Sept. 5, 2022 | By a Minghui correspondent in Inner Mongolia, China
- Name: Liu Xiaoxin
- Chinese Name: 刘晓欣
- Gender: Female
- Age: 52
- City: Chifeng
- Province: Inner Mongolia
- Occupation: N/A
- Date of Death: June 27, 2015
- Date of Most Recent Arrest: Sometime in 2000
- Most Recent Place of Detention: Hohhot Women’s Forced Labor Camp
Ms. Liu Xiaoxin survived two years of brutal torture in a labor camp between 2000 and 2002, for practicing Falun Gong. Out of fear of her being arrested again, her husband didn’t allow her to practice her faith any longer after she was released. Facing mounting pressure from her family and society, she could only read Falun Gong books and do the exercises in secret when her husband wasn’t around.
Due to the fear and mental pressure, her health kept declining over the years. She eventually passed away on June 27, 2015. She was 52 years old.
Below is a recap of the torture Ms. Liu, a Chifeng City, Inner Mongolia resident, suffered in the early years of the persecution.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual discipline that has been persecuted by the Chinese communist regime since 1999.
Pingzhuang Detention Center
Ms. Liu was arrested in 2000 and taken to the Pingzhuang Detention Center. Seven other practitioners were also being held there, including Ms. Bu Guoqin, Ms. Xin Xiuying, Ms. Zhang Xiuqin, Ms. Zhai Cuixia, Ms. Wang Xiufang, Ms. Li Cuilan, and Ms. Zhang Yuling.
When the practitioners refused to renounce Falun Gong, the guards deprived them of sleep and forced them to do the “duck walk.” In this torture, the practitioners were forced to squat in their bare feet, with both hands behind their back, while carrying 60 pounds of cornmeal. They were forced to walk back and forth in this position for an entire morning on hot summer days, on sandy ground. Another practitioner, Ms. Bu Guoqin, who couldn’t squat, had to crawl carrying the cornmeal on her back, which ruined her knee caps.
After the practitioners came back from finishing the “duck walk,” the guards forced them to sit in icy cold water and had other detainees pour buckets of cold water on them. Even practitioners who had menstrual periods were also subjected to the inhumane treatment.
When the practitioners remained unmoved despite the torture, the guards then ordered them to jump quickly with legs lifted up high. If they slowed down, the guards whipped them with a 4 cm (1.6 inch) diameter plastic pipe. Seeing that they could still jump after a while, the guards forced them to do it under the scorching sun, and emptied their water bottles. They were forced to jump for over an hour.
The practitioners were later forced to do the “frog jump,” in which they were forced to squat together, with the person behind holding the ears of the person in the front. They were forced to jump simultaneously without letting go of the ears. Some practitioners’ ears were torn and bled.
In another torture, the guards forced the practitioners to jump in circles on one leg, still holding each others’ ears.
The guards once directed the garden hose on the practitioners, causing them to suffocate.
One evening a guard claimed to be letting the practitioners sleep, and had them lie on their stomachs on the bed, after depriving them of sleep for days. They then ordered inmates to pour water on them. As the beds were connected, everyone’s clothing and daily necessities stored under the bed were soaked.
The guards told the practitioners that once they renounced Falun Gong, the tortures would stop. As the practitioners wouldn’t do so, the guards then stripped them and whipped their backs with a hard leather belt, which was called the “open skin” torture. While whipping them, detention center director Zhang Haiqing shouted, “If I can’t straighten you out tonight, I’ll quit my job as the detention center director. I will give you a taste of the proletariat’s dictatorship. I will beat you into pieces or even beat you to death!”
The whipping force was so hard that some practitioners quickly lost consciousness. The guards kicked their heads to see if they were alive. After three hours of torture, the practitioners managed to walk back to their cell at 2 a.m. A detainee said to them, “We thought you died. The whipping noise sounded like fire crackers. We we all terrified and cried.”
The guards handcuffed two practitioners together. They were unable to fully lie down to sleep, nor could they take off their water-soaked clothing.
The next morning, a guard took the practitioners to director Zhang’s office. The director, after learning that they had been to Beijing to appeal for Falun Gong, kicked them with his shoes. He kicked Ms. Liu’s head up like a ball and stomped on it. Other guards shocked her with an electric baton.
After two months of detention, Ms. Liu was given two years of forced labor and taken to the Chifeng City Detention Center. As she refused to recite the detention center rules, the guards beat her and verbally abused her. She held a hunger strike to protest and the guards began to allow her to do the Falun Gong exercises.
Tumuji Women’s Forced Labor Camp
Ms. Liu was transferred to the Tumuji Forced Labor Camp in August 2000, after two weeks at the detention center. She and 14 other practitioners were held in a large room. Because they did the Falun Gong exercises on the first night, the guards rushed in and beat them. Guard Wu Hongxia slapped them with a shoe, while verbally abusing them. Some practitioners experienced bleeding from the nose and others had bruises covering their bodies.
The practitioners were forced to squat overnight. During the day, the practitioners were subjected to brainwashing lectures. Ms. Liu said she lived by Falun Gong’s principles of “Truthfulness, Compassion, Forbearance,” so guard Wu grabbed her hair, hit her face, and stomped on her, until Wu became exhausted.
After the initial three-month torture, only six practitioners, including Ms. Liu, hadn’t renounced Falun Gong. The guards then ordered her to stand all day-long under the scorching sun. Ms. Liu fainted due to the heat. She later held a hunger strike to protest and the guards finally stopped the torture session five days later.
Ms. Liu was later assigned to the second ward of the labor camp, where she was forced to harvest corn buried in the snow. The winter in Inner Mongolia was always below freezing, and when the wind blew on one’s face it felt like being cut with a knife. Wet gloves would freeze hard in no time. The work usually lasted an entire day and the practitioners were taken back in the evening. Ms. Liu and two other practitioners, Ms. Hu Suhua and Ms. Zhou Zhihui, once did the Falun Gong exercises, and the guards then forced them to stand barefooted in the snow for hours, until they almost died.
To prevent the three practitioners from doing the Falun Gong exercises, the guards beat them. Their heads became so swollen from the beating that they could no longer open their eyes. Many inmates who saw them were terrified.
Because Ms. Liu refused to attend a Falun Gong smearing session one day in the summer of 2001, she was dragged by the hair and taken into solitary confinement.
As Ms. Liu and other practitioners protested another brainwashing session when the guards played videos attacking Falun Gong, they were beaten and shocked with electric batons. Ms. Liu was handcuffed behind her back and held in the solitary confinement for 15 days. One night, the guards dragged her to the yard, stripped off her clothing, and whipped her buttocks, while verbally abusing her. Her buttocks were severely bruised as a result.
Hohhot Women’s Forced Labor Camp
As Ms. Liu remained firm in her faith no matter how the guards tortured her, they transferred her to the Hohhot Women’s Forced Labor Camp for further torture.
By then, Ms. Liu had almost lost the ability to walk due to the torture. Yet she was still forced to attend a two-week brainwashing session every month. During that time she was deprived of sleep, denied restroom use, constantly beaten, and shocked with electric batons. To prevent her and other practitioners from shouting “Falun Dafa is good,” the guards taped their mouths shut and washed their hair with water used to mop the floor.
The guards stripped the practitioners in the winter, leaving only inner layers, and then dragged them around in the snow. Some practitioners, including Ms. Liu, were hung up by their handcuffed wrists for over two weeks. The handcuffs cut deep into their flesh, causing the bone to be exposed. Some became disabled after being let down.
Source: https://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2022/9/5/203130.html
Editor’s Note: Dear readers, do you know that Falun Dafa, originally from China, is currently practiced by people in over 100 countries? But in China, since Jul. 20, 1999, Falun Gong is defamed, slandered and persecuted due to the Chinese Communist Party’s fear of Falun Gong’s rapidly growing popularity. Jiang Zemin, former head of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), perceived the spiritual discipline’s growing popularity as a threat to the CCP’s atheistic ideology.
To learn more about the persecution Falun Gong practitioners are subjected to in China, visit http://faluninfo.net/.
For more information about the practice or to download Zhuan Falun, visit: www.falundafa.org. All books, exercise music, resources, and instructions are available completely free of charge.
