“I have seen the worst of what man can do”: Beijing
Resident James Ouyang Told the Washington Post after 20 Days of Brainwashing
Sessions
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SAN
FRANCISCO (FDI) — A U.S. Consulate official in Shanghai has informed Ms.
Yeong-Ching Foo that Chinese authorities have been forcing her fiancé Dr.
Charles Lee to undergo brainwashing sessions on a daily basis. The sessions are
carried out to force Dr. Lee to renounce Falun Gong, and have occurred despite
numerous protests from the U. S. State Department.
According
to what Dr. Lee told the U.S. Consulate official, he is visited every day by a
top Communist Party official who tries to “transform” him. Authorities at the
prison are also pressuring him through his family and, for the past month, have
been forcefully taking him to long hours of brainwashing classes.
What
are “brainwashing” classes?
Throughout
his incarceration, many concerned parties around the world have expressed deep
concern for Dr. Lee’s well-being, fearing he would be beaten or physically
tortured like countless other Falun Gong practitioners who are held in China’s
extensive labor camp system.
The
true horror of what Dr. Lee and all Falun Gong practitioners in China face,
however, is perhaps not solely the beatings and physical torture, but rather, a
sinister collection of techniques and methods aimed at breaking the will and
dissolving the spirit of a person. These methods are employed until the victim
either loses his mental faculties or submits to the ideology of the oppressors
so he or she can be used to “transform” or “re-educate” others.
Consider
the case of Mr. James Ouyang, reported by the Washington Post in 2001:
At
a police station in western Beijing, Ouyang was stripped and interrogated for
five hours. “If I responded incorrectly, that is if I didn’t say, ‘Yes,’
they shocked me with the electric truncheon,” he said.
Then,
he was transferred to a labor camp in Beijing’s western suburbs. There, the
guards ordered him to stand facing a wall. If he moved, they shocked him. If
he fell down from fatigue, they shocked him.
Each
morning, he had five minutes to eat and relieve himself. “If I didn’t
make it, I went in my pants,” he said. “And they shocked me for
that, too.”
By
the sixth day, Ouyang said, he couldn’t see straight from staring at plaster
three inches from his face. His knees buckled, prompting more shocks and
beatings. He gave in to the guards’ demands.
For
the next three days, Ouyang denounced [Falun Gong’s] teachings, shouting
into the wall. Officers continued to shock him about the body and he soiled
himself regularly. Finally, on the 10th day, Ouyang’s repudiation of the group
was deemed sufficiently sincere.
He
was taken before a group of Falun Gong inmates and rejected the group one more
time as a video camera rolled. Ouyang left jail and entered the brainwashing
classes. Twenty days later after debating Falun Gong for 16 hours a day, he
“graduated.”
“The
pressure on me was and is incredible,” he said. “In the past two
years, I have seen the worst of what man can do. We really are the worst
animals on Earth.”
Mr.
Ouyang’s case is similar to thousands of cases that the Falun Dafa Information
Center has received over the last four years about practitioners who have been
sent to brainwashing classes.
The
Madness in The Method
This
brainwashing may seem difficult to understand for Western readers, but it is a
method that has been utilized and repeatedly refined in the successive,
tumultuous political campaigns that have swept through China over the past fifty
years since the Communist Party took power. It is a method of breaking a
person’s will and usurping the entirety of his or her ideals, replacing them
with the Party line.
Today,
this refined method of destroying the will and spirit is one of the primary ways
in which the former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin aims to “eradicate Falun Gong.”
Among the methods reportedly used on Falun Gong practitioners in brainwashing
sessions are:
- Severe
sleep deprivation, starvation and little or no access to bathroom facilities
for days or even weeks.
- Being
hung by the wrists or all four limbs from the ceiling and receiving electric
shocks to the body, including to the genitalia and head for prolonged
periods.
- Sharpened
bamboo sticks pierced through the finger tips and then prying up the finger
nails.
- Being
forced to watch videos that demonize the teachings of Falun Gong, and in
which a variety of logical and rhetorical tricks are used to try to convince
one how “stupid” he or she is for practicing Falun Gong, and that the
principle of “Truthfulness-Compassion-Tolerance” is evil. If the person
diverts their eyes from the screen, they are severely beaten or
shocked.
- Having
immediate family members — often scared and crying due to threats from
authorities — are forced to plead with those held in the brainwashing sessions
to give up their beliefs.
- Being
fired from one’s job, ridiculed in local newspapers, and told that the
only way one will get out without giving up one’s belief is if one dies in
the prison camp.
These
techniques and variations of them are corroborated by countless eye-witness
testimonies the Falun Dafa Information Center has received over the past four
years.
Right
now, Dr. Charles Lee — a U.S. citizen, holding a U.S. passport — is alone in
a Chinese jail with the full might of the Chinese regime weighing down on him to
break his will. It is possible that his U.S. citizenship will allow him to
escape severe physical torture, but the intent of the brainwashing classes he is
forced to attend is the same, and the techniques utilized can be just as
sinister.
It
is clear that his captors want to make an example out of Dr. Lee; that is,
transform him into a tool they can use to further demonize Falun Gong, and
thereby advance Jiang Zemin’s cause to “eradicate Falun Gong.”
The
international community cannot and must not condone such treatment, under the
name of brainwashing or any other euphemism or excuse. It is a grotesque
violation of human rights and is the very antithesis of freedom of belief.
Posting date: 16/Nov/2003
Original article date: 15/Nov/2003
Category: World News
