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US Congressional Committee Scrutinises China’s Systemic Use of torment
The Chinese government continues to use systematic torture to force confessions to crimes. In an April 14th hearing held by the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) to speak about this issue, witnesses provided graphic detail of what they had personally seen and experienced.
China uses various persecution techniques to breakdown the subject’s will and humiliate him or her. These approaches have been used expansively on Falun Gong believers to make them renounce their beliefs and practice. Falun Gong is a spiritual practice that is based on the values of truthfulness, compassion and tolerance. The Chinese government started the oppression of Falun Gong in 1999 because it feared its principles gaining more followers than the communist philosophy.
The chairman of the CECC, Chris Smith (R-N.J.), arranged the meeting by first recounting the dreadful torture of lawyer Gao Zhisheng, who has been the subject of several hearings in the past. Gao was persecuted because he "ventured to speak for persecuted Christians and Falun Gong [practitioners]," said Chairman Smith, according to the Epoch Times.
Gao is currently under house detention in China. A written statement was submitted by Geng He, Gao’s wife, who now lives with the family in the U.S. According to the Epoch Times, her statement states that from 2006 until his conditional release in 2014, Gao was persecuted, beaten and shocked for hours at a time with an electric baton on his genitals and other parts of his body.
The other witness included a Falun Gong adherent and a Tibetan monk – both having suffered severe torture under custody, simply for not abandoning their faith.
Tibetan monk, Jigme Gyatso (a.k.a. Golog Jigme), who was imprisoned for six years for making a film on Tibetan life, escaped to India and currently lives in Switzerland. Jigme was also detained and severely tortured for two months in 2008, and abused again but less cruelly treated in 2009 and 2012. According to the Epoch Times, this is what Jigme said about his first imprisonment of 2008:
"For one month and 22 days I was tortured continuously. I was forced to sit in the "tiger chair" … day and night. … My arms were shackled in front of me on a small metal table, and my legs were bent beneath the seat and fastened to the chair with iron cuffs. My joints ached horribly and at one point my feet became so swollen that all my toenails fell off.. I was denied of sleep and given very little to eat, and felt unbearably thirsty…"