Human rights workers have compiled over 100 methods of corporal torture methods used against the Falun Gong.
(photo: The face of 36-year-old Gao Rongrong after it was severely disfigured by torture with high-voltage electric shock batons. Ms. Gao died of torture in 2005.)
Torture in custody has taken the lives of thousands of Falun Gong adherents’ since the Communist Party began persecuting followers of the spiritual discipline in 1999.
In the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Torture’s 2006 report, for instance, two thirds of the torture cases listed for China were of Falun Gong.
Human rights organizations have documented over 38,000 cases of severe abuse or torture of Falun Gong adherents. Of the more than 3,000 confirmed deaths of Falun Gong adherents in China, the vast majority came from torture.
Why torture
Used for decades by Chinese Communist Party police to extort confessions from suspects and targets of political campaigns, torture is now being used against the Falun Gong to force them to renounce their faith.
Both physical and mental torture
This way mental and physical torture are combined can be seen in the brief excerpt below from the Washington Post, which describes the typical ordeal countless Falun Gong adherents have faced:
At a police station in western Beijing, Ouyang was stripped and interrogated for five hours. "If I responded incorrectly, that is if I didn't say, 'Yes,' they shocked me with the electric truncheon," he said.
Then, he was transferred to a labor camp in Beijing's western suburbs. There, the guards ordered him to stand facing a wall. If he moved, they shocked him. If he fell down from fatigue, they shocked him.
Each morning, he had five minutes to eat and relieve himself. "If I didn't make it, I went in my pants," he said. "And they shocked me for that, too."
By the sixth day, Ouyang said, he couldn't see straight from staring at plaster three inches from his face. His knees buckled, prompting more shocks and beatings. He gave in to the guards' demands.
For the next three days, Ouyang denounced [Falun Gong's] teachings, shouting into the wall. Officers continued to shock him about the body and he soiled himself regularly. Finally, on the 10th day, Ouyang's repudiation of the group was deemed sufficiently sincere.
He was taken before a group of Falun Gong inmates and rejected the group one more time as a video camera rolled. Ouyang left jail and entered the brainwashing classes. Twenty days later after debating Falun Gong for 16 hours a day, he "graduated."
(John Pomfret and Philip P. Pan, August 5, 2001, full article)
Torture methods
Human rights workers have also compiled over 100 methods of corporal torture methods used against the Falun Gong. Below are a few short examples of such methods. More detailed examples can be found through the index on the right.
Beatings Falun Gong practitioners in police custody are often brutally beaten, sometimes to death. The use of the following items for beating have been documented among the known cases: wooden clubs, steel and iron bars, iron rods, whips made of twisted copper wire, bamboo sticks, rubber sticks, electric batons, wooden planks, steel wire locks, rattan, electric wire whips and rope whips.
Piercing Fingertips are pierced with pins and bamboo nails, which are also hammered under the fingernails. In many cases, torturers pull out the practitioners’ fingernails by the root. Women’s breasts are also pierced with sharp wires.
Force-feeding Force-feeding is a torture method often used on the Falun Gong, and it has been the cause of death in approximately 10 percent of all known death cases. The force-feeding is most often carried out by labor camp staff with no medical training, or by criminal inmates who are coerced to assist. Unsanitary rubber tubes are shoved into an adherent’s nose and down the stomach, often rupturing or damaging tissue; sometimes the tube enters the lungs. Detainees are often fed irritants such as highly concentrated salt water, hot pepper oil, boiling water, detergent, or even human feces.
Scorching with Hot Irons
Hundreds of practitioners have reported being burned with cigarettes, lighters, fire, irons, or hot iron bars.
( photo at right: On June 2nd, 2001, three labor camp guards tried to force Tan Yongji (above) to sign a “repentance statement” renouncing Falun Gong. When he refused, the guards tied him to a post, heated an iron rod in a furnace until it glowed red, and began applying it to his legs. The pain was so excruciating that Tan lost control of his bowel and bladder functions. The guards pressed the rod on his legs 13 times, spacing them out at regular intervals on his flesh, asking him all the while if he would renounce his belief in Falun Gong.)
“Water Dungeon” In “Water Dungeons,” the detainee spends many days in total darkness while inside a small cage and immersed in chest deep water. Often the water is routed from sewage lines. Some detainees have died under such conditions, while others have been driven insane from this torture.
High-voltage Electric Shock Batons Electric batons carrying high voltages are used to shock practitioners’ sensitive areas and private parts such as the inside of the mouth, top of the head, breasts, genitals, buttocks, thighs, etc. Several electric batons are often used simultaneously on different parts of the body. Victims have said that the smell of burning flesh permeates the air during the torture.
Psychiatric Torture
At least 1,000 adherents have been subjected to psychiatric torture in Chinese mental hospitals, though the actual figure is likely many times higher, likely far exceeding the number of dissidents politically persecuted in mental asylums during the Stalinist era.
Records of psychiatric abuses in China
Much groundbreaking work in exposing this abuse of psychiatry has been carried out by Robin Munro. In his 2006 book, China’s Psychiatric Inquisition: Dissent, Psychiatry and the Law in Post-1949 China, Munro dedicates a chapter to the issue of psychiatric persecution of the Falun Gong in China.
The psychiatric abuses of the Falun Gong and others who have been branded insane for insisting on views not in accord with that of the Communist Party, are well documented and have been ongoing under the current regime for decades. Organizations such as the World Psychiatric Association (WPA), Human Rights Watch, and the Geneva Psychiatric Treatment Committee have reported on it; the WPA sought to investigate the abuses of Falun Gong in Chinese mental wards but has been repeatedly denied access.
Purposes of psychiatric torture
Torture in mental hospitals serves two primary purposes for the Chinese Communist Party:
First, it aims to discredit Falun Gong by making its adherents appear demented.
Second, it allows for severe forms of punishment and a potential solution for handling those viewed as hardcore adherents who stubbornly refuse to transform.
The tools of psychiatry – including electric shock, sedatives, and other drugs – are turned on Falun Gong detainees as a means of torture and manipulation.
Testimony
Amnesty International has reported how one Beijing police spokesman connected to these hospitals, when questioned about these abuses, explained: “They are not patients, they are here to be re-educated… Most of them are Falun Gong extremists who have been to Beijing to protest.”
We were held in the Xuzhou City Mental Hospital for over three months. We were forcibly tied to a bed and the so-called medical staff gave us injections and forced “medicine” down our throats. They injected us with unknown drugs as well. We passed out and were unconscious shortly after receiving the injections.
When the injections were taking effect, we suffered from extreme pain. It was so severe that we writhed in pain, cried out miserably, and slammed ourselves against walls in a desperate attempt to knock ourselves unconscious in order to be rid of the pain.
After the injections’ affect wore off, we questioned the medical staff, “Why did you give injections and other harmful substances to us even though we are perfectly healthy?” They replied with shame, “We have no choice. It’s per instructions from above. We have to obey our leaders if we want to keep our jobs. We don’t want to treat you this way, but we don’t want to lose our job.”
