Editor’s note: This report contains graphic and potentially disturbing material.
For the past 17 years, in scores of Chinese prisons and jails, unspeakable forms of torture are still rampant.
One man, Jintao Liu, described the brutal mistreatment he endured and what it was like, in a recent Australian news segment.
He was woken up as pins were pushed into his nails and was forced to stand outside in a yard for 18 hours straight, News.com.au reported, adding that if he were to move, guards and others would beat him. The punishment at the hands of Chinese Communist Party officials caused his legs to swell up. Meanwhile, they wouldn’t allow him to use the bathroom.
Liu said it was a typical day in his life between 2006 and 2009 in labor camps and detention centers around Beijing. He was also subjected to unnecessary medical tests, forced-feedings, sexual assaults, beatings, and more.
Liu said that he was imprisoned merely for practicing Falun Gong, which is a form of meditation practice. Since 1999, adherents of the practice have been subjected to persecution at the hands of Chinese Communist officials—including extortion, imprisonment, beatings, torture, and according to recent reports, organ harvesting.
According to reports published on the Minghui website, which is dedicated to detailing reports on adherents of Falun Gong, the persecution is still ongoing—with people being harassed, arrested, beaten, or even killed every day.
Day after day, the website publishes reports of persecution, including accounts of elderly women being beaten and tortured by Chinese communist officials.
Friends of Falun Gong, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization founded in 2000, notes that Chinese Communist Party’s then-leader Jiang Zemin “ordered the practice ‘eradicated’” in 1999, launching a widespread suppression of the practice. “Journalists and inside sources have described Jiang as ‘jealous’ of Falun Gong and ’obsessed' with eliminating the group,” it says, adding that the Chinese Communist Party has a long history of persecuting other groups including Christians, Tibetan Buddhists, as well as democracy and human rights activists. Other qigong groups similar to Falun Gong have also been banned.
Hongbin Lin, 43, who was a Chinese naval officer, said he was persecuted for his practice.
“After my third day in prison, because I refused to admit that I’ve committed a crime, the prison guards started to torture me through various methods, such as shocking me with their electric batons,” he said.
“There would be two electric batons, two policemen, with criminals surrounding me. They pressed me down, stepped on my legs, some grabbed my arms, twisting them behind my back,” he said. “(One of them) pressed me on the floor, with both of my legs stepped on by 10 plus people.”
He added: “Then they shocked me on my head, face, and lower body. They shocked me until their batons ran out of power.”
“After shocking me, shackling me to the iron bed frame and depriving me of sleep which lasted up to 15 days at one stretch.”
Fengying Zhang, 66, said she was abducted from her home for practicing Falun Gong in 2013. Zhange said she was never charged with a crime and was just sent to a detention center and later, a labor camp.
She described going on a hunger strike before police tried to force-feed her. “I was force-fed twice in the year 2000 when I went on hunger strike,” she said.
“That time when they force-fed me, there were four people, two of them held my head, while two of them stepped on my legs. They had me face the sky, and started force-feeding me, and I started choking.”
“They were especially brutal, when he inserted the tube, he did not do it slowly. He forced it in through the nose, down to my stomach. If the tube went the wrong way, it could pierce the lung.”
“I choked and coughed out yellow liquid, until my neck was covered with it After they were finished, I felt like I was suffocated and on the verge of death.”
But it gets worse.
On Tuesday, a group of MPs in the U.K. Parliament heard a report on the removal of organs from prisoners of conscience, including Falun Gong practitioners, on an “industrial scale.”
During the Westminster Hall debate, MP Fiona Bruce said, “Despite the fact that the authors of the report have challenged—indeed asked—the Chinese government to reject their assertions, to come out and say that they are incorrect, there has been complete silence. There has been no rejection of the research or the information, or indeed of the authors’ conclusions.”
Researchers estimate that between 60,000 to 100,000 transplants have taken place in China each year since the year 2000, as compared to the official statistics from China of 10,000 to 20,000 per year.
