A Rare Chinese Look at Secret Detentions
Peter Terpstra
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By ANDREW JACOBS
Published: November 26, 2009
BEIJING — In a rare dose of candor that contradicts past official statements,
a state-run magazine has published an article that details a secret network of
detention centers used to prevent aggrieved citizens from lodging complaints
against the Chinese government.
Liaowang, or Outlook, a dependably stodgy publication aimed at Communist Party
bureaucrats and policy makers, ran an exposé on Tuesday laying out the
Byzantine network of interceptors, guards and holding pens used to put off the
petitioners who flock to Beijing in the hope that the authorities will resolve
longstanding grievances, many of them involving official corruption in their
hometowns.
According to the report, which was also published online by the official
Xinhua news agency, those grabbed off the street often have their cellphones
and identification confiscated before being locked away in guesthouses or dank
basements. After being held for days or weeks, inadequately fed and sometimes
beaten, they are shipped back to their home provinces with the admonition that
they stay away from the capital.
At peak times, the article said, as many as 10,000 retrievers — those paid by
local officials to keep petitioners from successfully filing their complaints
— roam Beijing in search of quarry. The report counted 73 secret detention
centers, many of them run by regional governments, and laid out in detail the
lucrative business of retrieving, detaining and sending home petitioners. The
magazine described it as a “chain of gray industry.”
Such a system of extralegal detention, sometimes called black jails, “damages
the legitimate rights of petitioners and seriously damages the government’s
image,” the article said.
Although the right to petition the authorities is enshrined in the
Constitution, that right is frequently swallowed up by the reality of
contemporary China’s system of governance: local officials, facing pressure to
maintain social stability, are penalized for allowing too many complainants to
find their way to the offices of the central government.
The article in Outlook comes less than two weeks after Human Rights Watch
issued a report documenting China’s network of secret jails — a report that
prompted a Foreign Ministry spokesman to deny their existence. “There are no
black jails in China,” Qin Gang, the spokesman, said when asked about the
report. “If citizens have complaints and suggestions about government work,
they can convey them to the relevant authorities through legitimate and normal
channels.”
Given the government’s tight control of the media, human rights advocates
expressed guarded optimism that the article might signal a shift away from
official tolerance for the jails, which are thought to have existed since
2005.
“The fact that the report focuses on the issue in a substantive and detailed
way gives us hope that the Chinese government might end its longtime denial of
the existence of black jails and move toward closing them down, liberating the
detainees and bringing the perpetrators to justice,” said Phelim Kine, a Hong
Kong-based researcher with Human Rights Watch.
Zhang Jing contributed research.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/27/world/asia/27china.html?_r=1
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Amnesty International Report 2009 om China:
http://report2009.amnesty.org/en/regions/asia-pacific/china