The story of a prisoner of conscience in a Beijing labor camp
In an image that so rarely escapes from China, Zhang Lianying is telling her story of horror. She stands in front of a home video camera operated by her husband in a makeshift studio. She’s wearing a plain, dark green skivvy, and speaking quietly with a characteristic Beijing accent.
Zhang and her husband were among the over 8,000 Falun Gong practitioners who had their houses broken into and were arrested and detained by police as part of the regime’s Olympics preparations. For Zhang, it was her second time in a labor camp.
A follower of Falun Gong, the spiritual discipline persecuted in China since 1999, Zhang has gone through indescribable suffering. Arrested eight times, sentenced to forced labor three times, and nearly died 14 times, she persists in telling her story of survival.
“If I did not have firm belief in truthfulness, compassion and forbearance, solid conviction in the goodness of life, determination to live and the thought that I must not die, perhaps I would have died long ago, countless times, and left the human world forever,” wrote the 46-year-old late last year in a letter to a human rights hearing at the European Parliament. The part of her letter detailing her ordeal she called “Experiences Too Sad to Recall.”
There was a time when Zhang’s life was untroubled. A university graduate, she was an official of the Guangda Group Ltd and a chartered CPA. She made a good living, and was afforded all the privileges of a modern, professional Chinese. In 1997 she and her husband, Niu Jingping, both started to practice Falun Gong. They gained health and a deep sense of inner peace.
When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) launched a full-scale persecution of Falun Gong in 1999, everything changed.
Several explanations for the persecution have gained currency in media and academia. The CCP was paranoid at the popularity and cross-social strata appeal of the practice, and the then leader of the Communist Party, Jiang Zemin, saw it as an afront. Just as in previous political campaigns, where groups with their own ideologies and networks are attacked, Falun Gong became the new target.
“It was as if the sky had suddenly fallen and everything around me had changed. My work was suspended and I was asked to write self-criticisms and hand in my Falun Gong books. I could not understand. I was the same person, only having gained the understanding of life’s significance and meaning, and was trying to be better than a good person. I was receiving praise a day before, but the next day I was made never to raise my head again,” Zhang wrote in her autobiography.
As third party investigative reports and witness statements like Zhang’s indicate, in dealing with Falun Gong practitioners the regime demands absolute submission. Officials are sanctioned to use extreme physical and psychological methods to break the will. Victims say the more they refuse to submit, the harsher, crueler, and more brutal the torment.
