A man said the Chinese authorities tortured him for publicly criticizing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and claimed that authorities prevent him from receiving medical treatment even though his health has continued deteriorating since he was released from prison.
In an interview with the Chinese language edition of The Epoch Times on April 13, Shao Mingliang recounted the torture he endured while imprisoned for four years.
“I didn’t expect that I could have survived all the torture,” he said.
Shao, a native of Jiangsu Province, is a pro-democracy activist and an anti-CCP critic.
He said he almost died from torture several times while being kept in a detention center in Nanjing and a prison in Changzhou, both in Jiangsu Province, from 2019 to 2023.
“I could smell a bad odor from my body as if it were a corpse, but I was so weak that I didn’t even have the energy to think of committing suicide,” Shao said.
When he was released on March 15, Shao was in poor health. The authorities didn’t allow his family to pick him up from prison and sent him home on a stretcher. He has since been placed under house arrest.
With the help of his family and friends, Shao managed to get to a hospital in Nanjing for medical treatment. But he said a group of local police in plainclothes followed him and prevented the medical staff from administering treatment.
“I suffered brutal torture in prison during the four years of imprisonment. Are there any human rights or rules of law at all in China? I am the best case, and I am the best witness of the red horror and the dark history [of the CCP]!” Shao said in a video on Chinese social media.
Shao said the authorities wanted him dead.
He now weighs less than 88 pounds and desperately needs medical care. Shao said years of torture affected his joints, heart, kidneys, esophagus, stomach, and other organs.
The CCP limits the freedom of dissidents and minority groups deemed a threat to its authority. For example, dissidents and rights activists are kept under house arrest, and plainclothes police closely monitor their movements.
The CCP Is a ‘Terrorist Organziation’
Shao is a resident of Xiangtang village in Nanjing’s Pukou district. He is the founder of the Minfu Party (or “Democracy Revival Party”). He called for removing the CCP from power.His political views were written on the front wall of his house: “In the future, after overthrowing the Russian-Maoist Communist Party [CCP] that has occupied our country, [we should] immediately declare it as an anti-human terrorist organization and a Nazi criminal organization.”
He also protested outside the office complexes of the local governments, denouncing the CCP.
On Jan. 25, 2014, right outside the Pukou District government complex, Shao was hit by a vehicle, and the driver fled the scene. He was hospitalized and suffered from injuries for two years—the accident left him disabled, and he had to use a wheelchair.
Shao suspected the local authorities were behind the car accident, according to Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch, a Chinese language human rights information website.
Torture in Prison
Shao was sentenced to four years of imprisonment for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a common charge under article 293 of China’s Criminal Law that Beijing uses to target critics and dissidents.“The suffering made me feel like I’d rather die than live,” Shao said, as he began to cry during the interview.
Shao said he was subjected to various torture methods, including the “airplane” torture, in which the victim’s hands are tied behind the back and hung up on the wall while the head is pulled down toward the ground, and this position is held for an extended period. He recalled eating food mixed with drugs.
Shao was locked up for 17 months in the Pukou Detention Center. He said he was tied down to a bed for a long time without food. The police once incited inmates to punch his left ear so that his eardrum was perforated. The police also starved him and inserted a feeding tube up his nose to torture him.
He was later transferred to Changzhou Prison, where he was tortured even worse.
“The torments I suffered in prison are too numerous to count,” Shao told The Epoch Times.
One time Shao was struck hard that his face and head became swollen.
The prison police tried various torture methods to force Shao to give up his political beliefs.
“They hit my genitals with sticks, pulled out my pubic hair, even put insects in my underwear, and poured urine over my head,” Shao recalled.
One day, several prison police stuffed Shao in a tiny storage box and didn’t allow him to sleep. They also forced him to read aloud: “Love the Chinese Communist Party.” But Shao refused to do so. The police then tied Shao to a bed frame and stretched his limbs to the extreme while inmates forcibly opened his eyes and forced him to look at the sentence.
“But I didn’t say that sentence, not even once,” he said.
Shao was tormented severely that, for over a year, he could not sit up straight and had to urinate and defecate in bed. On the eve of Nov. 27, 2020, the police thought that Shao was going to die.
Although Shao suffered so much, he said he would never cave in and believes the CCP would soon collapse.
The Epoch Times contacted the Pukou District Detention Center and Changzhou Prison for comment.
Hong Ning contributed to this report.
