My Personal Testimony to the Brutality at Forced Labor Camps in Liaoning Province

(Clearwisdom.net)

I am a twenty-five year old Falun Dafa practitioner from Liaoning Province. I started to practice Falun Gong in 1997. When the persecution of Falun Dafa started on July 20, 1999, I went to the Liaoning Provincial Office to appeal, but the police forcibly turned away the practitioners. An officer grabbed my hair, punched me and pushed me into a police van.

In January 2001, I went to Beijing to appeal against the injustices being done, but I was arrested and later sent to Shenxin Forced Labor Camp in Shenyang City, Liaoning Province. As we refused to give up practicing Falun Dafa, a team leader slapped Wang, one of our fellow practitioners, hard on the face, and picking up an electric baton, he shocked Jia Xitai, Miao Chunyu, and Liu Hailin with it. They were confined to the "small cell", a tiny solitary confinement chamber, for three days afterwards. Jia Xitai was severely burned on the mouth, face and the neck, but the officers denied torturing her. Following our group hunger strike, another team leader named Fan applied the electric baton on Wu Yuge and Liu Jinglin, and forced fed them as well.

In March, they illegally sentenced me to two years of hard labor. During that period, my family was constantly being harassed. They even extorted ten thousand Yuan from them. (The average monthly salary of an urban worker in China is 500 Yuan.)

In early March, I was sent to the Zhangshi Forced Labor Camp in Shenyang City, and I was assigned to live with over a hundred people in three very small huts. Everyone toiled during the day and slept in the hut during the night. We started working at 5 a.m. and did not finish until midnight, with only a few hours of sleep. Our hands were covered with blisters and torn skin. More than a dozen people shared a common bed. Everybody had to lie on their sides. We had no room to turn and could hardly breathe. There was no pillow, no blanket, but only a sheet of canvas big enough to cover half the body. The fan was turned on high, and we often woke up because of the chilling wind. The sanitary conditions were extremely poor. More than ten people shared one toilet. We could not wash our faces or clean our teeth, not to mention a proper shower. As a result, many of us developed skin abscess. Almost everyone had lice on their body. Food was scarce, and we were timed when taking our meals. Soon I was just skin and bones.

Later, I was transferred to group No.5, where all Dafa practitioners were placed together. Here, the officers made use of the collaborators (people who had turned away from Dafa under pressure) to brainwash the practitioners. No one was allowed to sleep until 3 a.m. in the morning and by 5 a.m. everyone had to get up. Sometimes we were not allowed to sleep for twenty-four hours, and some were even prevented from sleeping for one whole week. Under the command of the team leader, the collaborators applied all sorts of techniques to try and break down the Dafa practitioners. The common techniques were to keep them awake for twenty-four hours, force them to squat down or stand up in some painful awkward posture, or listen to propaganda, lies, threats, etc. In addition, the practitioners were constantly beaten and abused, and very often shocked with electric batons.

In early 2002, when a few Dafa practitioners and I withdrew our previously signed document that denounced Dafa, the officers immediately assigned someone to watch us. We were forced to squat down in a painful posture as a punishment. Any small movement would result in punches and kicks.

Another practitioner named Zhang was locked up in the same room as me, and we were both forced to squat down as a punishment. Under a shower of kicks and punches, Zhang was forced underneath a table and left there in a painful squatting posture for five days. At the end of five days, they forced him into another painful position. These are just some of the ruthless treatment that we receive in the forced labor camp.