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A Hefei City Dafa Practitioner's Appeal (Anhui Province)

April 04, 2001 |   A practitioner in Hefei City Anhui Province

I am a Falun Dafa practitioner from Hefei City, Anhui Province. I appealed to the Chinese authorities several times with a sincere heart for the freedom to practice Falun Dafa, but each time I was arrested, detained and imprisoned in a so-called "transformation class."

In 1999 Jiang Zemin banned Falun Dafa, so I went to Beijing to appeal during my vacation time. However, before I could express my concerns to the authorities, policemen at Tiananmen Square stopped me and asked me if I was a Falun Gong practitioner. I said "yes" and was immediately put into a police van, sent to a detention center, and finally to a so-called "transformation class." Everyone there was forced to pay a fine of 800 Yuan RMB (roughly two months' income of an average worker in China). From then on, I was even deprived of the right to work. In the "transformation class" we were forced to receive brainwashing under 24-hour surveillance. After weeks of detention, I wrote a statement to give up Falun Dafa against my will. Later I felt extremely regretful and painful because practicing Falun Dafa is not wrong.

In May 2000, I went to appeal again, and I suffered more than I did the previous time. I was imprisoned for over four months without my family's knowledge. I was monitored 24 hours a day and was completely deprived of personal freedoms. The policemen often ate and drank until midnight and then rushed in to harass the imprisoned practitioners. They used various torture methods on practitioners such as "flying sky," (arms raised high in front of the body) "squatting on a hitching post" and prolonged exposure to the sun mid-summer (July). Many practitioners were beaten so severely that they could not even move at all. The policemen divided and squandered the money they extorted from practitioners. They often made the practitioners suffer from hunger, using the absurd excuse that it would cause them more trouble to let the practitioners go to lavatory. Moreover, they pressured us to write "guarantees" by threatening to send us to a labor camp if we didn't.

Many practitioners were sent from that notorious "transformation class" in Hefei directly to labor camps. One of them was Li Mei, an innocent girl who was persecuted to death in a labor camp on February 1, 2001. We were detained at the "transformation class" until it was closed. Those who refused to write guarantees were forced to pay 8,000 Yuan to be released. This is the true story of the so-called "best period in the history of Chinese human rights." I hope the freedom of belief will soon be bestowed on the people as it says in China's constitution. I don't want to see the dictator infringing upon human rights and killing lives while he demonstrates disgusting hypocrisy on the surface.

March 22, 2001