(Minghui.org) Having been incarcerated in Wangling Prison, Hunan Province for several years, I remember it as an evil place where male Falun Gong practitioners in the province were brutally tortured for upholding our faith in Falun Gong. Falun Gong, also called Falun Dafa, is a peaceful mind-body discipline that has been persecuted by the Chinese communist regime since 1999. 

In order to forcibly convert practitioners who follow the principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance into Chinese Communist Party followers, the prison deployed various tactics to torture us and deprive us of our basic rights. We were not given enough food or allowed to buy food with our own money. Our families were not allowed to see us when they came to visit us.

If any of us was persistent in telling people the facts about Falun Gong or doing the Falun Gong exercises, the prison guards would punish us by making us sit on the tiger bench for many hours without eating or going to the toilet. Sometimes, we were forced to stand continuously for several days. As a result, our legs became swollen, and we became dizzy and disoriented. The guards then began to beat, kick or slap us harshly to force us to give up Falun Gong.

Once, when guard Liu Xiaoliang was on duty, he ordered every practitioner to curse Falun Gong before every meal, and those who refused to do so would be denied food. 

Yang Haibo, the deputy prison director, was transferred to Wangling Prison in 2019 from Yueyang Prison. He tortured the inmates with the methods used in the Cultural Revolution era. 

For three consecutive days, the inmates sent to solitary confinement were forced to line up at the workshop entrance, then other inmates hung signs around their necks. The signs had words stating the reasons for their confinement. After all the other inmates arrived at the workshop to work, the confined ones were forced to read their confinement reasons out loud, adding the sentence “I am dead meat” at the end. One inmate with a gong stood beside them and banged it after each reading. 

The workshop enforced the so-called “three no rules,” meaning “no looking up, no walking and no talking.” When a new inmate looked at Yang Haibo on September 20, 2020, during his inspection, he went over and slapped him in the face harshly. 

Mr. Kuang Sen, 64, a Qidong County, Hunan Province resident, was given 15 days in solitary confinement and forced to do leg splits, which caused his muscle to become torn, for not following Yang’s rules.

During my years in the prison, I have seen young practitioners driven insane and elderly practitioners becoming incapacitated as a result of the torture. The prison then claimed that these practitioners developed those symptoms because they refused medical treatment. Two Falun Gong practitioners, Mr. Tan Huidong and Ms. Lu Songming, passed away in 2019 to 2021, respectively, shortly after their release from prison.

Practitioners and other inmates were forced to work every day at the workshop, dubbed “Skill Practice Building,” and most of the products made were against international slavery law. The products were marked as products made by the Mingde Company and exported to foreign markets. Right before I was released, Li Shaolin, an inmate monitoring the workshop, broke another inmate’s nose in the production line.

Made with free labor, the products from the prison had competitive prices on the market and became a good source of profit for the prison. In the meantime, prison staff also extorted money from inmates to fatten their pockets.

In the Tenth Ward, a high security unit, the inmates were incited to verbally abuse or torture Falun Gong practitioners with impunity. The prison’s motto to “educate” the prisoners to become better people couldn’t be further from the truth. The prison is truly a hell on Earth, much different from the words displayed at its entrance: “Enjoying the fruits of civilization and bathing in the new wind of civilization.”