Torture
Used for decades by Chinese Communist Party police to extort confessions from suspects and targets of political campaigns, torture is now being used against Falun Gong practitioners to force them to renounce their faith. Both physical and mental torture techniques are used.
The way mental and physical torture are combined can be seen in the brief excerpt below from the Washington Post, which describes the typical ordeal countless Falun Gong adherents have faced:
Human rights workers have compiled over 100 methods of corporal torture used against Falun Gong practitioners. Below are a few examples of such methods.
Beatings
Falun Gong practitioners in police custody are often brutally beaten, sometimes to death. Items used for beatings in documented cases have included wooden clubs, steel and iron bars, iron rods, bamboo sticks, rubber sticks, electric batons, wooden planks, steel-wire locks, rattan, and whips made of twisted copper wire, electric wire, or rope.
Piercing
Sensitive body parts such as women’s breasts are often pierced with sharp wires. Fingertips are pierced with pins and bamboo nails, which are also hammered under the fingernails. In many cases, torturers pull the practitioners’ fingernails out by the root. The prevalence of this torture method and its use against Falun Gong practitioners was referenced in the Hollywood blockbuster film Syriana starring George Clooney.
Force-Feeding
Force-feeding is a torture method often used on Falun Gong, and it has been the cause of death in approximately 10 percent of all known death cases. Force-feeding is most often carried out by labor camp staff with no medical training, or by criminal inmates who are coerced to do so. Unsanitary rubber tubes are shoved into a practitioner’s nose and down into the stomach, often rupturing or damaging tissue. Sometimes the tube enters the lungs. Detainees are often fed irritants such as highly concentrated salt water, hot pepper oil, boiling water, detergent, or even human feces.
Burning, Scorching with Hot Iron
Hundreds of practitioners have reported being burned with cigarettes, lighters, fire, boiling water, irons, or hot iron bars.
High-Voltage Electric-Shock Batons
Electric batons carrying high voltages are used to shock practitioners’ sensitive areas and private parts such as the inside of the mouth, top of the head, breasts, genitals, buttocks, and thighs. Several electric batons are often used simultaneously on different parts of the body. Victims have said that the smell of burning flesh permeates the air during the torture.
‘The Water Dungeon’
In “water dungeons,” the detainee spends many days in total darkness while inside a small cage and immersed in chest-deep water. Often the water is from sewage lines. Some detainees have died under such conditions, while others have been driven insane from this torture.
Psychiatric Torture
Tens of thousands of practitioners have been subjected to psychiatric torture, with over 7,000 documented cases directly involving Chinese mental hospitals.
In the CCP’s psychiatric wards as well as other detention facilities like labor camps and prisons, Falun Gong detainees are injected with toxic doses of unknown psychotropic drugs. Some have suffered severe damage to their central nervous system from the injections, while others became deranged after being “treated” there.
Sleep Deprivation
Using Torture Devices
The “death board” (or “death bed”) is a particularly hideous torture device. It is an iron or wood board with handcuffs and shackles to lock the victims four limbs in a stretched position. A victim is usually confined to a death board for a minimum of seven days. As movement is completely restricted, the confinement of a victim on the death bed leads to painful muscular atrophy. In severe cases, the victim even loses control of bladder and bowel movements. The excretion of stool and urine is directly on the iron bed, resulting in an unsanitary condition. To save them-selves the trouble of cleaning, the torturers usually strip the victim down to a T-shirt or even naked, adding to the humiliation.
“Tiger bench” is a small iron bench. It is approximately 20 cm (8 inches) tall. The victim’s hands are tied together behind the back while his knees are tied down to a bench. Some hard objects such as bricks are inserted under the tied legs, causing the legs to bend upward in an unnatural way that causes them to break at the knees.
Tied, or Forced to Stay in Painful Position for Extended Periods of Time
Exposed to Freeze and Extreme Temperatures
In winter time, practitioners are often stripped and drenched with cold water, they are forced to run barefoot in thin clothing outdoors in the snow, or are tied with rope to a chair out in the open, and icy water is splashed over them from the neck down.
