Ma Chunmei, a resident of the Washington metro area, is trying by every means to rescue from the Masanjia labor camp her sister, Ma Chunling, who has been there since August 2012. She fears the worst.
Chunmei herself was tortured horribly in a labor camp in the northeast when she was in China. During a press conference last year, she wept as she recalled the tortures she suffered in detention, which included electric shocks and burnings with an electric baton, sleep deprivation, forced feeding, injections with unknown substances, being tied to the “death bed” for three days and nights, and savage beatings.
“I’m worried sick. We don’t know what is happening to her. Many practitioners have died in that place,” Ma Chunmei said in a previous interview. The last time her parents saw the sister, “she was much thinner.” Given what is known about Masanjia, the possibility that Ma Chunling has been severely tortured is high.
The Chinese Communist Party says that it gets offended when other nations bring up the human rights abuses it perpetrates—yet a number of instances have shown that representations by U.S. officials do have an effect, and that prisoners get released. Ma Chunmei hopes to deliver that message to congressional representatives and administration officials. She wishes they would write letters to the Chinese authorities, to help free her sister from Masanjia.
