The
group dispersed without incident after their petition was submitted, but perhaps
more frightened by the size of the organisation than by its peaceful, apolitical
ideology, the Communist Party promptly initiated a crackdown that saw tens of
thousands arrested in one day, while the Government-run news media began an insidious
propaganda campaign. Worse was to come, as Falun Gong students were imprisoned
in "re-education camps" where they were tortured, beaten, brainwashed
and killed. Zeng’s life had hardly been trouble-free before her imprisonment.
A botched medical procedure in 1992 caused two massive internal haemorrhages,
and an ensuing blood transfusion left her with hepatitis C. "Movement
of any sort made me nauseous," she writes, adding that she "felt so
wretched that life hardly seemed worth living". Five years after the
operation, Zeng’s younger sister sent her copies of the major Falun Gong texts
and she was "hooked". "It’s no exaggeration to say that
these books shook me more than all the other books I had ever read, put together,"
Zeng says. She claims that by practising the exercises outlined in the
books, her health improved dramatically – even her hepatitis "vanished
without a trace". Naturally, she was an extremely zealous convert,
and thus it’s no surprise that she was one of the first practitioners to be imprisoned.
The author was arrested three times before being sent to a labour camp
in 2000. Most of the book is an account of the horrific abuse that Zeng and thousands
of her fellow students suffered in these prisons. Ferocious beatings administered
by guards and other inmates – those imprisoned for "real" crimes,
sleep deprivation, electric shock treatment and back-breaking labour were the
everyday realities of prison life. Zeng recalls many of her captor’s inventive
methods of torture, such as being forced to stand for days on end with a saucer
of water on one’s head, with a vicious beating ensuing whenever a drop was spilled.
One woman was tied to a bed "for more than 50 days" until "the
muscles and skin of her whole back and arms went putrid". Another
was stood on and attacked with an electric prod so that "her chest ended
up looking like the fried underside of a pancake". It’s difficult
for an unconverted reader to comprehend how the Falun Gong students could choose
to suffer such appalling abuse when they could be freed simply by proclaiming
that they rejected their faith whether they really had or not. Indeed,
after three torturous years, that is how Zeng herself finally earned her freedom.
She justified her "betrayal" by deciding she needed to escape
to write a book to expose the workings of the system – but now, incredibly,
she seems to regret her decision. "I had experienced and survived
these trials," she writes, referring to the torture and the brainwashing,
"but was finally fooled by the delusion of the advantages of ‘doing it for
Dafa, doing it to expose evil’." This statement might seem ridiculous
to us – after all, she’s claiming that it would have been better for her
to remain in prison than to lie to her captors and escape – but we have the
luxury of living in a society where the ideals of freedom of speech and thought
exist. It’s easy for us to take them for granted . . . and hard to comprehend
that, to the Falun Gong students imprisoned in China, they’re worth dying for.
Zeng now lives with her daughter in Sydney, although her husband is still
trapped in China. It’s difficult to criticise a book like this. Even if
it was preachy or poorly written (which it isn’t), and even if it espouses a spiritual
movement based on metaphysical philosophising that the reader might have trouble
digesting (which I did), its message is so worthy and so powerfully expressed
that it can’t be ignored. The Chinese Government’s flagrant and frequent
violations of its people’s fundamental human rights have not gone unnoticed by
the rest of the world, but nor have they received the attention and the scorn
that they deserve. Let’s hope that Witnessing History marks another step
towards reversing that situation. Witnessing History – One Woman’s
Fight for Freedom and Falun Gong by Jennifer Zeng (Allen & Unwin, $29.95)
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