(Clearwisdom.net) Ms. Ding Liyan is a well respected person and an outstanding worker at the Inner Mongolia Tongliao City Power Plant. For her determination in speaking out for Falun Gong, she has been persecuted numerous times to the point her life was in danger.

In August of 2002, Ding's family, who were poisoned by Jiang's hate propaganda against Falun Gong, sent her along with 13,000 yuan [500 yuan is the average monthly income for an urban worker in China] to the Hebei Shijiazhuang Brainwashing Center, ignoring the tremendous physical and mental benefits she had gained from the practice.

The brainwashing center was so brutal it was truly a Hell on earth. The center's mission is to transform good people into bad people. A Falun Gong Practitioner is considered 'transformed' [renouncing their belief] only when he or she beats or scolds a fellow practitioner or says dirty words. In the beginning, as a way to deceive practitioners into renouncing their belief, they pretend to be friendly by caring for practitioners and being considerate of them. If this did not work, they resorted to brutal means to achieve their goal that included tying practitioners to a torture device known as the "Dead Person's Bed" [The four limbs of the practitioner are stretched out and tied to the four corners of an icy-cold metal bed. The practitioner cannot move at all. Neither is he allowed to get up to eat, drink, or go to the bathroom. This treatment would last from several hours up to more than a dozen days. This type of cruel torture causes severe damage to the practitioner both mentally and physically], forcing them to sit on an iron bench for a long period of time (usually pouring water on the bench during the cold winter), hand-cuffing them for weeks or months, shocking them with electric batons, and taping their mouth, which was stuffed with dirty socks. To get Ding to write a statement renouncing his belief in Falun Gong, collaborators [former Falun Gong Practitioners who had gone astray due to brainwashing and torture] tortured her 24 hours a day by pinching her, pushing her onto the ground and force-feeding her liquor and burning her with cigarettes [most practitioners choose not to drink or smoke,] They verbally abused her with derogatory words against Falun Gong and deprived her of sleep for eight consecutive days. After three months of subjecting her to daily propaganda, the brainwashing center sent her home.

On January 27, 2003, Ding bravely went to Tiananmen Square to appeal on behalf of Falun Dafa, unfurled a banner, and shouted out from the bottom of her heart, "Falun Dafa is good, Falun Dafa is a righteous Way!" For speaking out these words, she was taken to the Tongliao Hexi Detention Center, which is famous for its brutal torture methods. Their torture tools were horrifying and bloody.

On February 6, 2003, because she practiced the Falun Dafa exercise in her cell, she had to wear a restraint known as the "pig's cuff", which weighs almost 40 lbs. This torture device involved cuffing a person's hands and legs together with iron chains and rings so the person is in a curled up position and is not able to stand, walk, sleep, eat, and use the toilet. Ding was cuffed for a total of 26 days, only after the 6^th day of her hunger strike.

In mid-April, practitioners Tian Miao and Lan Guiqin were unlawfully sentenced. The police tried to take them away, but the practitioners refused to cooperate. The police directed more than ten prisoners to put the "pig's cuffs" on them. Ding bravely stood up for her fellow practitioners and shouted to the police, "It is a crime to persecute Dafa practitioners! Falun Dafa is good!" The police were very upset and used the most violent and brutal torture method, "carrying a board on the back", to punish her. This torture uses iron chains to cuff a person's hands and legs on a metal cross. It is worse than the "pig's cuff" because a person cannot move at all on the iron cross and is not released to go to the bathroom and must eliminate while being chained. Not wanting to bother other to assist her, Ding did not eat and drink. She fainted many times and had to depend on others in the same cell to change and wash her. The police were not sympathetic at all and did not release her until seven days later. While she was chained to the metal cross, the police again tried to force her to sign a statement to renounce her belief in Falun Dafa, which she firmly refused.

Ding wanted to write an appeal letter but the detention center would not supply her with pen or paper. She wanted to talk to the person in charge and was told that they were not available to see her. After being denied any opportunity to expose the persecution against her or appeal to the authorities, she again protested by going on a hunger strike, which only brought another round of persecution upon her. The authorities cruelly force-fed her, prying her mouth open and inserting a plastic tube into her stomach through her mouth and nose. Many practitioners have died from such torture.

One day in June, Ding was on the brink of death. The detention center did not want to be responsible for her death and ordered her family to take her home. According to her relatives who went to see her, a nice looking young woman had become old. All her teeth were loose from the force-feeding and she had wounds everywhere. Whether Ding is still alive is currently unknown.

Posting date: 1/28/2004
Original article date: 1/27/2004
Category: Eye Witness Accounts
Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2004/1/11/64624.html

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