| Published: Saturday 3rd May 2008 |
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Tianjin Women's Prison authorities have been closely following Chinese Communist Party directives the past eight years and have brutally persecuted Falun Gong practitioners. For those practitioners who refuse to give up their belief in Falun Gong, the persecution is even more severe. I got to know the most common methods of torture they use on Falun Gong practitioners while I was detained there. They are listed below:
Mental Torture
1. Use of threatening conversations to force practitioners to give up their beliefs, bringing pressure and fear to bear on practitioners.
2. Forced brainwashing. Practitioners are forced to watch TV programmes that defame Falun Gong every day at a certain time in order to confuse and "transform1" them.
3. Forcing practitioners to write the Three Statements2 (The so-called Repentance Statement, "Guarantee Statement" and "Thought Report Statement"). If the statements do not meet the requirements, the practitioner must write them again.
4. Use of strict monitoring and control. They use monitoring equipment and "personal monitors" to supervise the behaviour of practitioners. That means that apart from keeping watch on the movements of Falun Gong practitioners with monitoring equipment, they also arrange for two or more criminal inmates to constantly supervise the behaviour of practitioners. They follow them wherever they go, even when they eat, sleep or go to the toilet. Practitioners are not allowed to talk to anyone. They are not allowed to do the exercises or to read Falun Gong books. If they still refuse to give up their belief after a certain amount of mental torture for some time, they will then begin physical torture on the practitioners.
5. Extend prison term at will. When the prison term is up, if they think the practitioner doesn't have a proper attitude, is not transformed completely, or is too stubborn, then they will not release the practitioner and will extend her prison term. By doing that, they want practitioners to know that without giving up their belief, they will not be able to walk out of the prison or may even die there. The purpose is to force practitioners to give up their belief in Falun Gong.
Torture by Starvation
They don't give enough food to practitioners, so practitioners are often hungry every day. They only give two minutes for practitioners to finish their meal. If you haven't finished in two minutes, you must stop eating. Thus, Falun Gong practitioners are starving every day and living in tension. They use this method to weaken a practitioner's willpower. At the same time, they force starving practitioners to do hard slave labour to further weaken their bodies, hoping practitioners will give up their belief under this long-term severe torture.
Physical Torture
1. "Three Straight One Stare" method. The so-called "three straight" means the practitioner's head, chest and lower leg must be dead straight while sitting on a small plastic bench with holes. "One stare" means both of the practitioner's eyes must stare in front of them (or watch a propaganda programme on TV that defames Falun Gong or listen to a prison guard teaching a lesson). At the same time, both of the practitioner's hands must be placed on her knees. They would also place an object between her legs. If she dropped that object, she would be beaten. They have to sit like that from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., not being allowed to move for 15 hours. Especially in summer, one would suffer more by sitting on the small plastic bench with holes for a long time. One would sit there until one's bottom was sore and the skin was broken, and that kind of suffering is unbearable. This is a torture method that does not require the person who does the torturing to even move his hand. The prison guards used that method on me for over forty days.
2. Being forced to stay up all night. They would question a practitioner and torture her for the whole night until she could not stand any more and was forced to give up her belief.
3. Brutal beatings. They usually lock up practitioners alone in a small cell and then beat them until they are covered with cuts and bruises all over to try to force the them to give up Falun Gong.
4. Damage from force-feeding. They use injurious force-feeding methods on those practitioners who resist the persecution with a hunger strike. They can force-feed a practitioner any way they like and any time they like. Some practitioners on hunger strikes were hovering between life and death.
5. Being tied on a "dead person's bed". The four limbs of the practitioner are stretched out and tied to the bed. The practitioner cannot move at all. Neither is he or she allowed to get up to eat or drink. Sometimes they are not even allowed to go to the toilet, and they have to have a bowel movement in their trousers.
6. Torture from coldness. They don't allow practitioners to wear coats or to cover up with quilts on cold days. They cuff the practitioners and let them deliberately suffer from the cold.
For instance, Falun Gong practitioner Xie Guiqing was detained at Tianjin Women's Prison. Because she refused to give up her belief, she was brutally tortured by the prison guards. The prison guards ordered prison inmates and "personal monitors" to lock Xie Guiqing up in a cold, small cell at the service team. They tortured her with brutal beatings, making her suffer from coldness, starvation, cuffing, not being given water, not being allowed to go to the toilet and being tied up on the dead person's bed, etc. When Xie Guiqing was trying to resist the persecution with a hunger strike, they injured her by force-feeding and left the tube used for force-feeding in her stomach for a long time. Thus, a healthy person was tortured into a critical condition and was sent to the hospital for treatment. But as soon as she came back to the prison, the prison guards continued persecuting her until she was near death. To avoid taking responsibility, they finally let her family members take her home, but Xie Guiqing died two days after she was released.
This is what the Chinese Communist Party claims to be the "patient, careful and spring breeze" kind of education methods used on Falun Gong practitioners. This is what they claim as the "best human rights period" in history.
Because the persecution of steadfast practitioners is often concealed and hidden from the general public, there are many more physical torture methods that still have not been exposed.
Note
1. "Reform or Transform" Implementation of brainwashing and torture in order to force a practitioner to renounce Falun Gong. (Variations: "reform", "transform", "reformed", "reforming", "transformed", "transforming", and "transformation")
2. "Three Statements": Practitioners are coerced under brainwashing and torture to write "Repentance Statement," "Guarantee Statement" or 'Dissociation Statement" as proof that they have given up their belief. In the statement, the practitioner is forced to admit remorse for practising Falun Gong, promise to give up Falun Gong, and never again associate with other practitioners or go to Beijing to appeal for Falun Gong.
Chinese version available at http://minghui.org/mh/articles/2008/4/17/176656.html
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