Feature
Nothing left to lose
by Graham Reid
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A report by the US State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor published last month contains a damning catalogue of human rights abuses by the Chinese government: physical abuse resulting in deaths in custody; torture; coerced confessions; harassment, detention and imprisonment of those perceived as a threat to the party or government authority; and forced labour. Estimates of the numbers of Falun Gong adherents who have died in custody as a result of torture, abuse or neglect ranged from several hundred to a few thousand.
Huang Juo-Hua tells his story with deliberation and directness, and an unwavering gaze. He met his future wife in Guangzhou, southern China in April 1999. Both practised Falun Gong. In October of that year, when the government defined “heretical cults” and declared Falun Gong to be one, the couple went to Tiananmen Square in Beijing to join protests. They were arrested and Huang was taken to a prison in his home province where he was deprived of food and made to do heavy labour. Luo was imprisoned for 15 days in Guangzhou and force-fed salt water when she went on a hunger strike. After 20 days Huang was released and rejoined Luo in Guangzhou. They married in April 2000.
In November 2002, police came to their house and found Falun Gong books. The pair were arrested and detained in separate police stations. Huang went on a hunger strike and was force-fed through nostril tubes, which, when first inserted, pierced internal organs.
When police learned his wife was three months pregnant with their second child, she was removed from custody and initially taken to the Huang Pu district for what Huang says was brainwashing, then to a hospital where she was guarded by officers from the 610 unit. His wife’s sister learnt where she was being held and visited.
On December 1, the sister saw a policeman run into the room where Luo was detained. The sister assumed Luo had escaped, but on the street, three storeys below, lay her near-lifeless body.
As Huang tells it, his wife’s body had no broken bones – which gives the lie to the 610 assertion that she jumped. She had insisted the day before that she wanted to live for her baby’s sake. She had a severe head injury consistent with a blow. A second injury appeared after she was transferred to another hospital.
She died, aged 29, on December 4, with her unborn baby inside her. Huang, still in custody, wasn’t informed until four months later. He saw her body briefly and could identify his wife only by a distinctive front tooth. In December 2003, he was released from detention, having been forced to renounce Falun Gong and watch re-education films. He returned to Guangzhou. The following year he obtained a passport in his home province before fleeing to Bangkok in August 2004. Later that year a friend brought his daughter to him. He applied for and was granted UN refugee status.
Kaixin is suffering greatly, he says. She cries for her mother. It is she who puts the flowers around the sad-looking young woman in the photograph.
Falun Gong has become more than an irritant to the Chinese authorities as it engages in sophisticated anti-government activities. During early 2002, several successful hijackings of public television broadcasting time were carried out by Falun Gong members, who tapped into cable television networks in several north-eastern cities. Such overt anti-government actions are rare, and courageous, in China and are not always well understood in the West. As long-time sinologist Professor Barend ter Haar of Leiden University in the Netherlands notes: “The continued perseverance of Falun Gong adherents/practitioners even inside the People’s Republic of China in publicly expressing their resistance to the prohibition and persecution of their movement is remarkable, and easily misunderstood as fanaticism.”
In March, Falun Gong documented the existence of a secret detention camp in Shenyang City – where organs may be being harvested from live inmates. It’s part of the Liaoning Provincial Thrombosis Hospital to which 6000 adherents have been admitted. None has been released. The authors of the report refer to it as a “concentration camp” and compare it to Auschwitz. It is an increasingly common comparison being made by Falun Gong and human-rights monitors.
The preface to the Falun Gong volume on investigations into the persecution of members in China opens with a quote by Nobel Peace Prize winner and humanitarian Elie Wiesel: “Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Whenever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion or political view, that place must – at that moment – become the centre of the universe.”
Harassment of Falun Gong members outside China is widely reported. Members here say that they have been followed and photographed by people they believe to be party spies. Many Chinese practitioners living abroad fear identification will attract the attention of the CCP’s international network of spies and lead to reprisals for family at home, or arrest on their return.
Yet in a small unit in Auckland, as his daughter arranges fruit in front of the photograph of his late wife, Huang Juo-Hua keeps talking.
“He doesn’t worry about himself now,” his translator says. “He wants to use his real name to tell the truth about Falun Gong persecution in China.
