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Many Falun Gong practitioners in China’s northern provinces have been exposed to extreme cold as a form of torture. They are routinely doused with cold water and left outside or in unheated cells to freeze. Some have been forced to stand in or run through snow wearing only a thin layer of clothing. Thousands are left to sleep on the concrete floors of unheated prison cells in the dead of winter, and to make the cold even more unbearable, prison staff have been reported to leave the windows open in practitioners’ cells during the night. Many practitioners are kept in such cells even when badly injured or on the verge of death.
They are also exposed to extreme heat, being forced to work long hours in unventilated sweatshops or being left outside in the scorching sun.
Furthermore, practitioners are forced to live in extremely filthy and unsanitary conditions. Labour camp staff frequently punish Falun Gong practitioners by not allowing them to use the bathroom. Many female practitioners are unable to use sanitary products during their periods. As a result of the unsanitary conditions, many prisoners and Falun Gong practitioners in labour camps develop festering scabies and skin diseases.
In January 2000, because Ms. Mu Xiangjie refused to give up Falun Gong, she was forced to stand outside in the snow for three days and nights at the Tianjin City Women’s Labour Camp. She was given only one steamed bun each day. After three days, her hands and feet were frozen and swollen, and then began to fester so badly that she could not walk for one month. Also, Ms. Mu was handcuffed for a long period, and the handcuffs cut into her flesh and caused her hands to bleed heavily. She was then hung up and later sent to a solitary cell at night. Once, while she was in the solitary cell, guards strapped her arms to the window and she was not allowed to sleep for seven days and nights. They also beat her arms with electric batons. After her release from the cell, Ms. Mu could not move her legs, and there were blood blisters covering her arms.
At the Beijing Detention and Dispatching Center, Falun Gong practitioners are often stripped naked, drenched with cold water, and left in the open winter air. They are also forced to run barefoot outdoors in the winter while wearing only a thin layer of clothing. In another wintertime torture, practitioners are tied with rope to a chair placed next to a cold air vent, and icy water is splashed over them from the neck down.
At the Dispatching Center, during summertime the policemen on the female team stripped the clothing from newly abducted practitioners in the open air. They nearly tore practitioners’ clothes to pieces before beginning body searches. Then they forced the practitioners to stay in the scorching sun for long periods of time. If a practitioner moved at all, the policemen would instruct common prisoners to beat them up. Some elderly practitioners in their 60s and 70s fainted in the sun. The skin on the knees of several practitioners began to fester due to abrasion and sweat, resulting in gaping wounds about six inches in diameter that have not fully healed even as of this time.
In the early morning in winter, newly abducted practitioners were forcibly stripped for a body search. Then they were ordered to lower their heads or put their hands on their heads, or recite “the regulations of the center.” They were not allowed to go inside until nine or ten o’clock in the evening. In addition, the police force practitioners to work at hard labour from 5:00 a.m. until after midnight, sometimes even until two or three o’clock in the morning. The workload is often arbitrarily increased. Practitioners are not allowed to use the bathroom, forcing them to have to urinate and defecate inside the workshop. This of course causes the working environment to be extremely filthy and smelly. Practitioners are not allowed to wash their underwear.
Mr. He was a Falun Gong practitioner from Heilongjiang province. Police abducted him from his workplace, then sent him to the Daqing Labour Camp, where policemen ordered several prisoners to force him into writing a “repentance letter” denouncing Falun Gong. That night, from around 9-11 p.m., prisoners poured cold water on him, tied him to a steel chair, stuffed his mouth, opened the windows and doors, and sometimes took him outside to freeze. Other prisoners and Falun Gong practitioners detained there could hear Mr. He moaning terribly from the pain. Because he was kept in the freezing cold for too long, his heart stopped beating. He froze to death at around 11 p.m. in the 2nd unit bathroom.
“The practitioners were tortured by being forced to stand outside for the entire day, from 5:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.. It was in the middle of winter, and the temperature was very low, but they were not allowed to bring any clothing to shield against the cold. Practitioners Li Qingzhen, Yang Xiuhua, Li Bingqing, Du Guijie, Wang Wenrong, Zhang Chunjie, Shi Li, Li Xuelian, and others were stripped of their cotton-padded jackets and tortured until after 9 p.m. that day.”
– Account of a practitioner who was detained at the female prison in Heilongjiang Province
“In the cold of winter, practitioners were stripped of their clothes and forced to sit on the bathroom floor naked. Four or five criminals took turns pouring cold water over the practitioners’ heads and all over their bodies. Sometimes, practitioners were submerged into a vat of cold water for long periods of time. After this so-called “cold bath” practitioners were taken to a storage room with an open window and left to freeze for several hours. Sometimes practitioners were taken to their cells and placed under an electric fan. These practitioners were left under the fan for hours to the point that their bodies turned purple.”
– Falun Gong practitioners detained at the Changle Forced Labour Camp in Shandong Province
Cellmates Recall the Screams
Of the Chinese Retiree
Before She Died in Jail
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‘No Measures Too Excessive’
WEIFANG, China – The day before Chen Zixiu died, her captors again demanded that she renounce her faith in Falun Dafa. Barely conscious after repeated jolts from a cattle prod, the 58-year-old stubbornly shook her head.
Enraged, the local officials ordered Ms. Chen to run barefoot in the snow. Two days of torture had left her legs bruised and her short black hair matted with pus and blood, said cellmates and other prisoners who witnessed the incident. She crawled outside, vomited and collapsed. She never regained consciousness, and died on Feb. 21.
[...]
Two days later, Ms. Zhang [Ms. Chen’s daughter] came home to find half a dozen officials in her living room. They said her mother had been spotted outside by a special squad of informants who roamed the neighborhood looking for Falun Gong participants who dared to leave home.
... officials from the local district Communist Party office sent Ms. Chen to a small, unofficial prison run by the street committee, described to practitioners as the Falun Gong Education Study Class.
People who have been held there describe it as more of a torture chamber. The building is two stories with a yard in the middle. In the corner of the yard is a squat one-story building with two rooms. This is where beatings took place, according to four detainees who described the building in separate accounts.
Ms. Chen’s ordeal began that night. Wrote an adherent who was in the next room of the squat building: “We heard her screaming. Our hearts were tortured and our spirits almost collapsed.” Officials from the Chengguan Street Committee used plastic truncheons on her calves, feet and lower back, as well as a cattle prod on her head and neck, according to witnesses. They shouted at her repeatedly to give up Falun Gong and to curse Mr. Li, according to her cellmates. Each time, Ms. Chen refused.
The next day, the 19th, Ms. Zhang got another call. Bring the money, she was told. Ms. Zhang hesitated. Her mother came on the line. Her voice, usually so strong and confident, was soft and pained. She pleaded with her daughter to bring the money. The caller came back on the phone. Bring the money, she said.
Ms. Zhang got a sick feeling and rushed over with the money and some clothes. But the building was surrounded by agents who wouldn’t let her see her mother. Suspicious that this was a ruse to get more money from her – and that her mother wasn’t really in the building at all – she returned home. An hour later, a practitioner came to see Ms. Zhang. Falun Gong adherents were being beaten in the center, she was told.
Ms. Zhang raced back with her brother, carrying fruit as a small bribe for the police. She was refused entrance and her money was refused as well. She noticed an old woman in a room and shouted up to her: “Is my mother being beaten?” The old woman waved her hand to signify “no,” although Ms. Zhang wondered whether she might have been trying to wave her away from the prison, fearing she, too, would be arrested. Ms. Zhang and her brother went home for a fitful, sleepless night.
That night, Ms. Chen was taken back into the room. After again refusing to give up Falun Gong, she was beaten and jolted with the stun stick, according to two prisoners who heard the incident and one who caught glimpses of it through a door. Her cellmates heard her curse the officials, saying the central government would punish them once they were exposed. But in an answer that Falun Gong adherents say they heard repeatedly in different parts of the country, the Weifang officials told Ms. Chen that they had been told by the central government that “no measures are too excessive” to wipe out Falun Gong. The beatings continued and would stop only when Ms. Chen changed her thinking, according to two prisoners who say they overheard the incident.
Two hours after she went in, Ms. Chen was pushed back into her cell on the second story of the main building, an unheated room with only a sheet of steel for a bed. Her three cellmates tended to her wounds, but she fell into a delirium. One of the cellmates remembers her moaning “mommy, mommy.”
The next morning, the 20th, she was ordered out to jog. “I saw from the window that she crawled out with difficulty,” wrote a cellmate in a letter smuggled out by her husband. Ms. Chen collapsed and was dragged back into the cell.
“I was a medical major. When I saw her dying, I suggested moving her into another [heated] room,” the cellmate wrote in her letter. Instead, local government officials gave her “sanqi,” herbal pills for light internal bleeding. “But she couldn’t swallow and spat them out.” Cellmates implored the officials to send Ms. Chen to a hospital, but the officials – who often criticize Falun Gong practitioners for forgoing modern medical treatment in favor of a superstitious belief in their exercises – refused, her cellmates said. Eventually they brought in a doctor, who pronounced her healthy.
But, wrote the cellmate: “She wasn’t conscious and didn’t talk, and only spat dark-colored sticky liquid. We guessed it was blood. Only the next morning did they confirm that she’s dying.” An employee of the local Public Security Bureau, Liu Guangming, “tried her pulse and his face froze.” Ms. Chen was dead.
That evening, officials went over to Ms. Zhang’s house and said her mother was ill, according to Ms. Zhang and her brother. The two piled into a car and were driven to a hotel about a mile from the detention center. The hotel was surrounded by police. The local party secretary told them Ms. Chen had died of a heart attack, but they wouldn’t allow them to see her body. After hours of arguing, the officials finally said they could see the body, but only the next day, and insisted they spend the night in the heavily guarded hotel. The siblings refused and finally were allowed to go home.
On the 22nd, Ms. Zhang and her brother were taken to the local hospital, which was also ringed by police. Their mother, they recalled, was laid out on a table in traditional mourning garb: a simple blue cotton tunic over pants. In a bag tossed in the corner of the room, Ms. Zhang said she spotted her mother’s torn and bloodied clothes, the underwear badly soiled. Her calves were black. Six-inch welts streaked along her back. Her teeth were broken. Her ear was swollen and blue. Ms. Zhang fainted, and her brother, weeping, caught her.
That day, the hospital issued a report on Ms. Chen. It said the cause of death was natural. The hospital declines to comment on the matter. Ms. Zhang said she challenged officials about the clothing she had seen, but they told her her mother had become incontinent after the heart attack and that was why her clothes were soiled.
Ms. Zhang and her brother tried filing a lawsuit, but no lawyer would accept the case. Meantime, her mother’s body lay in refrigeration, until the threatened litigation was resolved.
Then, on March 17, Ms. Zhang received a letter from the hospital saying the body would be cremated that day. Ms. Zhang called the hospital to try to prevent it, but she said officials didn’t give her a clear answer and said they would have to call her back. They didn’t. Ms. Zhang never saw her mother’s body again.