Woman recounts horrors of jail torture

June 27, 2001 Section: METRO Page: B3

By RICHARD ESPINOZA The Kansas City Star: Nineteen months ago, Jian Tang left her home near St. Louis for a two-week vacation in southern China that led to a meeting with followers of the banned [group] Falun Gong. Police raided the apartment where the Falun Gong practitioners were meeting and then beat and arrested Tang and her friends, Tang said Tuesday at an area observance of the United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture. She spoke at a news conference at the Johnson County Central Resource Library in Overland Park. When Tang went on a hunger strike in jail, an official there ordered other prisoners to hold her down and force salt water into her stomach through a tube in her mouth, she said.

"My stomach hurt so much that I vomited constantly for a few hours. My throat hurt so much that I lost my voice for a few days," Tang said. "The next day, I was forced to work in a cell, making plastic flowers with shackles on my feet from morning until evening without resting."

Tang said she was released after 15 days, about four months into China's crackdown on Falun Gong. Its practitioners believe a series of exercises similar to yoga improves their health and lifts their spirits.

Gaixin (Sue) Jiang of Columbia told the audience of 25 at the library that Chinese police arrested her last year for unfurling a Falun Gong banner in Tiananmen Square and jailed her for 24 days. She thinks payment from her family saved her from physical torture.

Tang and Jiang continue to speak against the Chinese government's crackdown on Falun Gong. Later Tuesday, several people held a candlelight vigil against torture.

Kansas state Rep. Karen DiVita of Overland Park told the audience in the library that it was important to protest torture.

"We have an obligation to speak out, to put actions behind our words," DiVita said. "Words without action are like rain falling on a rock."

But action, she said, can bring change, like rainfall on fertile ground.

DiVita compared Falun Gong's call for followers to advocate truth, compassion and tolerance to Mahatma Gandhi's work in India.

"As resources become more scarce worldwide, the need for tolerance, the need for peace, the need for justice become more and more important," DiVita said. "Why should any government fear those who seek that kind of peace?"

An assistant to U.S. Rep. Dennis Moore of Kansas read the group a letter in which Moore said 245 Falun Gong practitioners had been killed in China and more than 1,000 had been sent to labor camps.

Although Moore voted for permanent normal trade relations with China, he joined other congressmen in expressing concern about human rights problems with China's president, the letter said. He also supported the nomination of Falun Gong founder Li Hongzhi for the Nobel Peace Prize.