Inside Stories from Masanjia Forced Labor Camp

By a Dafa practitioner in China

(Clearwisdom.net)

I am a Dafa practitioner who was kidnapped to the Masanjia Forced Labor Camp. While I was there, I witnessed how camp staff torture Dafa practitioners.

A part of the Masanjia Forced Labor Camp is the so-called "Liaoning Thought Education School," which is actually a new name for the former Women's Second Detention Center. It is a brainwashing center where Dafa practitioners are detained and abused. The Masanjia Forced Labor Camp is the biggest in Liaoning province. It detains people of both sexes, but mostly male. There are at least 10 brigades in it.

Outside the main gate, buildings on the east side are offices open to public access. Usually, detainees are not allowed to go beyond the big steel door at the main gate. To the left of the steel door are registration and reception rooms, along with some boarding rooms. To the right is the main building where Dafa practitioners are illegally detained.

Inside the steel door, there is a sports field. The sports field has basketball hoops and a volleyball net, but they are just for show for visitors and in fact aren't used. To the north of the sports field, there is a two-story annex extended from the office building. This is where the three dining halls for three brigades are. The club hall and the bathrooms are at the second floor. The club hall could fit about 1,000 people. Bathing was allowed twice a month, but in reality, you only get a bath once a month, if at all. No matter what season it is, most of the Dafa practitioners were forced to bathe only in cold water.

The sports field has a 3 meter wall (about 10 feet high) enclosing it on two sides. After entering the steel door, to the left there is an entrance hall with color TV monitors in the center, a "clinic" where forced torture-feeding of Dafa practitioners who conduct hunger strikes is carried out, a library, and a small shop. To the left of the entrance hall, inside an iron door is where Dafa practitioners who resist the brutal persecution against them by doing Falun Gong exercises, refusing to obey the camp orders, going on hunger strikes, or suffering from mental collapses are locked up. Inside the iron door, on both sides there are rooms with a total area of about 40 square meters (about 400 square ft). Usually one Dafa practitioner would be locked up in one room together with two guards. When there weren't enough rooms, two Dafa practitioners would be locked up with four guards. Talking between Dafa practitioners is forbidden, even if they are in the same cell. Bathrooms are available inside the iron door, and no free pass is allowed through the iron door. Food and hot water for people inside is sent in, and a guard on duty would supervise every room. Whenever visitors come, Dafa practitioners would be transferred to mini-cells to prevent their voices from being heard. The mini-cells are located on the fourth floor of the office building. There are 50 mini-cells, and each is equipped with either an iron chair or a bed. Dafa practitioners are often cuffed to the iron chairs or beds 24 hours a day, and are fed meager portions of corn rolls and salted vegetables. Most of the Dafa practitioners detained in the mini-cells are cuffed to a bed even in the night. Sometimes, two hands were cuffed at the two sides of the bed frame for a whole night. Masanjia Forced Labor Camp tries every way to hide the existence of the mini-cells. This is the major spot where Dafa practitioners are tortured.

Groups 1, 2, and 3 are located inside the left side of the iron door, and groups 4, 5, and 6 are located inside the right side of the iron door. Normally a group may have two rooms, but bigger groups may have three rooms. Classrooms, activity rooms, and bathrooms are on the two sides of the rooms. Since Masanjia detained too many people, most activity rooms had been turned into bedrooms. Each group had two bedrooms, one at the sunny side, and the other at the shady side. Each room had 10 bunk beds (beds normally seen in prison where there is a lower bed and then one above it) for 20 people. Sometimes, one bed would be squeezed with four people. It is not accurate to call such a room a bedroom, because Dafa practitioners lived, worked, are forced to watch programs slandering Dafa, and had been forcibly brainwashed etc. in the same room. Communication between rooms was prohibited even within the same group. Between brigades, detainees ordinarily never saw each other.

Dafa practitioners were locked up in the rooms almost all day long. Just to go to the restroom you needed to wait in line. A "group guard" sat at the door of each group to monitor the rooms 24 hours a day. Inside each room, a "room head" and the member of a so-called "detainee's committee" would manage Dafa practitioners. At the iron door, there were four guards to transfer messages to the group guard, and the group guard then gave the message to the Falun Gong practitioners in the rooms. Each week, there would be several "big classes" in the classrooms, and other times the classrooms were turned into forced brainwashing sites. But the classrooms were too small to fit that many people, so the corridor, and even the bathrooms were used as places to coerce Dafa practitioners to give up their belief.

January 25, 2003

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