Under a miscarriage of justice, a Falun Gong adherent was sent to the Heilongjiang Women’s Prison in China’s northernmost province for five years—1,828 days—where she experienced abhorrent torture.
“[Those] 1,828 days and nights, every minute, every second, every scene is deeply etched in my mind and will never be erased,” Chen Jing said after she was released from prison in the winter of 2021.
“As a survivor of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) persecution, I must record the persecution of Falun Gong and expose it to the world, ” Chen told the Chinese edition of The Epoch Times.
However, Chen was targeted by the CCP while in university because she practiced Falun Gong. The local police put her under house arrest, forcibly suspended her from classes, and threatened to expel her from school and send her to prison.
After graduating from university, she worked as a doctor at Jiamusi Central Hospital in Heilongjiang Province for a year until one day, her job was taken away and she was expelled from the hospital because of her beliefs.
On the afternoon of Jan. 21, 2016, a dozen police officers from Heilongjiang Provincial Police Department and Jiamusi Public Security Bureau arrested Chen at her residence and sent her to the Jiamusi City Detention Center the next day.
Tortured in Detention Center and Prison
While incarcerated, Chen was hung up in the air with both hands tied behind her back and her body was repeatedly slammed against a wall. Prison guards pulled out all of her fingernails, stripped off her clothes and pinched her nipples, used toothpicks to hold her eyelids open at midnight to deprive her of sleep, poured cold water on her, and forced her to sit on a small stool wrapped in tape from head to toe.She was tortured so severely she became paralyzed and lay in a bed for three months, unable to take care of herself.
On January 23, 2016, Chen was taken from the detention center to the Jiamusi Public Security Bureau Suburb Branch for interrogation.
An officer told the officers who would beat her: “It doesn’t matter if you beat her to death. The order is from the upper level.”
They tied her hands with a bedsheet and threw the other end over a heating pipe that was 9.8 feet off the floor, suspending her in the air. Her arms soon went numb and her head and chest felt unbearably heavy. She was soaked in sweat from the excruciating pain.
Her body was covered in bruises from multiple impacts to the wall, and her spine was severely injured. One officer broke all her fingers. She was tortured for several days in a row and couldn’t sleep at night because of the pain racking her body. She is 5 feet 4 inches tall but her weight dropped to less than 99 pounds.
The above is a fragment of the torture Chen was subjected to when she was interrogated.
She suffered more horrendous torture in the Heilongjiang Women’s Prison, including being constantly pinched, pushed, kicked, and slapped in the face, eyes poked and eyelids held open with toothpicks, being doused with water, pinched nipples, and deprived of sleep.
The CCP tortured Chen for the sole purpose of forcing her to renounce her beliefs.
“Once I renounce my belief, I will be released. If I don’t, I will be sentenced. Doesn’t this mean that I am innocent?” Chen asked the police at the detention center.
“Making a verdict that violates the facts and the law without any legal basis is a crime,” she told them.
Chen was imprisoned for five years because she refused to give up her beliefs.
“In China, judicial independence is basically non-existent,” a Chinese human rights lawyer, who chose to be anonymous for safety, told the Chinese edition of The Epoch Times.
“The CCP’s [method of] ’transformation' is forcibly controlling a human’s brain and changing thoughts and beliefs. It goes far beyond what the law allows, and is an illegal and criminal act, political persecution, and anti-humanity,” said the lawyer.
