When traditional Chinese painter Zhang Cuiying followed her husband to Australia in 1990, she could not have imagined that her path ahead would include detention and torture in China's labour camps. Nor would she have forseen herself in an Australian court, taking legal action against Chinese officials.
In 1997, hoping to remedy health problems she began to practise Falun Gong, and the popular Chinese meditation practice's tenets of Truth, Compassion and Forbearance appealed to her. She was astonished at the improvement it brought to her health and before long her whole family had taken up the practice. Soon Ms Zhang herself was able to pick up her brush and resume her art career that severe arthritis had put on hold.
But in July 1999, the entire apparatus of China's ruling Communist regime was thrust into a Cultural Revolution-style campaign to eliminate Falun Gong and its practitioners. Official media organs were filled with anti-Falun Gong propaganda, and thousands were arrested. Before long, news of torture and the first of what would be thousands of deaths began to seep out of China's grizzly labour camps and detention centres.
Determined to clear Falun Gong's name, Ms Zhang began writing letters to the Chinese Embassy and Consulates in Australia. When her letters fell on deaf ears, she set off for China in December 1999, to appeal directly.
Interrogation
There she was arrested more than four times; for being in possession of Falun Gong books and materials, for quietly meditating in a park in Beijing, for carrying a letter of appeal to China's leaders and for being a practitioner of Falun Gong.
With each arrest came a period of abuse in detention. She was cursed, slapped, punched about the head and face, bruised with solid batons, shackled and subjected to sleepless interrogations that lasted for days. Her old family home near Shanghai was repeatedly searched and ransacked. However Ms Zhang says she held onto her belief in the teachings of Falun Gong, not fighting back when hit or talking back when cursed.
During a seven-day detention period following an arrest in Chaoyang, she was visited by Luo Gan, close ally of the then President Jiang Zemin and member of the Central Standing Committee.
"You little Shanghai wretch," she recalls Luo cursing at her. "You're Chinese but you don't like China, you've left and become Australian. Why haven't your hair, face and eyes changed colour?"
Luo ordered all guards on duty to stay and intensify their interrogation, and then stormed out. The remaining guards were left searing with anger. It was the eve of Chinese New Year, in 2001.
"She's not a murderer," one exclaimed, throwing his pen to the ground. "Why must we stay here and not pass the New Year with our families?"
Under such pressure from above, the guards would take their anger out on Ms Zhang. When she refused to co-operate in signing documents denouncing Falun Gong, some would explode with anger and beat her. After calming down, they would again chuckle and crack sadistic jokes. Others took pity on her and helped her within their means, warning her family when a home search was imminent, or revealing to her the pressure they were under and how it pained them to strike her.
Imprisonment
Ms Zhang's ordeals culminated in an arrest on the border of Shenzhen province on March 4, 2000, which was followed by eight months in two Shenzhen detention centres. Seven days a week she laboured for 10 hours manufacturing export products. By night she slept in a damp, foul-smelling prison cell, sharing the 12 square metre space with more than 10 prisoners. Criminal inmates were offered incentives to abuse her, with one prisoner securing an early release by punching her face and stomping on her hands. On another occasion, the guards tore off her clothes and placed her in front of a closed-circuit camera, then detained her among the male prison cells.
She was allowed no visitors except from the Australian consul in nearby Guangdong − once a month. During their first meeting on March 31, the guards yelled at her to stop talking as she tearfully told the consul of her suffering in detention. The consul told the interpreter not to be scared, and to continue to translate.
After their final meeting on October 30, 2000, the consul relayed her return flight details to her husband in Australia. However, the details given by the Chinese authorities were false. When Ms Zhang arrived in Australia − with all her money and possessions confiscated − no family or friends were waiting for her. She asked a stranger for 40 cents for a phone call to her husband.
Court case
On September 15, 2004, Ms Zhang filed a civil lawsuit in the NSW Supreme Court for torture and wrongful arrest, hoping to legally address her suffering in China. The defendants are former Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin, the aforementioned Luo Gan, and the Gestapo-like "610 Office".
In March this year, Associate Justice Harrison of the NSW Supreme Court allowed an extension of six months for serving legal documents to the defendants. The plaintiffs also understood that the Registry itself would promptly deliver the documents to the defendants in China. Ms Zhang says the decision is a step in the right direction.
Recently she received a sympathetic letter from Prime Minister John Howard's office saying the Australian Government is "deeply concerned about China's persecution of Falun Gong practitioners and considers the Chinese Government's ban on the group breaches fundamental international human rights standards." The letter also said the Australian Government had impressed on China the need to address allegations of organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners through an "independent, credible investigation".
In October 2006, Ms Zhang learned that her nephew, Cheng Zhongcheng, had been arrested again in China. He had previously spent three years in detention for his beliefs, during which time he spent ten days chained to a torture device known as the "death bed", where he was unable to move and was forced to soil himself. Ms Zhang can understand better than most the suffering that he is now enduring.