November 13, 2006- Falun Gong News Bulletin

ORWELLIAN “MIND EDUCATION” IN CHINA’S MASANJIA LABOR CAMP
The Masanjia Women’s Labor Camp in Liaoning province is one of China’s most notorious facilities for brutally torturing Falun Gong practitioners. Information leaked out of China recently revealed how, along with physical torture, Masanjia’s personnel continue to carry out thought reform reminiscent of scenes from George Orwell’s 1984.

Under the supervision of Su Jing, the director of Masanjia’s “Mind Education School,” many women detained for practicing Falun Gong are locked up in small, dark isolated rooms. These rooms are completely empty save for a large speaker blasting at the highest volume.

The woman in charge of using videos to “reeducate” practitioners in Masanjia, Xiang Bofeng, has forced the Falun Gong prisoners of conscience to renounce and slander their spiritual practice and extol the Chinese Communist Party. Xiang would typically play songs from China’s Maoist days at a volume so high that practitioners become dizzy. When practitioners refuse to cooperate, they are beaten and shocked with electric batons.

A “normal” day for many of those imprisoned for practicing Falun Gong starts at 5:00 when they are handcuffed in a bent, awkward position to the side of a bed. The handcuffs are removed somewhere between midnight and 3am, by which time the practitioners have been shaking uncontrollably and have felt their shoulders pop out of place.

PROMINENT FALUN GONG PRACTITIONER DEAD FROM TORTURE
Mr. Zhang Zhong was a 35-year old man from Heilongjiang province. He reportedly took part in the bold effort to tap into Chinese state-controlled television in March 2002 to expose the persecution of Falun Gong. The use of technology infuriated the regime, which has used to Chinese television across the country to incite hatred and violence against Falun Gong practitioners since 1999.

Zhang was arrested in April 2002 and sentenced to 12 years in prison. In Daqing Prison, where he was held, disciplinary guards bashed Zhang’s head until he lost consciousness, stabbed him with needles, whipped his face with belts, suffocated him with plastic bags forced over his head, and doused his naked body with cold water in freezing temperatures. Zhang died of torture on October 16, 2006.

Zhang is the third Falun Gong practitioners tortured to death for participating in the famous broadcast. Others remain in critical condition.

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CHINESE WHO ARE NOT FALUN GONG PRACTITIONERS NOW ASKING FOR FORGIVENESS
More and more Chinese people who do not practice Falun Gong have come to believe they have been tricked into participating in the persecution of innocent people. Faced with a media blitz that incited hatred toward Falun Gong and policies that required colleagues, classmates, and family members to spy and report on one another, many Chinese burned Falun Gong books, participated in the campaign directly in their capacity as government officials, and acquiesced to or even induced the imprisonment and persecution of their own family members. Now many of these people are expressing their remose by posting “Solemn Declarations” online. As of early November, a total of 24,656 such statements have been sent to the Chinese Website www.Minghui.org.

E.U. VP URGES CHINESE AMBASSADOR TO RELEASE PRACTITIONER, LAWYER
In May, E.U. Parliament Vice President Edward McMillan-Scott met with two Falun Gong practitioners in Beijing in order to collect first-hand accounts of the persecution of Falun Gong in China. One of the people he met, Mr. Niu Jinping, has been monitored and harassed since. The other, Mr. Cao Dong, was secretly arrested and remains in jail. McMillan-Scott recently wrote a letter to the Chinese Ambassador in Belgium, stating:

For more about this story from the Falun Gong Human Rights Working Group, see: http://www.flghrwg.net/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=1564&Itemid=50