(Minghui.org) Editor’s note: Ms. Chen Jing, a talented college graduate, was subjected to persecution in her early 20s, simply for upholding her faith in Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline that has been persecuted by the Chinese communist regime since 1999. She was placed under house arrest in college and threatened with expulsion and imprisonment. After she graduated she was fired from her good job in a hospital. She was forced to move around to avoid persecution and lived in fear for years. When she was 37, she was arrested, then sentenced to five years in prison. She was subjected to various kinds of brutal torture in detention centers and prison.
Ms. Chen Jing
Ms. Chen recounts in detail how she was persecuted both physically and mentally.
(Continued from Part 3)
Appeal to Intermediate Court
My lawyer submitted my appeal case to the Jiamusi Intermediate Court on January 19, 2017. I submitted my handwritten appeal letter to the detention center on January 25 and asked them to forward it to the Jiamusi Intermediate Court.
Zhou Chen and Jiang Liang from the Jiamusi Intermediate Court met with me on March 8. They said the court had not received my handwritten appeal. During my two-hour conversation with Zhou Chen, he asked me about my prior criminal record. He put down my short-term detention of 15 days after my arrest on January 22, 2016, as my prior criminal record. I insisted he remove it. He attempted to keep it as supporting evidence to sentence me. He even offered to add that the detention was illegal. I refused, saying the detention was part of the same case and he couldn’t use it as double punishment against me. With no more excuses, he finally crossed that out.
I again described to him how I was tortured and the names of the people who participated. I repeatedly mentioned Li Zhongyi who was involved in the entire process of my case, from filing it, and prosecuting it, to the trial and sentencing. Zhou pretended that he didn’t know Li Zhongyi. He asked how I knew Li’s name and information about him. I said, “No matter how one tries to cover up their crimes, everything will be exposed one day. Many officers condemned Li for his bad character. Of course, I know his name.”
After a while, Zhou Chen suddenly asked me many personal questions: Why hadn’t I married? Why did I quit my job at the hospital? What did I do to support myself? How much did I pay for my computer?
These were all questions that the police and procuratorate asked before. I knew that they intended to use the information to smear Falun Gong—perhaps creating an image that Falun Gong practitioners are weird, did not get married, or that I had financial support from another country that was working to topple the communist regime.
I told him that I would love to talk about myself if we were not meeting under such circumstances. But I could not answer him since the questions were irrelevant to this case.
I suggested he have an open hearing of my appeal case and he said he needed to consult the collegial bench. I asked who the panelists were, and he gave me all their names.
Zhou Chen delivered the ruling to me on April 7. I prepared three documents for the appeal, including, “Application to Appeal Court for Public Trial,” “Application to Appeal Court for Appearance of Examiners and Witnesses on Trial,” and “Application for the Exclusion of Verbal Evidence Collected by Illegal Methods such as Torture, Physical Evidence and Documentary Evidence Collected not in Conformity with Legal Procedures,” and gave them to Zhou. He refused to accept them.
I asked him why the court did not hold an open trial and he said the decision was made by the panel. I noticed that the members of the panel were different from what he told me on March 8. The wording in the verdict smeared Falun Gong even more than that of the first instance court.
I told him that the documents I provided were according to the law and the case would not be fairly ruled unless the judges read them. He did not look at me but said that it was pointless to give it to him now. He kept asking me to sign the verdict.
I refused. Instead, I wrote on it: “This ruling misused the law. I do not accept the verdict. I refuse to sign.” I wrote on the delivery receipt that I refused to accept it. I signed my name under the defense lawyer’s signature of the defense statement section and dated it. I gave it to Zhou and asked him to include it in the file along with all the documents I gave him. I told him that I would refer to them in my future appeal. He didn’t respond. He said he would notify my lawyer about the ruling.
My appeal was in vain.
“Not a Place for Human Beings”
I was taken to Heilongjiang Province Women’s Prison on May 10, 2017, to serve a five-year term. It is a place that Yang Bo and Li Zhongyi referred to as, “Not a place for human beings.”
The day I arrived I met the inmates assigned to “manage” me. I introduced myself and peacefully told them that I was not a criminal and did not commit any crime. One of the inmates, Tian Yanru, scolded and pushed me, “Shut up, no talking, no looking around, walk with your head down. Do you know where you are? You have to remember your identity...”
I responded, “Why aren’t people allowed to talk?”
Tian yelled, “This Falun Gong [practitioner] seems not educated well about detention center protocol and does not know the rules.”
Next, inmate Zhou Lirong and two tall and large inmates forcibly dragged me to a small dark room and began to punch and kick me. I felt dizzy and could not move after the beating. The head inmate of Group Six, and three inmates dragged me to Group Six and threw me to the floor near an empty bed in the corner. Inmate Huang Liyan wrote words cursing Falun Gong and Falun Gong’s Master on the floor with a black marker, which I could not remove when I rubbed them with my hands.
“Chen Jing, listen. From now on, all of your activities will take place in this little space, while stepping on [the name of] your Master,” Huang told me.
Huang ordered another inmate to take away the new bedding and the mattress cushion given to me and brought me dirty and thin bedding. They attempted to force me to sit on a small stool for hours that night but relented after I explained that I got up at 5 a.m. and hadn’t eaten that day. I was allowed to go to bed at 9:30 p.m.
Darkest Days
The next morning, the harsh brainwashing began. I told Huang Liyan that I knew very well the content of those brainwashing CDs and books, and they would not work on me at all. Huang flared up, yelling, “Then we can deal with you directly and use the tough ones, no need to warm up... No need to start by sitting on a bench. Let her stand from morning to night...”
I started by standing from 5:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., then 4:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m., then 3:00 a.m. to 12:00 a.m. Finally, I stood around the clock. I was only given three minutes or five minutes for meals, but I was not allowed to sit down to eat. To prevent me from meeting any other Falun Gong practitioners, two inmates accompanied me to the restroom. I was only allowed two minutes each time. I was only allowed five minutes to wash up in the morning and no more than ten minutes in the evening.
All the inmates assigned to monitor me took their anger out on me when they were in a bad mood. They scolded me or intentionally caused trouble for me. When the monitor TV in my cell stopped working, the inmates beat me freely, with backup from the prison guards.
The inmates who were scheduled to monitor me at night couldn’t sleep and took it out on me, pinching and pushing me, stabbing my eyelids with toothpicks, or pouring water on me. One night, inmates Li Zhenghuan and Ning Hongshuai tormented me for several hours using those methods. Li suddenly grabbed my collar and pushed me hard back and forth, threatening me and shouting, “Do you know how I ended up here? I killed someone. Don’t irritate me otherwise I will do anything.”
Huang did not allow anyone to talk to me, or help me. As I had just arrived, I did not have any necessities. During my menstrual period, Huang did not allow me to go to the toilet as needed. The blood stained my pants but I was not allowed to change them. I was still forced to stand up all day.
Since I still refused to compromise, the prison guard ordered Yang Shuo, a tall, strong and ruthless inmate whose term was reduced for persecuting Falun Gong practitioners, to work together with Huang to torment me. Yang beat me up whenever she felt down. As a result, I had a black eye one day, or a bleeding mouth another day. My body was covered in bruises. Sometimes Yang put a piece of paper between my legs while I stood and beat me as soon as the paper fell.
After a while, three of the most difficult juvenile inmates, Ning Hongshuai, Hou Haiyue, and Li Jianing, were transferred to Huang’s group. They bullied practitioners, including elderly ones in their 60s and 70s. They cheated them out of their money and worked actively to cooperate with Huang to get credit from her.
One night around six o’clock, when I was standing for punishment, juvenile inmate Hou was not happy about her upcoming night shift to monitor me and lied to Yang that I was disobedient. Yang was also in a bad mood, so she rushed over to me, punching and kicking me wildly. She was wearing a pair of hard shoes, and I was immediately bruised and battered. Seeing that I did not budge, Yang gave me a strong, high kick. I flew out of the cell and into the corridor wall about four meters away, then I bounced to the ground. My spine was hurt badly. Huang saw it and asked other inmates to drag me into the cell and hurriedly closed the door.
In the following days, both of my feet turned from blue to purple and then became black. The bruising spread upwards to my calves. My feet were too swollen to wear the hard prison shoes. Huang insisted I put them on. She stuffed my feet into them, and the edges of the shoes cut into my swollen flesh. My shoes and feet were covered in blood.
I became a big target for Huang and the other inmates. One night she was furious. She ordered all the other Falun Gong practitioners in the room to go to bed and close their eyes. All the inmates assigned to work on me did not rest. They knocked me to the floor. Then the two juvenile inmates, Hou Haiyue and Li Jianing, each took a small stool and pressed them into my thighs. Then they sat on the small stools. Li Xiangzhen and Cao Fengping held down both of my arms. Huang took off her top layer of clothes and rode on me. She was screaming and began to forcibly strip off my top. When she tried to also strip off my pants, I resisted with all my might, so she stopped. Then she suddenly pinched one of my nipples violently, I could not help crying out loudly due to the pain. Ning then quickly twisted my other nipple. Both of my nipples were swollen for more than two weeks afterward.
Throughout the night, they kept pouring cold water on me while I lay on the floor, powerless and shivering. I began to drift in and out of consciousness. I vaguely heard Huang shouting loudly to get a dirty sock or underwear to stuff into my mouth. When I regained consciousness, my face, body, and clothes were wet.
Later, Huang wrapped transparent tape around my mouth and body and still forced me to stand. Inmate Cao Fengping threatened, “Huang Liyan can do anything to you. She can even tie a bundle of toothbrushes together and stuff them into your vagina and whisk them around inside you, which will destroy you.” Huang Liyan added, “I could also put you into a big vat and pour cold water on you during your menstrual period, to give you a good wash.”
Huang was released from prison on April 5, 2018, after her sentence was reduced by nearly five years as credit for her persecution of Falun Gong practitioners.
Because I insisted that I had done nothing wrong by practicing Falun Gong, the prison officials worried about how they would control me after Huang left. They decided to put me in the same group with Yang Shuo, where I continued to be monitored closely every day.
(To be continued.)
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Category: Torture of Women
