By the time the warders stopped beating Wang Hui with electric batons, she could no longer talk. Still they screamed at her, demanding that she denounce her leader, Li Hongzhi, the mysterious exile who [founded] Falun Gong, a [group] the [party's name omitted] is determined to brutally destroy.

Eventually Wang could take no more: she croaked out a denunciation, and then signed a criticism of the man she had trusted to lead her to personal salvation.

But there had been no reversal of faith. She was simply worn out.

Wang had endured isolation in a small cell. She had done the "90-degree airplane", standing with her arms stretched out and her head down for up to 18 hours at a time. She had "ridden the motorcycle" - forced to stand with her legs bent and her arms out for 18 hours. She had "corner squatted" for almost a week. She had squatted on a square tile all day and stood rigidly still at all times except for meals and toilet breaks.

When she still refused to relent, she was beaten nearly senseless.

There are a hundred or more stories similar to Wang's circulating in China. Not all have been catalogued in such detail or stretch across such a breadth of brutality, but they do have one thing in common - Beijing vociferously denies that they ever took place.

In an effort to dispel the gathering evidence that its campaign against the Falun Gong has spilled into fanatical crusade, with blood on the hands of its executors, the [party' name omitted] is opening up its labour camps to show the world a caring, merciful crackdown.

And so I find myself at Tuanhe Labour Re-education Camp where inmates are playing croquet just an hour from Tiananmen Square.

Standing amid benign scenes that would not look out of place in an exclusive sanatorium in New England, a guard bemoans the physical constraints of the location.

"We were thinking about building a golf course," he says. "But there isn't enough space." Deer munch on short grass, pheasants pick about beneath trees in the orchard and, most ludicrously of all, the sound of hard round balls being thwacked and thwocked across a sandy pitch dotted with steel hoops form a backdrop to the tour.

Since banning the Falun Gong in 1999, the Chinese authorities have attempted to eradicate the group with psychiatric treatments, a technique borrowed from one of the darkest pages of [party' name omitted] rule in the former Soviet Union. It is thought that more than 3,000 Falun Gong adherents have been consigned to camps for psychiatric "care" to cure them of their addiction to the [group].

Stung by the resulting criticism of its human rights record, Beijing offers resident correspondents limited tours of well-appointed camps, with many reformed and a few reforming Falun Gong members. Reports from these trips contrast sharply with the Falun Gong's claims of physical torture and mental abuse at the same facilities.

The facilities opened to scrutiny are obviously carefully selected by [party' name omitted] image-makers. The Tuanhe camp holds 350 Falun Gong followers in various stages of being persuaded to reject the [...] faith and exercise system led by the exiled master Li Hongzhi. It was opened last year in the grounds of a state-owned farm and was described yesterday by one visitor as a "fantasy prison".

As might be expected, inmates at Tuanhe claim to be content at their treatment. [...]

[...]

China's onslaught on the Falun Gong has steadily widened in scope since the government declared the movement an enemy of the people almost two years ago. The propaganda machine has been employed to criticise the Falun Gong as [Chinese government's slanderous terms omitted]. The police state has been mobilised to suppress Falun Gong adherents, many of whom have been handed harsh sentences in labour camps. Credible reports allege that as many as 200 Falun Gong followers have died in custody.

Other Falun Gong followers have been subject to more subtle methods of persuasion. Some government employees have been sent to official guesthouses for several weeks of intense de-programming, after which they are expected to renounce the Falun Gong or lose their jobs.

The hardcore of the group's members are treated as drug addicts in need of detoxification.

[...]

Sophie Xiao, a Falun Gong spokeswoman, says only a small number of Falun Gong adherents are treated so well. Most are subjected to terrible abuses.

"Without pronouncing any judgment, the practitioners are put into prison for one to three years, or killed as in the period of Cultural Revolution," Xiao says. "The government can rob them of their property, deprive them of their livelihood or torture them in prison."

A tour last month of Masanjia labour camp, where the Falun Gong claims that Wang Hui almost lost her life, was seized on by the state-controlled media as a propaganda triumph for the government. [...].

[...]

Meanwhile, China hails its programme as a big success. The People's Daily reported that 1,000 women followers of Falun Gong had been "successfully re-educated" at Masanjia - thanks to the "loving care" of its tutors. But still, away from the carefully groomed grounds of Tuahne, another dissident rides the motorcycle, another Falun Gong member gives up the cause.

http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/business.cfm?id=81640

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