We are a group of female Falun Dafa practitioners from Mainland China. In the midst of great suffering and indignation, we write this open letter to you with an expectation: As we report the inhuman tortures inflicted upon innocent female Falun Gong practitioners by Jiang Zemin's government, we are looking forward to your help in upholding human rights and justice for those of us who cannot help ourselves.

During the past 18 months, the persecution carried out by President Jiang Zemin and his supporters has been escalating. It has become more and more brutal, vicious and inhumane. To give you just a few examples, in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, practitioners ranging from 4-to-5-year-old children to 70-to-80-year-old elderly women have been savagely beaten simply for saying out loud: "Falun Dafa is good!" A woman six months pregnant was kicked so hard that she couldn't stand up due to the unbearable pain. A woman in her 70's was beaten to the ground and dragged into a police car. There are far more of these examples than there is space to recount them all.

In labor re-education camps, the guards are more debased and unbridled than you can imagine. They have taunted us, saying "Don't you say you practice tolerance? I will see if you can tolerate it when I rape you!" They have ripped off women's clothes in public and shocked them with electric batons; they have used iron wire to pierce their nipples; they have sexually assaulted women with various objects. At Masanjia Labor Re-Education Camp in Liaoning Province, 18 female practitioners were stripped of their clothes and forced into male prisoners' cells; at the Female Labor Re-education Camp in Jilin Province, the relentless police put hot pepper powder into female practitioners' vagina and forced them to write "repentance statements." These same guards even inserted electric batons into female practitioners' vagina to shock them; in Beijing, several policemen stripped a female practitioner and sexually harassed her in public.

We have been abused and persecuted only because we, as Falun Dafa practitioners, do not want to give up our belief in the universal principle of "Truthfulness, Compassion, Tolerance." Because we choose to practice Falun Dafa, and follow our respected teacher, Master Li Hongzhi, our oppressors have assaulted our dignity and abused our bodies and our basic womanhood. How can we bear to live with the humiliation done to us?

How many female practitioners have been expelled from their jobs, schools, and party memberships, and thus lost their livelihoods? How many female practitioners have become destitute and wander homelessly? How many of them were beaten, arrested and sent to labor re-education camps? How many female practitioners have been beaten black and blue, even tortured until deformed and handicapped? How many female practitioners have been sent to mental hospitals and injected with nerve damaging drugs? How many of them have lost their lives under the brutal torture? How many have simply disappeared? We have to ask, when in history has anything approaching this degree of brutality appeared? Which leader in the long history of our country has behaved so inhumanely?

We are writing to you to ask for your help. We are asking you to uphold justice, to help stop the vicious persecution carried out by Jiang Zemin's government and help protect the dignity and basic human rights of women everywhere, and especially in China at this critical time in history. We ask this not only for ourselves and not only for our own peoplethis is for all women in the world and for all of humankind! To allow this evil to exist is not only a source of shame for the Chinese people, it also shames the whole human race, and even more so the future development of human civilization. We are waiting in pain and looking forward to hearing from you...

Falun Dafa Practitioners from Mainland China,

January 6, 2001