SOH News

A Decade of Courage – Contributed by Peter

This is Catherine Hennessy reporting A Decade of Courage for Sound of Hope Radio Network.

The 20th day of July, 2009, is the ten-year anniversary of when the Chinese Communist Party (the CCP) began its suppression of the spiritual practice of Falun Dafa also known as Falun Gong by Physical torture and mental torture to force Falun Gong adherents to give up their beliefs. Just the opposite, not only the adherents are affirmative on their beliefs but also survived the CCP’s brutal religious persecution. Following is the recording of Peter and his translator taken at A Decade of Courage Rally. Peter, a courageous Falun Gong practitioner, and his memoir of how he was kidnapped, imprisoned, tortured, sleep deprived, forced feeding, forced slave laboring, brainwashing re-education, has revealed the true nature of the CCP. In order to protect Peter’s family from being harrassed by the Chinese policemen back home we do not announce Peter’s Chinese name. We are glad that he made his way to the religious freedom country, the United States, and now he can practice his beliefs with peace of mind. Here is Peter and his translator:

[recording]

July 20 is a day that deserves commemorating. On this day ten years ago, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) used every means possible to defame and persecute Falun Gong. Their fabricated propaganda even reached overseas and harmed many innocent people who did not understand the true situation. Having personally experienced this period of history, I can testify to the tyranny of the CCP and the kindness and perseverance of Falun Gong practitioners.

Before the crackdown on Falun Gong, the CCP pretended to allow freedom of belief. On July 20, 1999, they used the media to frame and threaten Falun Gong. They used police to arrest and beat adherents. Suddenly, it felt like evil descended and lies turned the world upside down.

On July 20, 1999, my wife and I went to appeal at the provincial government. Because our appeal had no effect, we went to Beijing to appeal. That day, the city was filled with police and armed police. I witnessed them arresting Falun Gong practitioners. My wife and my presence noticed by the plain-clothes police, and they began following us. The atmosphere was terrifying and tense.

Within two minutes of returning home from Beijing, the local police took us to the police station without any proper procedure or warrant. We were interrogated like criminals. We were not released till late into the night.

My company consequently also received pressure and harassment from the CCP. The manager told me that they received dozens of calls in a day to request that the company transform me, make me give up practicing Falun Gong and guarantee that I would not go to Beijing again.

Because I persevered in my beliefs, I was illegally sentenced to 7 years in jail by the CCP on March 2003. During that time, I experienced cruel torture, brainwashing and salve labor as well as a variety of mental and physical destruction and persecution.

In 2001, several police abducted me using gangster methods. They took me to a hotel. They interrogated and tortured me nonstop for four days and four nights under blinding lights. They used both hard and soft tactics. When their threats failed, they stripped me of my clothes. Then they hung me on the window frame so that my feet barely touched the floor.

They sealed my mouth with tape. They screamed and yelled as they stuck lit cigarettes into my nostrils.Whenever I became silent, they would either aggressively pull my hair over and over again or abruptly yank my body downward. The most vicious torture was called “shaking handcuffs”. This is a method used to force confessions out of murderers. They cuffed one of my hands to the top corner of the window frame so that my feet barely touched the floor. A policeman surnamed Yang cuffed my other hand and violently shook it in the opposite direction. After shaking me like that for a period of time, they would take me down and slap my blackened wrists. Then they would hang me back up and cuff me again. I was shaken so hard that my body was ripping with pain. I even had thoughts of wanting to die.

They also hang me on the window frame while twisting my neck. When they couldn’t turn my neck any further, they would fiercely snap it toward the opposite direction. At that very instant, I felt factures in my neck. During those four days and four nights, I never once got any sleep or food. I was continuously tortured and assaulted. I lost a lot of hair, my wrists became black, my tissues were exposed and I had lost a lot of weight.

After the torture, I was sent to a detention center. The police never notified my family or made any documentations. They used all thuggish means. At the detention center, I was forced to do over 16 hours of slave labor every day. Over 20 people were squeezed into a room not much bigger than 10 square meters in area. We had no hot water, were not allowed to brush our teeth, and had limited bathroom times. We were verbally abused and humiliated every day. Because the room was dark, damp and without clean water, I developed scabies all over my body. They were unbelievably itchy. I was locked up for over a year like this.

In June 2002, I was sent to Lujiang jail. I was locked up in a cell that could only fit one person. There was nothing there but a wooden bed. Two days later, I found out that only Falun Gong practitioners and the mentally ill were detained there.

I fasted twice to protest being persecuted for practicing Falun Gong. When I left the prison a month later, I looked like a holocaust survivor. I could barely see and needed to prop myself up against the wall to walk.

Before I got there, the head person Li Qinhua held a meeting and told over a hundred people that if other criminals talked to me, their sentences would not be reduced. In addition, the prisoners had to monitor me and report my every action to the police. If I needed something, I had to report it to the police. Three prisoners on death row were assigned to monitor me 24 hours a day. Another 3 people were assigned to monitor those who assigned to monitor me. Every day, they had to write a report, detailing all my actions, including sleep and bathroom times. They weren’t allowed to lend me anything, not even a piece of scratch paper.

The police used sentence reduction as bribery for the criminals who monitored me and to tried to collapse my determination and destroy my faith. This type of terror and threat surrounded me. I witnessed a 23-year-old Falun Gong practitioner being tortured to death. His name was Chu Zhiyong. My heart tightened. It was a sense of pain from being enveloped by terror. I reminded myself everyday that I needed to continue living so that I can expose their evilness.

In addition to physical torture, there was mental torture. Once you were sent to jail, you were forced to write reports about your thought processes. Every year, the jail supervisors sent agents to “transform” Dafa practitioners. We were forced to watch videos defaming Falun Gong and write “learned experience” statements based on their standards. They tried to force us to give up the faith to Truthfulness, Compassion and Tolerance. If you didn’t “transform”, you were not allowed to see your family members and not allowed to buy things, including toilet paper.

I returned home after over five years of torture. But I didn’t get true freedom back. The CCP used various methods to tell me that I could no longer have freedom. I was added to the blacklist by the CCP and often received their harassment.

During one of my business trips, the local police search my belongings for Falun Gong books without any warrant. They threatened that I should not go anywhere by myself, and that there would be random inspections. The police also told my business partners and landlord that I was a Falun Gong criminal. My landlord was asked to stop letting me rent housing, and my partners were forbidden from doing business with me. This type of harassment never ceased since my release. Neighbors and friends were all afraid to come to my home because of the fear of being implicated. This type monitoring made me live every moment of my life in terror.

My experience is only one page in the tragedy of the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners. During these past ten years of persecution, many people were imprisoned, made homeless, used for organ harvesting, and many families have been destroyed. Today, we definitely cannot ignore the CCP’s trampling of the China and the Chinese people. We call on the all righteous forces in the world to disintegrate the CCP, stop the persecution, and bury the CCP, an evil demon that harms humankind.

[ending of recording]

Is there any other government in the world besides The CCP utilized such horrendous torture methods to its own people? The CCP severely violated the international human rights code is unpardonable and criminal. Clearly, by looking at the drastically increasing number of resinding membership to the CCP in China, as of today, there are 57 million Chinese quit the CCP, the date of dissolving of the CCP is numbered. To hear more reportings on the CCP’s misconducts please visit
www.sohnetwork.com. This is Catherine Hennessy reporting A Decade of Courage for Sound of Hope Radio Network.