Forty detainees were forced to face the wall in the small and dingy cell as Crystal Chen was tortured. The police wanted to be sure that they heard the torture but did not see it. Their last victim had passed out, so Chen was a fresh challenge.
They threw her on the floor and four large males from China’s notorious 610 Office held her limbs down.
A water bottle was cut in half to be used as a funnel. A one-pound bag of salt was poured inside the bottle, a token bit of water added. Chen’s eyes were covered with a dirty towel. Guards shoved the opening of the bottle against Chen’s teeth and tried to pry her mouth open with a used toothbrush. She was obstinate—she knew the salt could kill her.
The female guard got the men to use a stick to scratch her foot, causing her to gasp.
“The salt went everywhere into my mouth and up my nose,” Crystal said in an interview in New York, after arriving in the United States May 13.
“It was hot, hot pain in my throat and nose. I couldn’t breathe; I thought I was going to die.”
Chen said she was struggling hard against the pain when she decided to relax and pray for the strength to endure. Almost immediately the chief guard ordered the torture to stop. One of the guards holding her down fell over.
“I vomited salt and blood for the following days and could not eat,” Chen said. “My gums were full of blood, I could hardly talk. They still handcuffed me.”
Room 212 in the Tianhe District Detention Center, Guangzhou City, China, was the scene of Chen’s first experience of torture. She was 27 years old at the time and had been practicing Falun Gong, an ancient spiritual practice, for three years. Chen was arrested just days before Christmas in 1999, after handing in a petition letter at the Central Petition Bureau, expressing her wish for the persecution of Falun Gong to stop.
Six days after her release from the detention center, a male practitioner, Gao Xianmin, died after being subjected to the same high-density salt torture.
Chen was soon fired from her job for reasons of “violating labor discipline.” She was one of the hundreds of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners to have been harassed at work and lose their jobs during the persecution in China.
Chen’s next arrest, in 2000, saw her in a detention center in Hebei Province.
“They handcuffed me to a radiator pipe for three days and forced me to tell my name,” she said. “I saw many fellow practitioners from all over China being tortured by sticks, hanging up, and electric baton shocks; their skin was covered with black bruises and burns.”
