In 1999, the Communist Party of China began a brutal initiative to rid the country of
the spiritual practice of Falun Gong.
The practice concentrates on meditation and morality, but even so, the government wanted
it gone.
The many people who practiced it were about to get persecuted, re-educated, and very likely,
tortured.
Fast-forward to the year 2000 and a man was sent to Benxi Prison to undergo his “transformation.”
He was subjected to a variety of forms of torture that you’ll hear about today, but
he survived his ordeal.
Nonetheless, when he returned to prison in 2016, his body could not cope with the relentless
hard labor, the sleep deprivation, and the cruel and unusual punishments he received.
One night while being forced to sit naked on a bench he was doused with freezing cold
water.
He collapsed.
When he hit the ground, he wasn’t helped and instead was beaten.
He died soon after.
His name was Hu Guojian.
Ok, before we list a number of tortures inmates might experience, let’s listen to some more
stories from Benxi Prison and the maltreatment of Falun Gong practitioners.
In 2010, a judge named Liang Yuncheng was sentenced to three years in prison because
he wouldn’t give up his belief in Falun Gong.
He was tortured in prison and wrote a letter about his mistreatment.
This fell into the hands of the prison governor and Yuncheng was ordered to serve 60 days
in solitary confinement.
There he was tortured every single day.
His hands were tied to the headboard of his bed and his feet were tied to the other end.
To make it almost impossible to sleep, a very bright light bulb was placed right over his
head.
In protest, he refused any food.
This is what happened to him next: “Guards inserted a feeding tube through
a nostril to his stomach and fed him a high-concentration salt solution.
They usually left the tube in his stomach for four days before taking it out for minimal
cleaning.
Once in a while, the prison doctor would coat the tube with chemicals to irritate Liang’s
nose and esophagus.”
In 2001, a prisoner named Meng Xianguang was imprisoned for the same reason.
As often happens, it was other prisoners under orders from the guards that committed some
of the tortures.
At times, they would take off their socks and shove them into Xianguang’s mouth.
He was tied to a chair, his head covered with a bag, and he was doused in cold water.
Sometimes he was electrocuted by the guard with an electric baton.
The torture didn’t stop there.
He was repeatedly whipped with a rubber tube, sometimes while naked and strapped to a chair.
After he was beaten, he could never sleep because the inmates had been ordered to take
shifts and make sure he didn’t fall asleep.
One day he was stripped naked and electrocuted with an electrified wire.
The guard pointed to his manhood and said, “I’m going to make you unable to have
any kids.”
Many such prisoners never receive any medical treatment for their injuries.
Some are released, but they are already in a very bad way.
When a man named Lu Yuanfeng got out, he was paralyzed, had slurred speech, and had a leg
fracture.
He soon fell into a coma and died.
In light of a new international investigation that proved China is involved in the genocide
of the Uyghur people, today’s episode is more relevant than ever.
When reading about the horrors that some detainees have faced, you often just read “torture”
or a “combination” of tortures, but the stories are sometimes not very specific.
Human Rights organizations have, however, investigated what goes on behind prison walls
and so there are details we can give you today.
Here are some of them: 6.
The beatings Beatings happen and sometimes they could be
said to be regular kinds of violence, such as inmates being ordered to kick and punch
a man or woman in the corner of a cell.
It’s said that the most sensitive parts of the body are the places that are aimed
for.
Guards may not use their hands and feet to hurt someone, but they do use their leather
belts.
The inmate is told to stand facing the wall and then is struck with the belt.
The worst part of this is when the buckle strikes the prisoner on the head.
This can cause deep cuts, and when that happens, there is always a chance of infection since
the inmate will not be provided with medical attention.
There is a punishment known as “passing on the board.”
During this torture, the prisoner is told to expose his backside.
He is then beat with a board or a stick up to 100 times.
So many strikes to one part of the body can of course cause serious injury.
If the person is in deep trouble, the stick or the board might have a nail sticking out
of it.
According to the International Society for Human Rights, this could lead to a fatal injury.
In some cases, the inmates or guards will use any hard object, which at times has been
a hammer.
The prisoner might be struck with that hammer on various parts of the body, including the
genitals.
To make matters worse, reports have stated that after this, sometimes stinging plants
are rubbed over the injured areas.
Now things get a little bit more technical.
5.
Twisting and stretching In Chinese prisons, there is something called
the “Tiger Seat.”
This is basically a narrow iron bench to which the prisoner is tied with leather straps around
his thighs and knees.
A slow kind of torture is to lift his feet up a little and place something under them.
Since his knees are tied, he feels pain in his legs.
The pain gets worse as more things are put under the feet.
Then there is something called “Bed Pressing.”
A prisoner is told to sit on the floor.
His, or her, hands are tied behind their back.
With his legs out in front of him, someone comes and presses the man down as far as he
will go.
Imagine doing this during an exercise in which you are trying to touch your toes.
Except, in bed pressing, the person is bent over and then stuffed under a bed.
That means they are stuck in an incredibly painful position.
To make matters worse, inmates are ordered to jump up and down on the bed.
That wouldn’t only be painful, but it could cause a serious back injury.
Another terrible thing that might happen when a prisoner is told to sit on the ground with
legs outstretched is a guard pushes down hard on the prisoner’s toes.
It’s reported that at times guards have even tried to stand on the over-stretched
feet.
The arms are also stretched at times.
Imagine being handcuffed, but with one arm over your shoulder and one arm coming up behind
your back.
It’s kind of like a straitjacket.
Reports state that sometimes the pain is so much that the victims pass out after only
twenty minutes, but some prisoners are kept fastened up like this for hours.
If that’s not bad enough, they are sometimes forced to dance because this makes their pain
much worse.
Arguably even worse is when a victim’s arms are tied together behind their back with rope.
That rope is then attached to something and they are hoisted up in the air.
The outcome can be the dislocation of the shoulders.
Some reports gathered by human rights workers state that the pain is so intense the prisoner
will often lose control of their bladder.
This hoisting technique is also another form of torture that has led to death.
Sometimes you don’t have to be stretched to feel a lot of pain.
You can just stay in the same position, and as you’ll now see, that can be hell in a
nutshell.
4.
Staying in position One torture technique they have in Chinese
prisons is called “exhausting an eagle.”
It’s very simple and also brutal.
A prisoner is told to stand on a stool, sometimes with his hands held high.
That’s it.
They are just told to stay there.
They can’t sleep and they won’t be given any food or water.
How long could you do this for?
After a while, the prisoner will collapse, and for that, they’ll be beaten.
This can also happen outside in the dead of winter.
Or, a prisoner might sometimes be told to stand on one leg, to ensure those beatings
happen more often.
At other times, the prisoners are told to stand on a pile of bricks.
The thing is, their hands are tied to the ceiling.
When they become tired, they lose their grip on the bricks.
Then they are left hanging there.
You only have to look at European medieval history to know that hanging from manacles
is extremely painful and can cause serious injuries.
Then there’s the min-cell.
This is a cage that is too small for the prisoner.
He is forced in there and often his hands are cuffed to the bars.
He can’t sit or stand, and so just has to stay in that agonizing position.
The pain is said to be unbearable after a short amount of time, but because the prisoner
won’t likely die, he can be kept there without food or water for many hours, or even days.
This might also happen outside in the cold, but when it’s summer, it’s the sun that
becomes a person’s worst enemy.
Not only does the victim become incredibly thirsty, but hours under the hot sun causes
burns.
Sometimes the torture is even more simple but equally as brutal.
There are reports that some prisoners were just asked to crouch on all fours and hold
their heads in their hands.
Ok, that wouldn’t be too bad for a few minutes, but some prisoners had to stay in this position
not just for hours, but over a day.
They of course collapsed and parts of their body went numb.
Some reports state that the victims are paralyzed for a few days.
The worst case we found reported by the International Society for Human Rights was a report of a
woman who was forced to crouch for an entire month!
Usually, once the person has collapsed, they’ll either be beaten or soon made to get back
in the same position.
There are various types of crouch torture.
Prisoners might be told to crouch with their legs in stretched positions, or they might
be told they are not allowed to move outside of a square they are crouching in.
Another method involves using nails, so if the croucher fails to keep a position, they’ll
be impaled on the nail.
Then there’s the “airplane”.
A person is forced to stand up against a wall.
They are told to bend forward with their head down and stretch out their arms.
This looks like an airplane.
Try standing like that for hours or days on end.
Perhaps you’d rather sit down.
Some prisoners in Chinese prisons have been fastened into an iron chair.
They are force-fed and they cannot move from the chair.
This means they sit in their own human waste, sometimes for a week or more.
This is not only terribly humiliating but sitting for that length of time can lead to
its own kind of injuries.
Worse, they might be told to sit on a board with nasty raised edges.
This hurts for the first hour but after a while, it can cause cuts.
Those cuts deepen and infections are common.
Prisoners are told to sit on all kinds of sharp objects, including broomsticks.
They of course fall off, and for that, they receive a beating.
Possibly even worse than that is when they are told to kneel on hard or sharp objects.
Reports state that some prisoners have been forced to kneel for long periods of time on
ashtrays.
Perhaps the worst-sounding of these tortures is something called “Hell’s Shackles.”
This is when the shackles, we imagine like handcuffs, are actually cut into the victim’s
ankles and wrists.
Any movement will cause deeper cuts.
This is why they cannot move at all, which makes sleeping impossible.
The “death bed” sounds almost as bad.
This involves the victim being forced to lie on a thin plank of wood.
Another plank of wood lies across the beam, making it look just like a crucifix.
The device is not lifted, though, so the person just has to stay in that position.
This means not moving for a long period of time and of course, pooing and peeing in the
same place for as long as the victim is kept on the death bed.
In one report, the device was called the “Deadman’s bed.”
Here is a snippet from a first-hand account of someone seeing it:
“When I went to the clinic to see a doctor, I saw a female Falun Dafa practitioner bound
on the dead man’s bed.
One police officer gave her an injection and then started to force-feed her while a group
of police officers shocked her with electric batons.
The lady was almost tortured to death and yet wasn’t even crying.
Policewoman Li Man asked us to look the other way to avoid seeing the torture.”
Now you’ll see just how horrific amateur force-feeding is.
3.
Force-feeding As you already know, sometimes when the victim
is in these positions, they are beaten.
They might also be electrocuted to certain parts of their body, including the genitals.
Reports have stated that “Electro sticks” can be inserted into any one of a man or woman’s
orifices.
Yes, you’d be right to imagine the orifices include those at the mid-level of the body.
This is from another report: “Sometimes the guards force an electric
baton into a practitioner’s mouth to shock her; this often leads to her face being disfigured.”
It can lead to mental problems, too.
This is how one former prisoner described the state of fellow prisoners after they’d
been tasered in the head numerous times: “They lose their minds.
They cannot talk properly anymore.
They become very slow in their movements and you see that their brain is damaged.”
But then how do victims eat in these positions while the worst is happening to them?
The answer is guards, not medical professionals, force them to eat.
This usually involves a tube being inserted into a person’s nose, with the tube leading
into the stomach.
Reports state that lubricants are not used, so this in itself is very painful.
It’s also reported that after tubes have been inserted and removed a few times some
prisoners have died from what investigators believe to be a result of aspirated blood.
Even more macabre are the reports on some of the things the prisoners are force-fed.
The International Society for Humans rights has said some prisoners have been fed urine,
human excrement, alcohol, and hot pepper.
A separate report states that some prisoners were made to eat insects.
Yet other reports say some prisoners have been made to drink boiling water.
This is how one human rights organization described force-feeding:
“The main aim of the forced feeding ordered by the police is not however to feed the victim.
The objective is to break the will and the resistance of the victim.”
One former prisoner said he’d seen plenty of people die after being force-fed food,
or even worse, human waste.
He said in an interview, “I can show you a list of those who've died, so you'll know
how many have lost their lives.”
Here’s more evidence of the sheer brutality of Chinese guards.
2.
Burning and stabbing and the use of water There are plenty of reports that state prisoners
have been burned in various ways.
Cigarettes are often the weapon of choice, with guards using them to burn the ends of
fingers, faces, nipples, and worse, the genitals.
One report stated a prisoner was once forced to eat a burning cigarette.
Then there is the scalding, which could happen to the skin, or on the inside when the person
is forced to drink the water.
Guards have also used red-hot iron bars to burn prisoners.
Similar to this is stabbing people.
We found one case of a doctor inserting a needle under one prisoner’s fingernail.
Other times nails and bamboo sticks have been hammered into fingernails.
This stabbing with small instruments could affect any area of the human, although we
read that the puncturing of the eardrum is very painful indeed.
All this can sometimes be stopped if only the person renounces their beliefs.
As for the use of water, you won’t be surprised to hear that Chinese prisons use a kind of
water torture very similar to waterboarding.
In other cases, victims repeatedly had their heads shoved into a bucket of water or urine
until they were close to passing out.
Ok, last one, and it’s as brutal as anything we’ve talked about so far.
1.
Isolation So, if a prisoner is not being forced to 19
hours a day grueling labor or isn’t having their body stabbed, burned, twisted and abused
in any number of ways, they might be left alone in a very isolated space.
This is very common.
The isolation, though, is somewhat different than that which happens in most countries
of the world.
For one thing, the cell is so tiny it is hard to move.
Reports state that some isolation cells are five feet squared, which is around 1.5 meters
squared.
A prisoner can sit, but not fully lie down or stand up.
There are no windows and there are no toilets.
A prisoner lives in total darkness with the smell of his own waste.
Sometimes water is poured over the floor to make the experience worse.
People have given detailed accounts of this in the past.
This is what happened to a Falun Gong practitioner named Kang Hong when he was held at Xishanping
Forced Labour Camp.
“Standing water and human waste accumulated several inches deep inside the dungeon.
To make it more frightful, many dead rats and snakes were tossed in.
Because of his insistence to continue practicing Falun Gong, Kang Hong was handcuffed and hung
from the steel door inside the water dungeon for three days and nights.”
Sometimes the prisoner is handcuffed to the cell door to make it very hard to sleep.
No one can speak to the prisoner and he or she cannot talk to anyone else, which is a
way of breaking a person’s mind.
If that’s not awful enough, there’s also a form of isolation in Chinese prisons called
the “Water dungeon.”
The person is imprisoned in a cage that is then submerged in water.
The prisoner cannot sleep of course because they’d drown.
It can also be very cold.
Some reports state that some cages are filled with nails so the prisoner can be hurt by
touching the sides.
This is how one person described it: “Usually, the water dungeons are well-hidden
rooms or cells where practitioners are forced to stay for days and nights on end in total
darkness.
The water is most often extremely filthy, containing rubbish and sewage.”
The world was shocked when a woman named Ms. Ding Yan told the international press what
happened to her and others while she was being held at the Shijiazhuang Detention Centre.
Her crime was being spiritual.
She said she was placed in an iron cage that had a wooden floor.
Sticking out of that floor were nails, so putting a foot wrong was extremely painful
and possibly quite dangerous in terms of getting an infection.
She told the world about many of the horrors you’ve heard today.
That got her in serious trouble.
After that press conference, she was arrested again.
At Chengde City Prison she was again forced into a cage, this time with spikes on all
sides.
She was lowered up to her neck in filthy water.
She died after two months of almost-constant torture.
Her case is one of the most well-known.
Not only because of the horrific torture she suffered but the fact she never stopped standing
up for her rights.
It’s not clear how she died, but other prisoners said she was so injured at the end of her
ordeal that she could no longer walk.
Almost all of her hair had been pulled out by guards and prisoners.
Her feet were too swollen to wear shoes.
One person wrote: “One day, after a round of savage beatings
and electric shocks at the hands of policemen and several prisoners, no one ever saw Ms.
Ding again.”
With China continuing its genocide of religious groups, there’s no telling what horrible
tortures are taking place right now.
Now you need to watch, “Most Horrible Prison Experiments On Humans of All Time.”
Or, have a look at, “White Room Torture - Worst Punishments in the History of Mankind.”