GOSHEN, N.Y.—Under the blazing, late-morning sun, a petite woman walked onto a small stage. She picked up the microphone and started to talk. Her voice was clear, sometimes agitated and almost reaching a cry, then calm again. The images evoked by her words were so ghastly that they jerked the listener out of the bright, small-town park and into a dark world some 6,000 miles away.
“My name is Yuhua Zhang,” she began. “I used to be a professor and chair of the Russian Languages Department at Nanjing Normal University in China. Because of my faith in Falun Gong, I was fired by my university.
“From October 2000 to November 2012, I was incarcerated in several locations, including [the] Women’s Labor Camp of Jiangsu Province, Nanjing Detention Center, and Nanjing Women’s Prison. I suffered many kinds of torture for several years.
Campaign of Misery
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual discipline and meditation practice based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. The practice found itself the target of Beijing’s wrath 23 years ago after the discipline gained significant traction in China, with up to 100 million people practicing in 1999.On July 20, 1999, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) launched a whole-of-government campaign against Falun Gong. The plan was to eradicate the popular meditation practice in three months—in time for the party chair at the time, Jiang Zemin, to claim a victory before the Party’s National Congress in the fall.
A tried and proven machinery of the repressive state was set into motion: All the media in the country were commanded to print and broadcast a nonstop barrage of propaganda blaming adherents of Falun Gong for every possible societal ill. Overnight, the practice was declared illegal. Teaching the practice, sharing its literature, or even speaking positively about it became punishable by prison or worse.
Two decades later, reports of people tortured to death in Chinese prisons for the “crime” of practicing Falun Gong keep coming.
Zhang, 62, spoke of her last arrest, in November 2011.
“The police ... took me to a hospital, where they injected me two times by force with an unknown drug. They also tied my hands and legs to a bed, firmly pinched my cheek to force my mouth open, and force-fed me some drugs. These drugs caused me to have a numb tongue, stiff limbs, convulsions, and extreme pain. I lost consciousness,” she said, speaking at a rally to commemorate the 23 years since the persecution began.
Methods of Torture
There are thousands of stories like Zhang’s. Xia Haizhen, 46, originally from Shanghai, spent a total of seven years in the Shanghai Women’s Prison. Her first arrest was in 2003, simply for visiting somebody who practiced Falun Gong, she said during the rally, held in the town of Goshen, New York, on July 17.
“More than 20 police officers took turns interrogating me day and night. They handcuffed my hands, forcibly locked me to an iron chair for six days and six nights, and lit a very bright light bulb in [front of] my eyes, preventing me from sleeping,” Haizhen said.
“I went on a hunger strike to protest. A policeman forced me to walk around the concrete floor barefoot, pulling me by the handcuffs on my wrists. When I didn’t cooperate, he kicked my head with his leather shoes.”
After six days, she was taken to the prison hospital.
“I was forcibly held down by four policemen and handcuffed to an iron chair,“ she said. ”One policeman grabbed my hair and prevented me from moving. Another policeman roughly inserted a thick hard plastic tube up my nose and into my stomach. My nose started bleeding immediately.
“Then they put me on the ‘death bed,’ stretched out my arms and legs, and tied me down with a few ropes so that my body could not move. The ropes were so tight that they dug into my flesh. The pain was unbearable. In order to increase my pain, one police officer pulled the plastic tube back and forth every few minutes, causing a lot of blood to flow from my nasal cavity.
“I stayed on the hunger strike for 13 days, and all I vomited was black liquid.”
Haizhen was eventually released after three years, but then arrested again in 2012.
She was kept in a cell smaller than 10-by-10 feet in size, with six other inmates to “watch over” her.
“The prison guards electrocuted me with electric batons, forced me to wear a straitjacket, and handcuffed my hands behind my back for 15 days. Prison guards used loudspeakers to force me to listen to songs praising the CCP repeatedly. At the same time, the guards and the inmates who were watching me came every hour to pull the handcuffs and torture me,” she said.
Some of the torture methods were simple. In the winter, the guards would tie her to a chair by an open window for two days straight until her hands and feet would become numb from frostbite.
Once, she was forced to sit on a hard, tiny bench with an irregular surface.
“After being forced to sit on the bench for a long time, my rear end was bleeding and sticking to my pants. ... Every moment was painful,” she said.
One time, she was forced to hold a glass of scalding-hot water between her thighs. Other times, the guards would send other inmates to beat and abuse her. One prisoner pulled out her hair, “one handful after another,” she said. Another prisoner scratched her back with her fingernails until it was covered in blood.
But some of the most intense torture, in her description, was the brainwashing.
“They forced me to watch videos made with lies that reversed black and white. I closed my eyes and refused to watch, and the prisoner pinched my eyelids and forbade me to close my eyes. She also put headphones on me, turned the volume to the maximum, and forced me to listen to the shameless slander of Falun Gong,” she said.
“I felt like my spirit was being stabbed with one stroke after another endlessly.”
It was the proper description of hell, she said.
“I couldn’t survive, I couldn’t die, and my spirit was almost collapsed. Only the three words of truthfulness, compassion, forbearance [Falun Gong’s tenets] were in my mind and supported me through this very dark experience.
“When I came out of the prison, my entire body was blue and purple, scarred, and skinny.”
Upon her release in 2016, Haizhen managed to escape to the United States.
“Today, I can stand on the free land of the United States and have the freedom to believe in truthfulness, compassion, forbearance. I feel extremely lucky,” she said.
“However, in today’s China, thousands of Falun Dafa practitioners are still suffering the brutal persecution that I once suffered.”
World’s Response
The persecution of Falun Gong has been denounced by governments all over the world, including in a number of U.S. Congress resolutions and U.N. reports. In 2020, an independent tribunal in the UK determined that the CCP has been killing imprisoned Falun Gong adherents and other dissidents for their organs, which are then used for transplants, often for high-paying foreign patients.
Still, the topic draws relatively little attention in government and media, leaving it largely to adherents of Falun Gong themselves to spread the word, several attendants of the rally said.
“It’s important because somebody has to do it. Nobody does,” said Julia Baniasadi, 44, who attended the rally with her family.
In China, the CCP keeps a tight grip on information about the persecution, especially about the torture and abuse in prisons.
“A lot of Chinese people in China, they don’t even know about the persecution,” Baniasadi said.
Even in the United States, the media have seldom touched the topic.
“The media cover a lot of it up,” Baniasadi’s daughter Nikou, 18, said.
“Just mainstream media, they don’t report on it, they don’t present it, nothing. For some reason, it’s always hushed up. So I guess we just have to take our own initiative to go out and tell people.”
