Hubei rights activist Ma Lijun tells of the abuses she and other elderly inmates experienced while serving her "re-education-through-labor" sentence at the Shijiazhuang Female Re-education Through Labor Center in central China:
When they sent me to re-education through labor, they [initially] didn't take me, because the doctor said I could be treated, and so I went to hospital instead. But they told me that because my knees were swollen up, that my life was in danger, and that they'd have to amputate. But then they wouldn't let me stay in the hospital; they just dumped me back in the labor camp.
While I was in the labor camp ... the male doctor there said I had only had a fever once, seriously, because of my leg, and in fact I'd had a fever countless times. When this happened they would drain my leg and bring the fever down ... Now the swelling is all the way up to the knee, and my whole leg is taut like a drum.
There are so many people in there who are sick, and all have them have just been dumped there [without proper care]. They give them a bit of medicine, enough to keep them alive, so no one actually dies, but everybody gets sicker in there.
There were more than 100 of them in there who were petitioners. The police rules say they can't take anyone over 60 years of age, but there were people in there in their sixties and seventies, lots of them. They were sick and they'd just been thrown in there. Some of them had no arms; some had no hands. It was like forced labor.
You had to get up before the sky was light and work until dark, unloading the trucks, loading the trucks, carrying sacks of stuff. It was completely exhausting work ...They paid us 30 yuan a month, although they said it was 50 yuan, but they hung onto the rest of it, basically. Those work gang leaders were going out roping in workers like crazy, and there were extra shifts to work in the evenings.
Basically we were working the entire day. We never saw the sun. We all looked pale and sickly.
The guards would never speak properly to us; they always swore and cursed at us. It was very common for them to beat people. The petitioners used to get electric cattle prods used on them, which was really cruel. When everyone went to eat, or to the workshop, they would be carrying electric batons and manacles with them at all times.
They also had this isolation room. I never knew it to be empty after we went there. Whenever they wanted to beat someone up, they took them to the isolation room. It was pandemonium in there, with hellish noises, the whole time, and we couldn't sleep. Eventually we all got high blood pressure, to the point where, by the time I got out of there, two tablets of medication a day can't keep it down.
Reported by Fang Yuan for RFA's Mandarin service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.
