💦p US Congressional Committee Scrutinises China’s Systemic Use of torment UNSUBSCRIBE E-mail The Chinese regime continues to use methodical torture to coerce 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 methods to breakdown the subject’s will and disgrace him or her. These methods have been used extensively on Falun Gong adherents to make them renounce their faith and practice. Falun Gong is a spiritual practice that is founded on the principles of truthfulness, compassion and tolerance. The Chinese regime 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 shocking persecution of lawyer Gao Zhisheng, who has been the subject of several hearings in the past. Gao was tortured because he "dared to speak for ill-treated Christians and Falun Gong [practitioners]," said Chairman Smith, according to the Epoch Times. Gao is currently under house arrest in China. A written statement was presented by Geng He, Gao’s wife, who now lives with the family in the U.S. According to the Epoch Times, her testimony states that from 2006 until his conditional release in 2014, Gao was tortured, 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 believer and a Tibetan monk – both having underwent severe persecution under detention, simply for not renouncing their faith. Tibetan monk, Jigme Gyatso (a.k.a. Golog Jigme), who was jailed for six years for making a film on Tibetan life, escaped to India and currently lives in Switzerland. Jigme was also imprisoned and severely tortured for two months in 2008, and abused again but less brutally treated in 2009 and 2012. According to the Epoch Times, this is what Jigme said about his first incarceration of 2008: "For one month and 22 days I was tormented 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 suffered dreadfully and at one point my feet became so swollen that all my toenails fell off.. I was deprived of sleep and given very little to eat, and felt unbearably thirsty…"
