A report by Radio Free Asia (25th November 2004) documents the case of Mao Hengfeng, a Shanghai woman serving a one-year sentence in a labour camp for her campaign against China's draconian one-child policy.

According to her relatives she appeared in court with bruises on her body. She lost an appeal in a Shanghai court claiming benefit payments from the government on 19th November 2004. Although some of her family and supporters were denied permission to enter the courtroom, Mao's husband Wu Xuewei said he saw marks on her body that convinced him she was still being tortured inside the labour camp. "I noticed that there were blood-blisters and huge swellings around her wrists and ankles..", Wu told RFA's Mandarin service."...I think it is probably a repeat of the August situation all over again.

Subject to systematic torture in August Mao had been suspended by leather belts for three days and denied food until she admitted her mistakes, Wu said. "The belts were pulling her in all directions.They said to her, Are you still going to cry out? Are you going to admit your errors?" During her brief appearance in court, Mao shouted from the dock, "Yangpu Court, Daqiao police station, labour camp; you are all fascists and sadists!" Mao had appealed a government decision to terminate her welfare payments after her labour camp sentence, which in China can be imposed administratively for up to three years without trial.

Mao's run-in with the authorities began when she became pregnant with a second and unauthorized child when she was employed at a soap factory in Shanghai in 1988. She was shut up in a psychiatric hospital when she resisted a forced abortion and later dismissed from her job a move the city's labour arbitration committee ruled was illegal. The factory appealed to the Yangpu district court, beginning several long years for Mao of petitioning and pursuing complaints through official channels. She was sentenced to one year "re-education through labour" in April 2004 after the authorities were angered by her persistence.