(Minghui.org) My name is Guan Yunzhi. I am a former employee of the Qinghe District Power Plant in Tieling City, Liaoning Province.

I was 19 years old when I started to practice Falun Gong at the end of 1997. I read Zhuan Falun, the main book of Falun Gong, and felt as if I had just awakened from a dream. My life was full of hope, and I wanted to become a better person from deep within my heart.

The Chinese communist regime began to persecute Falun Gong in July 1999, after which I was detained and tortured in a forced labor camp for two years. I was also fired by the power plant, and my wife divorced me.

Fingers Burned with Cigarettes

I was arrested at my workplace on December 24, 2001, and taken to the Qinghe District Detention House. I was then transferred to the Qinghe District Detention Center. Liu Yongren, former head of the Qinghe District Domestic Security Division, was responsible for my arrest. He claimed that I would be the first Falun Gong practitioner in the Qinghe District to be sentenced.

The guards demanded that I give up Falun Gong, and they tortured me during interrogation. I was beaten, slapped, and stomped on. Guards even pulled fine hairs from my neck, one by one, and burned my fingers with cigarettes.

Torture Re-enactment: Burning with cigarettes

I was sentenced to two years of forced labor at the end of January 2002 and taken to the Tieling Forced Labor Camp.

Electric Shocks and Beatings in the Forced Labor Camp

Practitioners were ordered to write “thought reports,” which would indicate if there was any brainwashing progress. I decided, instead, to write my cultivation experiences and how I benefited from practicing Falun Gong. The next day, I was tortured with electric batons.

Torture Re-enactment: Shocked with electric batons

I was once taken to a guard's office, where Wang Zhibin, the division head, and some other guards cuffed me to a chair. They beat my back with rubber rods. These rods were reinforced with steel inside and hard rubber on the outside.

They demanded that I give up Falun Gong. After I refused, they started to shock me with electric batons. They shocked my head, chest, and entire body, while berating me at the same time. When the electric batons ran out of power, they recharged them and continued to shock me.

Torture re-enactment: Being hung and shocked with electric batons

Tortured for Practitioners' Escape

Five practitioners escaped from the labor camp in October 2002. All the practitioners sharing the same cell were interrogated. They were beaten, hung on a wall, and shocked with electric batons.

Wang Quan, one of the five escaped practitioners, was arrested a week later and brought back to the labor camp. He was detained and tortured in a dark room for several days. When he was released, he was unable to see clearly. (I learned, more than a dozen years later, that he still experiences the after-effects of that torture.)

During the SARS outbreak in 2003, I was held in solitary confinement. I managed to escape and was chased down by five people. I threw myself against the concrete door frame and passed out. I was then carried to an office.

Wang Zhibin ordered five inmates to beat me. They stripped me and held my arms, legs and head down. A chair was put over my stomach and someone sat on it. Wang shocked me with a high voltage electric baton on my head and entire body. My head felt like it had been hit with a hammer; I had a very painful headache, which lasted for days. The burning scars on my body were still visible several months later.

Harassment and Divorce

After I was released from the labor camp, I was monitored and harassed. I went into hiding in March 2007 after I learned that the police would arrest me again. Then my workplace fired me.

My parents were very worried, and my wife was pregnant at the time. Police interrogated her in an attempt to find me. My family was fined 5,000 yuan. My wife could not handle the pressure and divorced me.

Detention and Extortion

I was stopped by police on July 30, 2014. When they learned I was a practitioner, they turned me over to the Tieling Domestic Security Division. I was cuffed with my hands and feet to an iron chair and I could not move. They interrogated me the entire night.

Because there was some Falun Gong truth-clarifying information stored on my cell phone, I was detained for 13 days and then transferred to the Tieling City Detention Center. I was kept in the detention center for over 40 days and forced to do hard labor. I was released after they extorted 5,000 yuan from me.