give up their belief ever since.
This newly-designated “transformation” base in Harbin is similar to other brainwashing centers, where physical and psychological torture are used to try to force practitioners to write the Three Statements (Repentance Statement, Guarantee Statement, and Dissociation Statement) to denounce Dafa.
That is not the function of a detention center, however. The “transformation” practices violate several articles of the State Council's Detention Center Regulations on protecting personal freedom and personal rights.
They also violate Criminal Procedure Law Article 50 that states “[Judges, procuratorial personnel, and investigators] are strictly prohibited from extracting confessions by torture, collecting evidence through threats, enticement, deception, or other unlawful means, or forcing anyone to provide evidence proving his/her own guilt.”
These are some of the tactics used by the “transformation” base:
Wu Yanli was a policewoman. She studied psychology and has worked on brainwashing practitioners before. The center promoted her to the deputy director and established a studio under her name in February 2018. This studio focuses on “transforming” practitioners.
The center touts its “humane” management, which translates as deception, enticement, threats, pressure, and humiliation. The police brings practitioners' husbands and children to pressure practitioners to give up their belief.
The police tell imprisoned practitioners the “success” stories of “transformed” practitioners. For example, so and so was released eight months after writing the “three statements,” a practitioner who held hunger strikes for six months wrote the three statements and was sentenced to only three years, and so and so was sentenced to five years for not writing the three statements.
Guards order the practitioners to memorize the detention center regulations. If the practitioners refuse to do so, the guards say, “If you don't, everyone will think that you are creating trouble for them.” The guards also repeatedly tell practitioners how much pain their arrest has caused their family, and, that if they care for their family, they should write the three statements so that they can go home.
The police officers tell practitioners that everything will be over once they write the three statements. But if a practitioner does write the statements, the police take her to a separate location to be videotaped holding the statements and reading them, line by line, in front of a camera.
Some practitioners were injured when they were arrested. The center shows it “cares” by giving them medical treatment. Guards also bring them warm water and pills.
The center requires every inmate to practice yoga. Time is set aside to do yoga. This is to force Falun Dafa practitioners to stop practicing Dafa and switch to yoga.