My name is Yang Dazhi. I was born in 1967 in Sujiatun of Shenyang City, Liaoning Province. I currently reside in Britain. The following is my personal experience, which is far from being unique in China.
In a society that doesn’t truly practice law, anyone can have a similar experience. Speaking out about my experience may be beneficial for others. In Sujiatun Detention Center I saw Falun Gong practitioners, and I will not forget my encounters with them for the rest of my life.
My Wife was Raped and Committed Suicide
I graduated in 1989 from the Math Department at Liaoning University. My graduation was affected by my participation in the June Fourth Student Democracy Movement, thus I was sent to teach math at Wanggang Middle School, a village middle school in a suburb of Shenyang City. On October 5, 1991, I married my first wife Zhou Mingjing, who studied liberal arts. She was my high school and college classmate. Our relationship was very good.
In late 1992, our daughter was born. My wife was introverted, quiet, and very beautiful. At that time we lived in apartment 2 on the 7th floor of Unit 4 in Building 37. We lived a peaceful life and never imagined the disaster that was to come upon us one day.
At that time, my wife was a secretary at Chuanyi Glass and Steel Limited in Shenyang. On the surface, this company is a joint venture corporation of Taiwan. In fact it is managed by some people at the public security bureau in the city. The company is at 186 Xuesong Road in Sujiatun district. It is not far from the Shenyang-Dalian Highway tollgate, and is also about a five-minute bike ride to the Sujiatun Thrombosis Hospital. The company’s boss, Dai Youchuan, is over 40 years old, a representative to the People’s Congress in Shenyang, and had received an award for being an outstanding national entrepreneur.
I later discovered that Dai Youchuan is a sexual harasser. He once had a pretty secretary named Wang Chunlin whom he had raped. The girl’s parents found out about Dai Youchuan, so Dai bought a house for her family in Shenyang suburb as compensation. I had heard that Wang Chunlin’s sister Wang Shuhua was also raped by Dai Youchuan.
December 15, 1999 is a day I will never forget. My wife came home very late. When she arrived home, she had an unusual expression on her face. Later she told me she was raped by Dai Youchuan and that she could not face another day. I still remember what she said, “I cannot believe this… I don’t need to go to work anymore, everything is finished.”
At 9:30 p.m., my wife suddenly jumped out of the 7th floor window. After I found out, I immediately called a taxi and took my wife to the Sujiatun Hospital, which is three-minute drive from my home. The doctor checked my wife’s pulse and said, “This person is already dead, take the body to the mortuary.”
I was utterly confused at that time, and I could only think of going to the public security bureau to make a report. Later, I realized the hospital didn’t ask me to sign anything. Not only did they not have a death notification to be signed by a relative, but they also did not have permission from any relative to cremate the body. Seventeen hours after my wife’s death, people from the public security bureau forcefully cremated my wife’s body. Later I went to appeal, but they used the fact that I didn’t have any testimony of a witness and evidence as an excuse to refuse my investigation request. Even now I don’t know if they have done anything about my wife’s body.
The Rapist Is a People’s Congress Representative
Once I knew that my wife had died, I rushed to the Democracy Police Station close to where I live to report the case. Afterwards they asked me to go to Sujiatun District Public Security Bureau. After listening to my introduction, all the police there said that life is the most important and they will do a thorough investigation.
The morning of the second day after her death, my father and I went to Sujiatun funeral home to take possession of my wife’s remains. The Sujiatun Cremation Center is close to Dayangan village and Zhangjiang village, and is divided into two yards. At that time we had planned to take the remains and put it in front of the office building of the Sujiatun district. If the problem were not solved, we would not move the body. However the people from the crematory center didn’t allow us to take the body. I had to go back to the police station to reason things out.
Dai Youchuan asked a mediator to beg for leniency from my father in-law. In the end he gave my father-in-law 20,000 yuan to keep quiet. However, I felt the matter could not be settled privately like this. I had to find justice for my wife. On December 17, I found Sujiatun People’s Congress Legal Office Director Liu Yucheng.
I later found out that Liu Yucheng was a legal consultant of Dai’s company. In principal, the person who works at a legal office in the government cannot work part-time in a company. At that time, Liu had a bad attitude. He told me, “What do you want to do, go appeal wherever you want? I don’t have time to deal with you!”
At 1 p.m. on December 18, I phoned Dai Youchuan and asked him to take responsibility for everything. Two hours later, police from the Huxi Police Station arrested me at my home. Their excuse for my arrest is that I “intimidated and threatened the personal safety of a representative of the city People’s Congress.”
I was detained in Huxi Police Station from 3 p.m. until midnight to record an oral confession. I wasn’t given any drinking water. I told them that my wife had been raped, but what the police recorded was that my wife had committed adultery with other people. In the end, a policeman asked me if I had any request, I said, “Chastise the murderer! Everybody is equal in front of the law.” The police laughed after hearing this, “Equal? You wait and see what equality is.”
District Security Section Chief Li Xingbin, A Smiling Tiger
Around 7 p.m., the section chief of the public security section of Sujiatun District, Li Xingbin (later I heard he was promoted to become the chief of Sujiatun District Public Security Bureau) came to talk to me. He is a typical smiling tiger — gentle on surface but cruel inside. Later I became to know what he had done on the sly.
He said he'd heard my wife also practiced Falun Gong. I was very surprised by his words. Later I understood he was trying to find an excuse to make a false charge against us. I answered that my wife didn’t practice Falun Gong, and it was just that many arrested Falun Gong practitioners were taken to her factory for forced labor.
I heard my wife mention that the factory had poor working conditions. The chemical powder used for making glass fibers is very dense and toxic chemicals were everywhere. Many people suffered from silicosis after working there for a few years. At that time, many of these workers there were female Falun Gong practitioners who were illegally arrested and put to forced labor. Afterwards I learned that once Falun Gong practitioners were arrested, the females were sent to work in the glass fiber factory, while the males were sent to coal mines close to Sujiatun to dig for coal.
It was said that every day two large buses would transport them from the outside to the factory. In the factory, plain-clothes police watched over them and there were a few large German Shepherds. The factory was fenced off by iron railings. Over 79 people would crowd into one bus. Every day over one hundred people would be transported to the factory very early in the morning, and work until very late then they were transported back. No one knows where they were detained. Watching them work so hard, my wife was very sympathetic towards them.
Li Xingbin saw this technique did not work on me and he pretended to comfort me, “She is already dead. It’s no use fighting for it. Dao Youchuan is a representative of Shenyang Municipal People’s Congress. The higher authorities are protecting him — how awkward is this for me?” He said, “You save face for me. As long as you agree to settle this under the table, don’t hesitate to turn to me if you are in difficulty. I will try my best to help.”
I responded to him that first of all I didn’t know him, therefore, there was no such thing as saving him face or not. Besides, the case is a serious crime related to someone’s life. It is not something that can be solved by saving someone’s face. I demanded punishment for the rapist in accordance with the law. Seeing I was determined, he said, “You take care of yourself.” then left. Later I realized he'd already thought of way to deal with me.
At 4 a.m., two policemen came in saying that the chief of the Sujiatun District Public Security Bureau wanted to talk to me so they came to take me to his office. At the time, I wasn’t thinking clearly, I even believed what they said — that their chief could talk to me even at 4 a.m. When I walked outside with them, I realized things were not right. Two policemen kidnapped to me in Dai Youchuan’s car. The driver was Dai’s driver. The car didn’t stop at the district security bureau. In the end, they locked me up at the Sujiatun detention center, which is next to No. 46 middle school.
The Sujiatun Detention Center
It is not going too far at all to describe Sujiatun as a hell on earth. It is not big, with a total of seven rooms, each no more than 10 square meters, but in every room there were about 30 to 40 people locked up. Thieves, drug-abusers, gangsters, many kinds of people, but the majority were Falun Gong practitioners.
With so many people crowded into the room, there was no way to lie down to sleep. Only the prison bully could sleep lying down. The rest of the people didn’t even have enough room to sit. In order to punish Falun Gong practitioners, using the excuse of letting them meditate, policemen ordered the criminals to separate practitioners’ legs into a very awkward position, which could easily break bones. They had to sit very straight, with eyes looking forward. For a person to sit in this position for 10 minutes is unbearable. But they had to sit for over 10 hours. If their backs were not straight, the prison guard would kick them in their backs. Many people were injured.
The detention center only served two meals a day, one at 8 a.m. and another at 3 p.m. The food was not enough to properly feed anyone. What the prisoners ate was unwashed cabbage, boiled with a little bit of salt. There was never any meat. One day an old man found a piece of meat in his bowl, and it looked like small intestines. Later another person found mouse hair in his bowl. We understood that a little mouse in the cabbage had been chopped and cooked.
There is a little shop in the detention center. Everything is extremely expensive there. A regular pack of instant noodles normally worth 20 cents was sold for ten yuan; 80-cent sausage also cost 10 yuan. Cigarettes worth two yuan were sold for 20 yuan.
No One Dares Buy Vegetables Grown in Ashes of the Dead
At the detention center, we were not allowed to talk with each other. But practitioners could be identified right away because they were all very honest and nice. Their expressions in their eyes looked very different from those of the criminals.
There was a Falun Gong practitioner, arrested from Benxi City, about 40 years old. He was very honest. But the prison guard said he was dishonest and ordered the prison bully to punish him. So someone found a huge iron rod and a thick magazine and ordered him to press the magazine on the practitioner’s chest. Then one person helped him stand up while another person smashed into the magazine with the iron rod. This way, on the outside one couldn’t see any bruises, but the internal organs were damaged.
After they smashed over 10 times, that Falun Gong practitioner could no longer endure it. He vomited blood, fell on the ground and couldn’t stand up. Later the prison guard took him to another room. I never saw him again. Later I heard from a criminal that “he left for enjoyment.” I guess he was beaten to death.
After I came aboard, I heard from my relative that after the year 2000 too many ashes of the dead at Sujiatun crematorium were unidentified. Staff began wrapping them in plastic bags and throwing them outside. Some farmers took them and spread them onto the farmlands. Vegetables grown this way always grow really well and, at first they fetched a good price. But later, before negotiating a price, a buyer would ask, “Where are you from? Dayangan Village or Zhanjiang Village?” Those places were next to the Sujiatun funeral home. Vegetables grown in the ashes of the dead — who dares to eat them?
Life in This Way Was Even Harder
There was another person who practiced Falun Gong, over 40, medium in stature, with the outward appearance of someone from a small town. Once, he was ordered by the prison guard to stand upright, with both of his thumbs tied firmly by a shoelace to the top of the metal gate. Moments later, his thumbs started to turn dark due to the lack of blood circulation. Five hours later, both of his legs began to tremble violently. Then his legs and feet swelled to an enormous size.
From that morning to the next morning, the man had been kept standing that way — with his hands held up in mid air — forbidden to urinate or defecate. Those around him empathized with his suffering, and bent down beside him, on after the other, so that he could take a rest on their backs. Most of those who offered their backs for him to sit on were other Falun Gong practitioners. I also took a turn.
I still remember a young man from Harbin who practiced Falun Gong. The prison guards often arranged to have him beaten by the other convicts — their sick way of “re-educating” him. One day several convicts encircled him and started kicking him so violently that the young man fainted dead away. I was there and saw it happen. The police found a rickshaw and told a few of us to put the man in it. We took him to the nearby Sujiatun Thrombosis Treatment Center. A doctor used an injector tube to move across his skin, but there was no response. Seeing that the man’s pupils remained dilated, the doctor said it was no use to save him and had someone dump him into another room.
The police who escorted him to the hospital said, “Death is also a way to free oneself.” I was told that the young man’s mother came to identify her son’s body, but was so shocked by what had happened to him that she refused to admit that he was her son. Her son had been tortured beyond all recognition.
There was another youngster in his early twenties who could not endure the inhumane torture and attempted to commit suicide by swallowing the copper buttons and zipper of his clothing. I saw him rolling around painfully on the floor due to stomach cramps, his whole face sweating. Having been told of the situation, the prison guard said calmly, “I have experienced this kind of thing many times. I am terribly good at curing this kind of illness.” He ordered the four of us to carry the convulsing man out and bind him to a chair. Then the prison guard found a beer bottle and knocked off its bottom to serve as a funnel to force salty raw leeks and a half box of flour down the young man’s throat. Meanwhile, we were asked to hold the young man fast to the chair — he thrashed about so hard I thought we might tear his ears off trying to keep his head still. The victim’s mouth was bleeding profusely from the force-feeding. After having been force-fed all the stuff, the young man was carried away.
Several torture methods were used against Falun Gong practitioners. One of them was called “sitting as a jet plane,” in which the victim was made to bend 90 degrees from the waist and extend their arms behind them as high as they could. Another torture method was called “scooter riding,” in which the victim was made to squat down and imitate the sound of a scooter as if he were riding a scooter. If the victim was tired and stopped, he would be beaten and kicked. Still another torture method was called “disco dancing,” in which the victim, with his hands on a metal gate, was subjected to electric shocks. Electric batons with electric currents of thousands of volts were used to attack the victim. The electrified victim could not help jumping involuntarily.
Such tragic scenes of torture were common spectacles in the detention center. The police usually spent hour after hour at their dirty work of torture. They employed prison bullies to administer the beatings, so that if the prisoner died, they could claim it occurred during a jailhouse fight. They even claimed that Falun Gong practitioners fought each other and beat each other to death.
These horrible memories weigh heavily upon me. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s dictatorship is far beyond our imagination. In fact, to be shot or to be tortured to death in not so terrible, as compared with living on in deadly fear of being subjected to day after day of mental and physical torture. I think those who practice Falun Gong are also made of flesh and blood, and require eating, drinking and sleeping to stay alive. They have been tortured so brutally. Alas! It is against the heavenly law.
The Cunning of a Smiling Tiger
Let me switch back to my own story. After I had been in the detention center for four days, I was transferred to Linchengbao Mining Camp in Sujiatun, which was around the train station of Linchengbao town. At the camp, the police wore no uniforms, except for its leader, a man named Ge; he wore a shabby old uniform.
At that time there were over 600 detainees in the Linchengbao camp, mostly male and 70 percent of them Falun Gong practitioners.
Once there, some of us were dispatched to Hongyang Coal Mine to work the mine, while the others were sent to the coal waste factory to pulverize stone. At first I was supposed to labor. But later Li Xingbin, chief of Public Security Section in Sujiatun, came to the camp to have talks with me. He wanted me to settle my case out of court. As one of the CCP officials, he impressed me with his deceitful tactics to turn big problems into small ones, and small ones into no problems at all.
He asked me, “Why do you torture yourself this way? You have witnessed the situations in the camp, which go far beyond your imagination. Even If you don’t consider yourself, you should take your kids and elderly parents into consideration.” Based on his reasoning, with the development of the case, it was not the rapist who should be blamed; instead it was me, the victim, who should be blamed.
He continued, “Well goes a Chinese old saying, ‘The good will be met with the good, the evil with the evil.’ Dai Youchuan did something wrong against his own conscience. Retribution for the wrongdoings he committed will eventually come. You don’t have to confront him for justice. You see, I am in a dilemma. My superiors want to bail out Dai Youchuan. If you refuse me this favor, how could I handle the case? Let’s settle the case in this way. I'll let Dai Youchuan pay the funeral costs, which came to over 10,000 yuan and offer child support until your daughter is 18 years old. If you agree with the deal, I will immediately ask the head of the detention center, Ge, to let you go.”
As a result, I regained my freedom 14 days later, after I had been in the detention center for four days and in the camp for another ten. I came away with serious head wounds, several missing teeth that had been knocked out during police beatings, and scars from being whipped. In the detention center, prison guards and cell leaders beat people for no specific reason; they would make up any excuse to start beating someone. There we rose at 4 a.m. and were not allowed to rest in the cell until 11:30 p.m. Words failed to describe hardships of life over there. It was exactly a hell on earth.
Capability of Chief of the Public Security Section
On the afternoon of the following day, I, together with my father, came to the office of Li Xingbin to have him keep his promise. That day I was kept waiting for a long time in his office because many people were waiting to see him. First came a middle-aged man, showing his humility by nodding and bowing. It was said that his daughter-in-law had been imprisoned for a long time for practicing Falun Gong. His grandchildren needed someone to take care of them. Now he came to pay the penalty to secure his daughter-in-law’s release. I heard Li Xingbin say, “I will have mercy on you. For the sake of your humble attitude, I will let you pay less. The penalty comes to 4,000 yuan. Otherwise, it would have been 20,000 yuan.”
Then Li Xingbin took out a piece of paper and pen and wrote, “Penalty of 4,000 yuan received today.” Li asked the old man to sign his name. Then Li slid the receipt together with the money into an envelope and locked it in his safe. I doubt the receipt would be of any function being locked in his safe.
Li Xingbin Broke Every Promise
After Li finished this business, he turned to speak to me in a stern voice. “After coming back and thinking it over, I am afraid that it may not be suitable for Dai Youchuan to pay the funeral expenses of 12,000 yuan (US$1,518). After all, you were a couple in the past, why don’t you just share half of it. In terms of your daughter’s upbringing cost, in my view, it may not be suitable for Dai to cover it either. You'd better pay by yourself.”
While talking, he took out the six thousand yuan (US$760) offered by Dai, and put it in my father’s hands. In the meantime, he pulled out a piece of pre-written paper and asked me to sign my name on it. As far as I can recall, it said, “Yang Dazhi sincerely acknowledged his faults and agreed to reconcile the dispute in private as well as promised not to accuse Dai Youchuan any more.”
Upon reading it, I became enraged. But Li suddenly changed his smiling face and shouted at me immediately, “Damn you! If you don’t recognize the reality, I'll put you in jail again, and you should not blame me for cruelty.”
At the moment, my father was so infuriated that he burst into tears. But he was afraid that I might be sent to jail again as he held that it is impossible for a civilian to defy government officials. He thus asked me to sign my name on the paper. Afterward, Li forced my father to sign it as well. The paper eventually ended up with Dai Youchuan, as insurance that he would never be tried for his crimes.
After experiencing all these things, I became quite desperate. Fortunately, one of my relatives was quite rich. As he worried about my safety, he got me a passport and gave me some money for the traveling expenses to Zimbabwe.
According to Zimbabwe’s laws, as long as I held a passport valid for a period of over three months, I was entitled to a six-month landing visa upon my arrival, and this visa limit could be extended by the immigration authorities.
I thus left China for Zimbabwe on February 23, 2000, and soon thereafter I met my current wife, who is a Zimbabwean. After living there for a few years, I came to the U.K. to apply for asylum along with my wife. We currently have a two-year old daughter, and my previous daughter in China is still living in Shenyang and has been raised by my father.
A Story About a Director of Sujiatun Thrombosis Hospital
In terms of the harvesting of organs from living Falun Gong practitioners in the secret concentration camp in Sujiatun, since I have been overseas since 2000, I have no idea about what has happened in Sujiatun Thrombosis Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine. But one thing I am sure of is that if we had asked the police who relentlessly persecuted Falun Gong practitioners to help harvest organs from Falun Gong practitioners for profit, they definitely would have been more than willing to do so. Judging from the location of the Hospital and the close relationship between the Hospital and the Sujiatun Detention Center as well as the Custody and Interrogation Center, it was obvious to many people that they were colluding with each other. In addition, we have the following two indirect clues.
One of my senior high school classmates, by the name of Jin Fushen, was a hard working student whose father suffered from mental illness. His family was so poor that they could not even afford to buy aluminum pan lids, so their pan lids were made of sorghum stalks. He was admitted into China Medical University in Shenyang, and after graduation, he was assigned to work at Sujiatun Thrombosis, where he finally became a director of the Department of Cerebral Surgery.
Historically, that facility was not known for turning good profits. But beginning in 2000 the profits began to skyrocket. My classmate began making a lot of money. People noticed his increased income, but doubted foul play beyond the usual bribe taking. My former classmates talked about him with envy and contempt.
At that time, I didn’t think much about the matter. After the Sujiatun organ-harvesting incident was exposed to the public, I called my classmates and friends in an attempt to get more insight into Jin Fushen’s situation. They unanimously replied that they had no idea about it, but some did tell me directly that the national security bureau had warned them not to talk about the matter, and that many telephones had been monitored, so no one really had the courage to talk about what they knew.
Livers Are Available at Anytime
One of my elderly relatives received a full-size liver graft at the First Affiliated Hospital of the China Medical University in Shengyang in 2005. The expenses for the operation amounted to 250,000 yuan (US$31,600), and she waited in the hospital for about two months, due mainly to the time for cashing the checks. The hospital performed the transplant the day after the money went through.
She was told by a friend that worked in the hospital that her liver came from a young man in his twenties. As soon as the blood typing and tissue matching were completed in the hospital, the hospital immediately found the matching donor through the Internet, but the transplant operation was not performed until the payment in full was made. Since the operation, she has suffered massive graft rejections. Within a year, the expenses for post-operative treatment, including the cost for various anti-rejection drugs amounted to 130,000 yuan (US$16,400), which made the total cost of the procedure approach 380,000 yuan (US$48,000).
The First Affiliated Hospital of China Medical University in Shenyang is close to the Thrombosis Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine. Nobody knows how they were able to find the liver donor so easily. Apparently, livers were available anytime.
Another story just came to mind. When detained in the Linsheng Custody and Interrogation Center, one day I saw a doctor giving an injection to a man. Though the doctor claimed that the man was sick, we didn’t notice any symptoms. The doctor had asked some guys to hold him down and had forcibly given him an injection. The man’s mouth was skewed the following day, and the doctor said that he had cerebral thrombosis. As a result he was sent to the Thrombosis Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine in Sujiatun, and nobody knew of his whereabouts since then.
Regarding the underground facility in Sujiatun, to my knowledge many underground shelters were established in the Shenyang area over a period of four to five years during the Great Cultural Revolution to prepare for wars and natural disasters. These shelters were under the jurisdiction of the reserves of the Sujiatun district, and managed by the People’s Armed Forces Department of the Public Security System. The shelters were each built large enough to accommodate hundreds of people.
There are two reasons for me to step forward to share my stories. First, I want to do justice to my former wife, who was persecuted to death. Second, it is my hope to let more Chinese people realize the intrinsic nature of China. I am a patriot; however, patriotism doesn’t mean that I love the CCP. My horrible experience is far from unique. Similar injustices have happened to many people since then and will happen to many more. I have written to expose to the public the dark side of the CCP’s collusion, and to let people know what the Chinese communist regime has done with its autocratic power.
No long ago, I made a phone call to the director of the Public Security Bureau and told him that I was no longer afraid of them, and that though they brutally persecuted me before, I am firmly convinced that they will get their due in time, and it will be even worse than what they forced upon their many victims. The CCP will soon collapse, so let’s just wait and see.
