[Minghui net] I am a Falun Dafa practitioner in Hebei Province. Simply because of my appealing in Beijing on 11/02/00, I was sentenced without a proper legal procedure to three years in a labor camp. While I was at the Hebei Province No. 1 Labor Camp I was tortured mentally and physically until near death. Due to my weakened condition, camp officials released me on 01/24/01, after some 80 days in prison. The following is an eyewitness account of my own experience of China's persecution of Falun Dafa practitioners.
Upon arriving at the Labor Camp, without any reason we were strip-searched, and our personal belongings were confiscated. We then received severe beatings from the guards. They did not allow us to do the Falun Gong exercises or to talk about Falun Gong. If we did not comply, we were beaten, kicked and shocked with electric batons. Even worse, one might be sent to the Isolation Freezer for punishment, or handcuffed for hours and hours to a tree with one's body hanging from the wrists and bent over 90 degrees. Ms. Jiang Yingshun, an engineer and a Falun Gong practitioner from Qinhuangdao City Glass Research Institute, was handcuffed to a tree in such a tortured position from 10 am one day till she passed out at 6 am the next day. Another practitioner, Ms. Wang Limin of Langfang City, was left hanging so long that one of her arms is now permanently damaged.
The camp personnel set up many arbitrary regulations. There were about 400 practitioners in the camp. We were divided into groups to take turns doing the daily chores. The time allotted for eating, drinking water, and going to the restroom was so short that it was impossible. You just picked up the chopsticks and the time for the meal would be up. If you moved a little bit slowly, then the next group would not be given food. As for going to the restroom, you couldn't go at need but only when the guards let you. Even so, as soon as you closed the door to the toilet, the guard was already yelling at you to get out. Thus most of the time, we tried to hold it and were suffering from not using the restroom.
Also the camp encouraged other prisoners to beat the Falun Gong practitioners. As we were reciting Hong Yin (translator's note: Poems written by Teacher Li) during our hunger strike to protest the inhuman treatment, they found a muscular prisoner, Mr. Bao, to hit and kick us. After beating a 60-year-old lady, he came over to me and kicked my stomach so hard that I cried out loud. I was hurt so much that I could not eat or drink for days. (Bao, who beat us ladies, was later rewarded and released 9 months before the end of his sentence.)
In our cell, at the direction of Instructor Wei Qin, the lead guard Ms. Ding Xiaqing kept beating all of the practitioners from time to time. Every one of us beaten so fiercely and so often that our faces were always swollen and our bodies were covered with bruises.
One day in early December, seven or eight male guards charged into to our jail cell. They dragged Ms. Jiang Yingshun, Ms. Xu Youlan, Ms. Wang Fengzhen out to the yard and tied them to a tree leaving them there to suffer in the winter cold for 4-5 hours. Then Instructor Wei and Captain Liu pulled the almost frozen Ms. Jiang into a room for verbal and physical abuse. They kept hitting her with fists and rolled-up magazines. After hours of torture, Ms. Jiang's face was swollen and distorted. It took more than a month for her to recover.
On 12/20/00, practitioners in our cell, Cell #8, were doing group exercise and meditating on our beds. The Instructor called in Prisoner Bao and a few male guards to pull us down to the floor. They forcefully removed our coats and handcuffed us to a tree outside the building. They even rolled up our thin clothes to expose or midsections to the cold wind. After some 3 hours trembling in the cold, some practitioners passed out. Some became ill and are still bed-ridden to this day.
One particular practitioner, Ms. Liu of Langfang City, was force-fed several times with drugs that would damage her central nervous system. Then she was confined to a psychiatric hospital. We strongly protested such inhumane treatment. As an answer to our protest, the guards in the camp beat us terribly with police batons while cursing us loudly. To drown out our protesting voices, the camp turned on and turned up the high-pitched broadcast on the public address system. Reported by a Practitioner in China
