Falun Gong is a pseudo-religious Buddhist-rooted belief system based on meditation, breathing exercises and the renunciation of human attachments. It might not be your thing, but it seems basically harmless, if a bit controversial. It seems hard to justify, then, the reasons for China's incredible heavy-handed ban on the practice. In 1999 the Chinese government began to persecute practitioners to such an extent that two thirds of UN-reported torture cases in China involve Falun Gong believers. Even the Scientologists don't have it that bad.

Annie Yang was held for 18 months in a forced labour camp in Beijing till September 2006. She agreed to discuss her experiences with us.

I began practicing Falun Gong in 1991 after the breakdown of my marriage. My son was only three years old then. I became very depressed and totally lost confidence in life. Soon after I started practising Falun Gong my health improved. Falun Gong teaches people how to be a good person, a better person, and finally to become a selfless person. The biggest change in me was that when faced with difficult situations, I was able to maintain a calm and peaceful mind. Even if people did bad things to me, I would consider the issue from the opponent’s angle. Since 20 July 1999 the Chinese Communist regime has used everything in its power and all the state media to create lies to defame and attack Falun Gong and its founder Mr Li Hongzhi.

When I was arrested, I had already been practising Falun Gong for about eight years. I chose to continue even though I was fully aware what could happen to me. But I have no regrets at all.

The police arrested me in front of my 16-year-old son. It was 12:45 am when I was taken away by force from my home. When my father, who was over 70 years old, heard the news, his heart gave way. He survived after emergency treatment.

I was taken to Hai Dian District Detention Centre - Block 1 Room 7. The room was about 20 square metres in size. There was a single dim light bulb. There was one toilet. There were twenty-one people living in the room. The bed was just bricks covered by a thin piece of wood laid 15 centimetres above the ground - about four metres long and two metres wide. It was so packed that at night you could only lie down on your side to sleep. There was no hot water all year around. We were allowed to have a shower once a week, lasting three minutes.

I was questioned and assaulted by the security agents on a regular basis. They also sent former Falun Gong practitioners, who had renounced Falun Gong under pressure, to try to convert me. It lasted three days, from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm. Finally the head of the Haidian national security agents, Yang Jian, personally came to talk to me. He told me that other Falun Gong practitioners never had this “polite” treatment. He told me that they didn’t want to sentence me. I didn’t quite understand the implication of what he said. At the beginning of April 2005, without any legal process, I was sentenced to two years in the Da Xing forced labour camp.

First I was sent to a dispatching centre. The first day I was detained alone in a room. This is where I met a policeman known as “the big eye Wang”. She sent four drug addicts to watch over me and to force me to write a statement renouncing Falun Gong. These police use the drug addicts to make Falun Gong practitioners suffer. There was a Falun Gong practitioner called Wu Mei. Because of her refusal to write the guarantee statement three drug addicts beat her. They didn’t allow her to sleep and Wu Mei was forced to stand the whole night. Every time I passed through the water room to wash my hands I always saw Wu Mei standing facing the window. If a Falun Gong practitioner signed the guarantee statement giving up his/her belief these drug addicts would receive reduced sentences. Otherwise they would also be punished.

Most of the beatings would take place in the deep corner of the building. Loud music would be played so that the screaming and crying would not be heard. Falun Gong practitioners were not allowed to talk to each other or sit next to each other.

After a thirteen day stay at the dispatching centre I was taken to the Beijing Labour Camp for Females on 25 April 2005. I was questioned relentlessly but I refused to give up my belief in Falun Gong. At the beginning of June 2005 I was sent to a special unit whose sole purpose is to deal with these Falun Gong practitioners with a firm belief. A living hell then began. The first method was “sitting on the high chair”, which was made of plastic about thirty centimetres across. Every day we were forced to sit for over eighteen hours with a strict sitting posture: both knees touching each other tightly, both legs touching each other tightly, both hands resting over the knees, the back kept straight, eyes open, and no movement allowed. After a week or two many people’s bottoms started to rot.

This was only one of the ways to make us suffer. The second method was starvation. Breakfast, lunch and dinner were half a piece of steamed bread, not even with any pickled vegetable. Another method of torture was not providing drinking water. When I was at this special unit it was June. June is always very hot in Beijing. The temperature could reach 40 degrees centigrade. Everyday they only gave you about five hundred millilitres of drinking water. When thirsty you could only afford to just about wet your lips. Apart from this, even going to the toilet was deliberately blocked, sometimes for up to two or three hours. This led me to have constant pain in my bladder later. There was no feeling whether there was urine or not.

After two years in the labour camp my eyesight became bad and my memory became weak. Everyday I thought about dying. Was it better to smash my head onto a radiator or drink washing powder? Because of long-term malnutrition my whole body became swollen. Due to the “sitting on the high chair” I had difficulty walking. However, because I kept practising Falun Gong, my health recovered very quickly.

On 24 November 2005 an international human rights organisation came to the Labour Camp. When they arrived I managed to hint to the two ladies who came to interview me. They understood my difficulty. Before I was arrested I used to be an antique dealer and ran my own antique business between China and London. I have some friends in London and they had been appealing for me. My friends and fellow Falun Gong practitioners wrote lots of letters to Amnesty International, other human rights organisations and even the United Nations.

During my detention the British ambassador wrote a letter to the Chinese government to rescue me. On 1 September 2006 I was released. When I was arrested the police had taken many of my things, but luckily they did not find my passport and visa. So a month after I was released, I came to England.

This so-called freedom didn’t bring me any happiness. On the contrary, I have been heavily burdened in my heart and this burden will be with me for the rest of my life: during my detention I said things against my will and did something that I didn’t want to do in exchange for the relief from the physical harm. What I did goes against my conscience. To a person who seeks a clear conscience, this means living is worse than death!