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The emotional bond that a mother has with her child, whether born or unborn, is a sacred and powerful one. In China’s labor camps, not only is this bond not respected, but it is wielded as a weapon to force pregnant women or mothers to give up their belief in Falun Gong.
For example, one cannot imagine the anguish of Ms. Wang Lixuan when labor camp authorities tortured her infant son to death and took her life as well.
Because detaining pregnant women is against policy in China’s labor camps, it is common for pregnant detainees to have forced abortions. In one case, when a Falun Gong practitioner’s baby was ripped from her womb after eight months, the baby was conscious and crying; it was taken away, never to be seen again. Pregnant and nursing women are also forced to perform hard labor, often resulting in complications in pregnancy and miscarriage.
Scores of children have been left unattended after their parents are detained. They wait anxiously with relatives for their parents to return, not knowing whether they ever will come home. In some cases children are left alone to fend for themselves, and dozens have been orphaned.
On October 21, 2000, Ms. Wang Lixuan and her eight-month-old son, Meng Hao, were arrested and detained at Tuanhe Labor Camp in Beijing, where they were tortured to death on November 7, 2000. When her family received the death notice and arrived in Beijing, they found the frozen corpses of Ms. Wang and her son. According to the coroner’s examination, her neck and knucklebones were broken, her skull was sunken, and there was a needle stuck in her body.
There were two deep bruises on her son’s ankles, two black and blue spots on his head, and blood in his nose. The bruises may have been caused by guards shackling little Meng Hao’s ankles and hanging him upside down.
The authorities declared on the death certificate that the two had “committed suicide by jumping off a building,” even though this was inconsistent with their injuries and the coroner’s report.
Family members of Ms. Wang have also been persecuted. Her sister, Ms. Wang Lihui, was sent to a labor camp simply because she practiced Falun Gong exercises at Yantai University, and her brother was sent to a labor camp for practicing Falun Gong at Jinan Industrial College.
Ms. Zhang Hanyun, 33, is a resident of Hanzhong City, Shanxi Province.
In March of 2000, because Ms. Zhang practices Falun Gong, she was forced to attend the anti-Falun Gong brainwashing class held by the Hanzhong City “610 Office,” even though she was pregnant and expecting her new baby soon. To avoid persecution, Ms. Zhang hid with a relative’s family. Her father owned a contraction company. Under instructions from the Hanzhong City “610 Office” staff members, the Beiguan Administrative Office closed down the construction sites of Ms. Zhang’s father and brother in an attempt to force them to hand over Ms. Zhang. They also handcuffed Ms. Zhang’s husband to the Jialing River Bridge to humiliate him.
In the end, Ms. Zhang was arrested and sent to the brainwashing class. When the staff of the Hanzhong City “610 Office” realized that Ms. Zhang would soon be giving birth to a baby, in order to keep her detained at the brainwashing class, they took her to a hospital, where she was subjected to forced late-term abortion by dilation and extraction. The horrifying procedure is hard to imagine.
Ms. Dou Jianhua is a 28-year-old kindergarten teacher from Mishan City, Heilongjiang Province. In June of 2000, she went to Bejing for the second time to appeal to the government to stop persecuting Falun Gong. After being escorted back to Mishan City, she was sent to the Beishan Detention Center in Lianzhushan Town by the Nongken Police Department in Mudanjiang, Mishan City. All practitioners in the detention center were forced to do hard labor. Especially after learning that Ms. Dou was pregnant, the labor camp authorities continued to make her move heavy bricks, which caused massive bleeding and a miscarriage.
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Ms. Jiang Zhongli is an employee of the Hengyang Blood Bank, Hengyang City, Hunan Province. She was pregnant while detained with drug addicts and drug dealers at the Hengyang Detention Center in Hunan Province. Her husband was serving in the army. In February 2000, she had a miscarriage at the detention center and suffered from severe hemorrhage. Her work unit took her away when she was hovering between life and death. She was fined 1,500 Yuan and denied 3,000 Yuan in wages.
Ms. Liu Qiuhong, 39, an employee of Zhong Ce Medicine Inc., is a practitioner from Yantai in Shandong Province. Police arrested her from her home when she was more than eight months pregnant, then forced her to undergo an abortion. When the child was forced out, it was still alive and could cry; it was taken away, and no one knows where it is or whether it is still alive. The police refused to allow any recovery time for Ms. Liu after her forced abortion. She was detained at the Fenghuangtai Office for one month of brainwashing, then illegally sent to a labor camp.
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Ms. Wang Shaona is from Shekou City of Shenzhen, Guangdong Province. She and her husband, Mr. Li Weijun, were arrested in February 2000 while on their way to Beijing to appeal. Mr. Li was sent to the Shekou Detention Center. Ms. Wang was six months pregnant; in order to keep her in detention, police aborted her fetus.
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Five practitioners from Guilin City, Guangxi Province – Lin Jiangjin, Wei Yuemei, Li Xiaoying, Li Xiuliang, and Ou Yang – were arrested for practicing Falun Gong exercises together on July 13, 2000. Because all of them refused to sign “repentance” and “pledge” statements, giving up their belief, they were detained in the second detention center of Guilin. Ms. Ou was allowed to go home because she was pregnant, but only after she paid 10,000 Yuan. The police later forced her to undergo an abortion, citing the excuse that she did not have a permit to give birth.Ms. Liang Mei (pseudonym) is a 29-year-old Falun Gong practitioner from Sichuan Province who was still nursing her baby when she was locked up in the local Agronomy School together with several other practitioners. As part of her torture, several policemen grabbed her by her arms and legs, lifted her up in the air, and then threw her repeatedly to the ground.
The police told Ms. Liang, “We were told by the top [officials] that we do not need to reason with Falun Gong practitioners. Never mind the laws and legal procedures, we can do whatever we want to you.”
They ignored her pleas that she had a young baby at home who still needed to be breast-fed. This time she was handcuffed behind her back with her arms wrapped around a tree. Her mouth was sealed with tape. Ms. Liang’s shirt and pants were wet with her milk while the baby was starving at home. As time passed by, her hands, handcuffed backward around the tree, began to swell, and the pain became excruciating. She thought of her poor baby daughter starving at home, and wondered how she could survive this. She asked again to be released but her request was denied.
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“The Linhe City policemen took me back to Linhe City after I appealed for an end to the persecution on February 19, 2000, in Beijing. They interrogated me one by one for an entire night, and then three of them took turns beating me. One policeman named Yang slapped my face over a dozen times. They shackled me and forcibly sent me to the Huhhot City Female Labor Camp without any legal procedure. They held me there from February 19 until July 30, 2000. Around July 10, while doing heavy labor, I felt a severe pain in my stomach. An exam showed that I had been pregnant for a few months. I had suffered tremendously during that time. Nine of us had to unload 30 tons of coal per day. I loaded and unloaded cow manure and tilled the soil. When there was no farming work, I had to wrap more than 10,000 pairs of chopsticks each day. In the labor camp I continued practicing the Falun Gong exercises. Every morning I was handcuffed to the stairway railing and forced to squat for a long time. Because I practiced the Falun Gong exercises, Captain Liu of the No. 3 Team in the labor camp shocked me with an electric baton. Later, Deputy Captain Hong ordered them to hang me by my handcuffs without letting my feet touch the ground. After two hours of hanging, my arms became black, cold, and numb. Later they hung me there for an entire day. Knowing that I was pregnant, they still did not allow me to leave. They held me for ten more days before sending me home with my hands cuffed.
“The Linhe City Police Station ordered me to abort my eight-month pregnancy. Fortunately, the forced abortion did not succeed. Soon after I gave birth, the police came and asked for my repentance letter. If I did not obey, they would fine me 30,000 Yuan. I did not have the money, so they threatened to take my house. When my child was three months old, they sent five or six policemen to my house to harass me every day. I have lost the right to live freely and I was under surveillance 24 hours a day. I had to leave my home and have become homeless...”
– Account of an anonymous Falun Gong practitioner
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Ms. Zhou Jing is a resident of Beijing. Because Ms. Zhou is a Falun Gong practitioner, several plainclothes policemen from the Beijing Police Station broke into her home and arrested her. Ms. Zhou refused to go with them. Despite her pregnancy, a strong policeman handcuffed her arms behind her back, pushed her down to the floor, and dragged her out of the room. The police tore her clothing, leaving her body uncovered. Her eyes, knees, and legs were injured while she was dragged on the cement floor.
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Ms. Liang Peiying is a resident of Shiyan City, Hubei Province. One afternoon in the middle of October 2000, when Ms. Liang was breast-feeding her seven-month-old daughter at home, two policemen from the Sanyan Police Station in Shiyan City arrested her. Even though it is illegal to detain a woman who has a child less than one year old, they took her to the police station and beat her severely. When Ms. Liang’s husband went to see her, the policemen handcuffed him and hung him from the window frame by his handcuffs, although he is not a Falun Gong practitioner. They brutally beat him as well. They then cuffed Ms. Liang’s hands behind her back and made her sit on the floor all night. Her seven-month-old son was deprived of her breast milk and cried so hard that he became hoarse and nearly lost his voice. Later, Ms. Liang was released.
On December 14, 2000, Gao Donghui, the Sanyan Police Station chief, and policeman Cai Xiaojun broke into Ms. Liang’s home and arrested her again. In the police station, they handcuffed her behind her back, with one arm over her shoulder and the other behind her waist. The torture is called “carrying a sword on the back.” With her hands still in this distorted position, they pushed Ms. Liang onto the floor, facing up. Policeman Cui Ke, while wearing leather boots, stomped on her body from her head to her toes. Ms. Liang instantly lost control of her bladder and bowels from this assault. They then hung her up on the window frame by the handcuffs.
On December 15, Ms. Liang was sent to the Shiyan No. 1 Detention Center. Ten days later, when policeman Cai went to interrogate her, he closed the door of the interrogation room and brutally beat her again. To cover up the arrest of a woman with a child under one year old, the Sanyan Police Station authorities altered their records, changing the date of Ms. Liang’s detention from December 15, 2000, to February 17, 2001, one day after her daughter’s first birthday. To support this fabrication, Ms. Liang was transferred from the detention center to an out-processing station on January 15, 2001, then transferred back again on February 17, 2001.
Zou Rongfa was born in November 1999. At that time, her father, Mr. Zou Songtao, was held in a detention center because he had gone to Beijing to appeal for Falun Gong. Mr. Zou was not released until the end of December 1999. He was sent to the Qingdao City Labor Camp in July of 2000, then later transferred to the Wangcun Labor Camp in Zibo City at the end of September 2000. On the morning of November 3, 2000, policemen shocked him with electric batons, and killed him within two hours.
Rongfa lost her father when she was only a year old. After Mr. Zou’s death, the police kept harassing and closely watching Rongfa’s mother, Ms. Zhang Yunhe. In February 2002, the police arrested Ms. Zhang and detained her at the Dashan Detention Center. The police refused to release any information about her to her family. Rongfa was thus separated from her mother, and had to stay with her grandmother, who was over 60 years old. However, her grandmother became ill and died in August 2001 after losing her son-in-law and being separated from her daughter.
Rongfa has lost her father, her mother, and her grandmother, the three people she loved the most.
Huang Ying’s parents were Falun Gong practitioners. Her mother, Ms. Luo Zhixiang, was tortured to death at age 29, while pregnant with a second child, at the Huangpu Drug Rehabilitation Center in Guangzhou City. Huang Ying’s father, who was illegally held in a labor camp, has become homeless to avoid recapture and further persecution. Huang Ying now lives with her grandparents; their living conditions are so poor that the house is made of mud bricks and there is a one-meter-long crack in the ceiling. She kisses her mother’s picture and often says, “I saw Mom. She is so beautiful. Mom comes to see me.”
On July 19, 2000, police officers broke into the home of four-year-old Wang Shujie’s uncle and, in front of Shujie, arrested all the adults present because they were suspected of being Falun Gong practitioners. A few months later, she and her father were taken to the police station, and she watched as police officers beat and slapped her father. Shujie fainted from the shock, and later awoke sweating and with a high fever. She repeatedly shook her head from side to side and was apparently suffering from severe pain in her head. She became very anxious after the incident and sometimes banged her head against the wall. After returning home from the police station, she was in a lethargic state and slept all day.
The police went to Shujie’s home over and over again to arrest her family members. For a time the family left home to avoid unlawful arrest. After living in fear and anxiety for so long, Shujie had difficulty eating, and her health declined.
At dawn on February 1, 2002, nearly 20 police officers surrounded Shujie’s home. They broke inside to abduct her father; Shujie was so scared that she wet her bed. The police simply ignored her and took her father away to a brainwashing class.
On February 14, 2002, Shujie and her aunt went to the brainwashing class to visit her father. When she returned, Shujie said to her mother, “Dad said today is my birthday, but he can’t be with me.” Her mother looked at the emaciated child and shed tears. Shujie was only skin and bones, and she had hardly grown during the two years of persecution. She had difficulty eating and sleeping. Her parents had to take her to a hospital for help. At the hospital, it was discovered that Shujie had fluid in her brain, and doctors attempted surgery to correct the problem. After the operation, she began convulsing and developed a high temperature. Four days later, she stopped breathing and died.