Guards in Wangcun Forced Labour Camp Cruelly Tortured Me

I was lucky to learn Falun Gong in August 1997. The principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance rectified my deviant path of life. I have come to know many Falun Gong practitioners ever since, and I can see the wonderfulness of Falun Gong through them.

On July 20th, 1999, Jiang Zemin's, [former leader of China and instigator of the persecution] regime initiated a persecution of Falun Gong practitioners. Facing unreasonable suppression, I went to appeal many times, but I was beaten, arrested, detained, placed under house arrest, and finally, sentenced to forced labour in July 2000. Later, I was transferred from the Weifang City Labour Camp to the Wangcun (Shandong Province) Labour Camp.

In order to try to force me to give up cultivating Falun Gong, the guards used all sorts of torture means. They handcuffed me as soon as I entered the camp, and I remained cuffed 24 hours per day for 141 days, until December 2000. I was detained in a 40-square-foot cell with a coffin-shaped bed. I was cuffed onto the metal gate and forced to stand holding the gate for 79 days. They did not allow me to sleep for the first ten days. If I closed my eyes, the guards would punch me, beat me, or curse me. By the tenth day, I could not bear such inhuman torture and protested. I requested that they let me sleep during the night. Just because I dared to raise such a basic request, the guards in the tenth ward took me to a room where more than a dozen guards surrounded me, each holding an electric baton, and shocked me for the whole morning. That was the darkest morning of my life. The scars resulting from the shocks took two years to fade. I was tortured to the degree of unconsciousness. Then they let me sleep for several hours per night, but they still handcuffed me to the bed.

The room in which the guards shocked me is one floor directly below my cell. I could almost hear the noise of the electric baton shocks every day, practitioners' screaming, and guards cursing. The air was filled with the smell of burnt flesh. Guards constantly maliciously laughed. They were devoid of kindness, and they had forgotten that the people paid them, they are among the people, and they should serve the people, and therefore they should not torture kind Falun Gong practitioners who follow Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance.

Mr. Hua Yuliang (an employee of the Weifang City Construction Bank), Mr. Zhang Zhao (an employee of the Weifang Diesel Engine Factory), Mr. Li Xinjian (an employee of the Weifang City Senior Citizen Centre), and many other practitioners have also endured the same cruel torture that I did. Twenty-eight-year-old Mr. Zou Sontao, an educated man with a Master's degree from the Qingdao City Oceanography University, was tortured to death there on November 3rd, 2000.

The torture I went through in the forced labour camp is almost too painful to think about. I did not expect to walk out of there alive. My parents cried every day. My family was not allowed to visit me because I refused to accept the brainwashing. They tried with all their might to find out if I was still alive in the camp, and they were severely mentally traumatized. Upon being released from the forced labour camp, my wife cried and told me, "While you were serving in the camp, we were under the same pressure outside the camp. Do you know how hard it was for us to survive these miserable years? It was too much suffering!"

Chinese version available at http://minghui.ca/mh/articles/2004/12/6/90813.html