(Minghui.org) (Continued from Part 1)
Shenxin Forced Labor Camp
Ms. Zhou and eight practitioners were transferred to Shenxin Forced Labor Camp in Shenyang on May 10, 2001, and were again subjected to abuse.
The food they were given was barely edible, often muddy cabbage soup and half-cooked moldy cornmeal buns. They were forced to walk non-stop, do calisthenics, pull weeds, and take roll call. They were also forced to watch videos that slandered Falun Gong. After being subjected to brainwashing, Ms. Zhou began to protest by refusing to work or do the calisthenics.
One day, when a video defaming Falun Gong was playing, Ms. Zhou, weak and fragile after the long-term abuse, staggered to the TV and unplugged it. Guards surrounded her and beat her. Then another practitioner stood up and said, “I don’t want to watch it either.” Both women were put into solitary confinement and hung up. Captains Guo Yong and Song Xiaoshi beat them several times.
Despite her fragile condition and being hung up, Ms. Zhou said to the guards in a weak voice not to persecute good people. In return, the guards laughed at and mocked her, saying, “She looks really comfortable.” She was held in solitary for three days.
Once when her husband and son went to visit her, a guard tricked her husband into leaving 500 yuan for her to buy nutritious food since she was in such bad shape. But she was never given any of the money.
Prison Hospital
Two days after she was released from solitary confinement, Ms. Zhou was taken to Dabei Prison and detained in the underground hospital. There she saw practitioners Ms. Yin Liping and Ms. Zou Guirong.
The guards began to deny Ms. Zhou family visits because she refused to renounce Falun Gong. Her family wasn’t allowed to make cash deposits for her, either, so she couldn’t buy necessities like toilet paper and soap.
The guards tortured Ms. Zhou and other practitioners by handcuffing and shackling them and tying them to a bed in a spread-eagle position. When the women started a hunger strike to protest the torture, the guards beat them and force-fed them saline water and raw corn paste. The feeding tube damaged Ms. Zhou’s esophagus and she vomited blood. Clumps of her hair were pulled out. One nurse was heartbroken to see her being tortured. She brought milk powder from home for Ms. Zhou the next day and said that she could not sleep the night before and cried for a long time.
By the 11th day of her hunger strike, Ms. Zhou’s temperature was 104º F and her heart was beating 150-160 times per minute. Her ECG was irregular and she was unable to walk. She was diagnosed with heart and kidney failure. An inmate carried her out of the basement.
Her family was desperate to get her home alive and paid 3,000 yuan for her release. To shirk their responsibility, the prison officials released her on August 10, 2001.
Fired from Her Job
Her family, friends, and colleagues cried when they saw that she’d been reduced to skin and bone. When she was getting better, she asked the director of her hospital, Li Xuezhong, to reinstate her. But Li demanded that she first write a letter to renounce Falun Gong.
She also met Li Meng, the head of the Human Resources Department of the hospital, several times regarding returning to work. Finally they told her that she was no longer employed by the hospital. When she asked when that had happened, Li Meng said, “No formalities, it’s a verbal dismissal.” He even called the police station and told them to arrest Ms. Zhou.
Arrest and Interrogation with Torture
Ms. Zhou was reported to the authorities on October 31, 2001, when she was distributing information about Falun Gong. She was again arrested and taken to Yongzheng Police Station in Dalian City. When a young police officer asked her for her name and she didn’t answer, he beat her. She was tied to a tiger bench overnight, handcuffed.
Two plainclothes officers interrogated her again early the next morning and gave her a savage beating. She was transferred to the Jinzhou District Police Department at around 8:00 a.m. and was beaten again during their interrogation. But she refused to give her name or sign any documents.
Ms. Zhou was later taken to Jinzhou District Detention Center. When she went on a hunger strike for 11 days, she was beaten and force-fed. She was released on November 11, 2001, when she was extremely weak.
Family Torn Apart
After Ms. Zhou was released, the police constantly harassed her and her family and monitored her. Her cousin’s husband was summoned to the police station and questioned after Ms. Zhou stayed at their home for a few days. Shenxin Forced Labor Camp officials also called her from time to time to harass and check on her and ordered her to return and finish serving her term. Even her sister and brother often received harassment calls.
When guard Deng Yang from the Shenxin Forced Labor Camp called and asked for directions to her home, she left to avoid being taken back to the camp. She did not dare to call home.
Unable to find her, the police kept calling her home and went to her husband’s workplace to harass him. Her husband was pressured by the police station, the forced labor camp, and his and his wife’s employers. He lived in fear, worried that his wife would be arrested again. When Ms. Zhou sneaked back home one night, her husband told her that he could no longer live like that and wanted a divorce. Their happy family was torn apart.
With no home and no income, Ms. Zhou did odd jobs to get by. She also counted on help from friends and relatives. She had to hide from the police and had a hard time finding a steady job. Once she started to work at a clinic, but the boss had to let her go the next day after he learned about her situation.
Tieling City Detention Center
On October 8, 2002, Ms. Zhou was invited to stay for a few days at the home of one of her friends in Tieling City. Late that night, four police officers smashed open the door and broke in. They beat Ms. Zhou and arrested both her and her friend.
Ms. Zhou was taken to Tieling City Detention Center the next day. The guards shouted at her through the loudspeaker every day. They tied her to the floor in a spread-eagle position for a month and tortured her around the clock. It was -22º F outside, so the guards opened the windows. She was wearing only a single layer of thin clothes. The inmates were ordered to stomp on her.
The guards chained her feet and neck together and attached the chain to the floor. She was in excruciating pain in that position. She did not regain feeling in her right leg until six months after she was released from that position.
The detention center doctor, Qian Dapeng, brutally force-fed Ms. Zhou while she was restrained to the floor. He slapped her in the face when he had a hard time inserting the gastric tube, cursing and shouting at the same time. Her face swelled up and was covered in bruises. He force-fed her large quantities of toilet water or concentrated saline solutions in a very short period of time to make her stomach swell up and cause her to suffer. He did not pull out the gastric tube for a month until her stomach bled and the tube was covered with pus and blood.
During this period, Ms. Zhou was taken to Masanjia Forced Labor Camp three times but was never admitted because she failed the medical exam each time.
Ms. Zhou was released on December 9, 2002, only after her life was once again in danger and she had been diagnosed with heart and kidney failure. The authorities extorted 4,000 yuan from her family before releasing her.
Near Death During Fifth Detention
After Ms. Zhou stayed at her brother's home for a month, she was arrested again at a practitioner’s home on January 11, 2003, when Zhongshan District Police Department officers showed up to arrest her fellow practitioner. She was detained in the basement of the police department for two days before being taken to Dalian City Detention Center.
After she was deprived of food and water for 20 days in the detention center, her body became rigid and cold, and she could barely move her eyes. The police extorted another 1,000 yuan from her family and released her on Chinese New Year’s eve, January 30, 2003.
Family’s Suffering and Death of Her mother
Ms. Zhou’s brother-in-law picked her up at the detention center and took her to her brother’s house. Her mother, sister, brother-in-law, brother, and sister-in-law were all there, and the mood was somber.
Besides the constant mental pressure and distress from her multiple detentions, they suffered financially as well. Her sister and brother’s families were not well off, and her mother did not have a pension, so they had to find ways to come up with the money to get Ms. Zhou released each time. They’d had more than 13,000 yuan extorted from them.
After that, Ms. Zhou had lived with her mother in a rental place and did not communicate with other family members for the sake of their safety. They had to move four times over the years to avoid being monitored. The difficult circumstances and long-term mental pressure destroyed her mother’s health and aged her prematurely. She passed away in February 2006.
(The end)
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Category: Accounts of Persecution
