Publisher’s Note:
National Review has brought out
Here, There & Everywhere: Collected Writings of Jay Nordlinger. You may order the book
here. It has eight chapters — and we are making one piece per chapter available on
NRO. We are doing this every Tuesday — hence, “Tuesdays with Jay”! The chapters are Society, Politics, People, The World, Cuba and China, Golf, Music, and Personal. For the pieces drawn from the first four chapters, go
here,
here,
here, and
here. And this week’s piece is from the chapter on Cuba and China. It was originally published in the
National Review of April 24, 2006.
Charles Lee has a story to tell, and I have come to hear it, in a New York conference room. Dr. Lee has recently been released from a Chinese prison, after three years’ confinement. He is an American — a U.S. citizen since 2002 — and he talks like one: His conversation is peppered with “like,” as in, “If you tried to move, they would, like, hit you.” Dr. Lee is a remarkably composed and assured man. But he has been through a ghastly ordeal, which is no surprise, given the People’s Republic and its ways.
Dr. Lee was born in 1965, in the eastern province of Jiangsu. His parents worked in a cotton mill. He himself went to medical school in Guangzhou (Canton). In 1991, he came to the United States, for further study and research at the University of Illinois and Harvard. In 1997, he became a practitioner of Falun Gong, a system involving meditation and exercises.
When Falun Gong first became popular in the 1990s, the Chinese government supported it, as a means of promoting both health and traditional Chinese culture. But when they discovered just how popular it was — 100 million were practicing Falun Gong, they found — they banned it. That was in 1999. Since then, they have been waging a merciless campaign against practitioners of Falun Gong, seizing, torturing, and killing them. Indeed, these people might be said to be bearing the brunt of PRC brutality at the moment.
Dr. Lee decided to return to China to try to assist his fellow Falun Gong practitioners. He was especially concerned with countering the government’s propaganda against the movement; this propaganda is pervasive and constant. He first went in 2002, for three weeks. He was arrested, but managed to get out. He went again in January 2003, and this time he was not so lucky.
His intention was to execute a brazen plan: to tap into government television — the only kind of television there is in China — and broadcast a 45-minute tape about Falun Gong, detailing the government’s persecution of practitioners.
On landing at the Guangzhou airport, he was arrested. Right away, he started a hunger strike, as political prisoners have long done. The police kept Dr. Lee awake for 92 consecutive hours, badgering him, denouncing Falun Gong. On March 21, 2003, he had his trial — which he describes as a “show trial,” in which he was not permitted to defend himself. Like other such figures, he insists on his legal justification: The Chinese government has violated its own constitution, and so on. After this trial, he was sent to prison in Nanjing.
There, the ordeal began in earnest, but I will be light on the details — light on them without avoiding them.
He spent 130 straight hours handcuffed — painfully handcuffed — while trying to write a letter to an appeals court. He was subjected to constant anti–Falun Gong propaganda, which attacked his most deeply held beliefs. He endured “reeducation sessions,” or “condemnation sessions.” He was not allowed to perform his Falun Gong exercises, of course, and he was constantly surrounded by other prisoners, who served as enforcers.
As a foreigner, he says, he was supposed to be kept with other foreign prisoners. But he was kept with Chinese ones, most of them drug traffickers and the like. Some of them befriended him; but then they were replaced by “more vicious ones.”
During his three-year confinement, he went on hunger strike nine times, for a total of 50 days. Prison authorities force-fed him four times. Once, they left the tube in his stomach for 33 hours, for the sole purpose of torturing him. “It was agonizing,” Dr. Lee says. One is sure he is understating it.
He tells of another forced feeding: “The scene was so violent, the cameraman fainted, right on the spot.” Excuse me, the cameraman? “Yeah, the guy who was filming it. He was just a kid, green from the police academy.” They were filming it? “Oh, yes: They filmed everything. They do this so as to piece bits of video together later, for their own purposes.”
#page#In late 2004, they forced him to sit on a bench, staring straight ahead, into a wall, all day long. He was allowed to sleep at night, but otherwise he could not move, and had to keep staring straight ahead. They made him do this for 48 straight days. “Your body starts to rot,” Dr. Lee notes. Eventually his heart began to fail, and he had trouble breathing. They then took him to a doctor.
At other times during the three years, he was made to work in prison sweatshops. He assembled Christmas lights. “The room was small, and it was crowded with about 60 people. The temperature was over 42 degrees centigrade” (108 degrees Fahrenheit). He also made bedroom slippers with Homer Simpson’s image on them. (Homer is the father on the TV cartoon
The Simpsons.) You put your foot where Homer’s mouth is.
