Dear Friends,

Thank you for coming to our press conference.

My name is Xiuhua Zhang, and I am a local Falun Gong practitioner. Today, I am going to start a hunger strike (water fasting), to support my 130 fellow practitioners detained in Masanjia Labor Camp in the northeastern province of Liaoning. They have been on hunger strike for over three weeks. I am extremely concerned for their lives.

These 130 practitioners were illegally thrown into Masanjia Labor Camp because of their belief in the principle of "Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance", the central principle of Falun Gong. In order to force them to betray their faith, the guards in the labor camp keep torturing them using all brutal means such as electric shocks, beatings, hanging by handcuffs, confinement in small cells, deprivation of sleep, slave labor, etc. After practitioners finished serving their so-called "jail terms" (which were arbitrarily imposed on them by police, and which are mostly more than a year), the labor camp authorities refused to release them and declared that they would rather violate the law instead of releasing them. To protest the persecution, these 130 practitioners went on a hunger strike more than three weeks ago. Their suffering is very typical of the labor camps in China. The hunger striking practitioners are often brutally force-fed. The guards often force feed them with high density salt water, and sometimes, they insert the nose tube into the trachea or lung. This brutal force-feeding has caused many deaths.

I appeal to the Chinese government to stop the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners. I also appeal to the public to continue to pay attention to the suffering of my fellow practitioners in China. So far, at least 268 practitioners have been persecuted to death. They are all kindhearted Chinese citizens. Let's make every effort to stop the killing of these innocent Chinese people.

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Thank you.

Xiuhua Zhang, Auguest 24, 2001