The Persecution of Dafa Practitioners in the Shanghai Yangpu Detention Center and the Shanghai No. 1 Forced Labor Camp

By a Dafa practitioner in Shanghai, China

(Clearwisdom.net)

The Shanghai Yangpu Detention Center

In August of 2001, because of printing Dafa banners, I was arrested by the police and brought to the Yangpu Detention Center. In order to isolate Dafa practitioners from each other, each prison cell only holds one practitioner while the rest of the inmates are criminals who have committed various crimes. Each cell measures less than 16 square meters [approximately 160 square feet]; excluding the pit-type lavatory, the area for sitting and sleeping is very small. With more than twenty inmates detained in a cell, fights broke out every day; very often we would be awakened in the middle of the night by the noise of fighting and shouting due to someone's loud snoring or arguments from inmates trying to get more sleeping space. The most crowded occasion was when there were 33 prisoners in a single cell. Everyone had to sleep side by side. It was in mid-summer, our bodies touched each other and everyone was sweating, and the whole prison cell stank of body odor. During that time, the incidents of yelling and fighting increased rapidly. According to a detention center instructor, the national regulation is that each prisoner should have a minimum of 1.5 square meters [15 square feet]; in actuality the practical area for each person was only 0.45 square meters [4.5 square feet]. One cannot turn his body in this narrow space, not to mention stretching out. After sleeping all night in this way, one's whole body would be very stiff and painful all over; often one was only able to sleep a maximum of 2 -- 3 hours nightly. Under this circumstance, different types of skin diseases spread easily and many detainees' health deteriorated rapidly.

In the detention center, only three minutes were allowed per meal. Because my teeth were bad and I did not want to take away from face-washing and teeth-brushing time, I swallowed my rice with cold water hastily without chewing; also, they would take away my meal if I did not eat fast enough. Due to this stipulation, there was always bowls of unfinished rice left over. The leftover rice would be collected and just thrown into a pit (actually, they poured the rice with water bit by bit into the lavatory pit). The result was that we did not get enough to eat, and food was wasted. One time, the superintendent of the prison asked to speak to me and I told him of this situation, but no action was taken.

After I had been detained for about 28 days, the policeman who undertook my case told me that they would release me if I signed an acquittal document. At first I refused to sign, but they lied to me, saying that the signature only proved that the person was released and that there was no other meaning. Because I did not have sufficient righteous thoughts (my signature meant that I accepted the persecution), plus my attachment to getting released, I signed the document. However, they did not release me but instead sent me to the "Shanghai Law School" at Sichen Highway to continue their persecution against me. This time, they tried to make me betray other practitioners but I firmly refused. About four or five days after they realized that they could not achieve their goal, they announced publicly that I was sentenced to two years of forced labor.

One day in October, I was illegally sent to the Shanghai No. 1 Forced Labor Camp in Dafeng City, Jiangsu Province. They forced me to sit on a small bench all day long; sitting on it, one is forced to bend the knees and the waist at a 90-degree angle, and one is not allowed to move from 5:30 in the morning until after 10 at night. The skin on many Dafa practitioners' buttocks was thus broken, and fluid oozed from the wounds and caused infections; later, the skin would form thick scars. After a few days, we were forced to do military drills. We had to march right after breakfast, until lunch, with no breaks in between. In addition, there were special groups of people assigned to monitor the practitioners. After lunch, the drill sergeant and the monitors (including criminals convicted of burglary, robbery, assault and fraud) took afternoon naps; only Falun Gong practitioners were not allowed to take a nap. We had to continue marching in the afternoon. Although it was late autumn, we sweated so much that our clothes were soaked.

We were not allowed to take regular showers. Sometimes, they would give us half a bottle of hot water or maybe a full bottle to wipe down our bodies; by the end it was like mixing mud, but there was no alternative. The food and hygiene at Dafeng (Shanghai No. 1 Forced Labor Camp) are extremely poor. Only twice a month would we have better meals, and most of the time we just had the same vegetables over and over. No oil is used in the cooking, only small pieces of fat floating in clear vegetable soup. They do not wash the vegetables before cooking either, and every time we ate leeks, the metal container that the vegetables came in always had a thick layer of muddy water in the bottom of it.

We were only allowed to take a bath before the Chinese New Year. A hundred and twenty to a hundred and thirty people in the unit were divided into five or six groups, who would squeeze into a small water pool of about ten square meters like sardines, for a little while. And that would be considered taking a bath. No soap was allowed in the pool; and only cold-water taps beside the pool were available for rinsing. It was the coldest time in winter during the Chinese New Year, so no one would dare to use the cold water to rinse; there was no way to get clean with a bath like that.

At the labor camp we were forced to work as slaves producing stuffed toys such as small monkeys, little bees and the like. Forced overtime was frequent during the peak season, and the supervisor constantly tried to make us work faster. More than ten groups in a unit worked very hard. In addition, there was a special labor unit (Group Number 13), which was mainly made up of steadfast Dafa practitioners. Besides the regular labor, they were forced to take on heavy physical jobs. Group 13 had to clear the feces from the pit toilets (carrying the feces in two buckets attached with ropes to a pole carried across their shoulder), till the soil, and cut the grass. This type of work might not be too much for someone who was used to hard physical labor, but it was extremely difficult for those unaccustomed to it or someone in their fifties or sixties. For example, once five people went to dig up potatoes; three of them were young prisoners assigned to monitor Falun Gong practitioners and the other two were practitioners in their fifties and sixties. They had dug out almost eight hundred kilograms of sweet potatoes and put them in a big metal cart. The cart was long and heavy, weighing at least 200 kilograms. Together with the sweet potatoes it weighed about one thousand kilograms. Police officer Shi would not ask the young monitors to pull the cart; instead he kept ordering the two older practitioners to pull, yelling, "Pull hard! Pull hard!" By the time they unloaded the sweet potatoes and returned to the cell, they were covered with mud and sweat. One of the older Falun Gong practitioner's heartbeats was over 120 beats per second.

There was also an incident related to carrying feces; it was after a rain and the field was wet and slippery. Falun Gong practitioner Wang (surname) was very weak and rather small. When he picked up the two large buckets of feces hanging from the pole (the two plastic barrels were half filled and weighed 90 kilograms), his legs could hardly bear the weight and his body swung and shook. By accident, the bottom of the barrel was cut by the sharp edge of a rock and the feces-laden water leaked from the crack. Immediately, police officer Shi swore at him and told him he would have to pay for the barrel. They force the practitioners to clean up a pit toilet in two hours. Feces get all over the practitioners' hands and bodies, and at the end they are exhausted and soaked in sweat.

In March of 2002, all Falun Gong practitioners held in Dafeng were transferred to the Shanghai Qingpu No. 3 Forced Labor Camp. During the SARS epidemic of April 2003, using the excuse of an isolation period, they stopped families from visiting. The police moved the Falun Gong practitioners to the "Strictly Controlled Section" near the Qingdong Hospital and began a bloodier and crueler round of persecution. The police arranged for several prisoners to watch over each Falun Gong practitioner. They prohibited practitioners from sleeping, beat them, and used all kinds of cruel methods to try to force practitioners to denounce Falun Dafa and their righteous beliefs. Many practitioners suffered continuous beatings for more than ten days. On October 15, 2003 Shanghai Pudong Dafa practitioner Liu Xingguo was persecuted to death by the monitors under the instigation of police officer Xiang.

This persecution of Falun Gong practitioners occurred in Shanghai, an international metropolis, during the "best period of human rights in China" according to the Chinese authorities. As of today, there are many Falun Gong practitioners who hold steadfast to their beliefs and who are being persecuted and held in detention centers, so-called "law schools," forced labor camps and in prisons. We hope that everyone can fully understand the facts, oppose the persecution and help stop these atrocities.

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