As explained here and elsewhere before China still has a petitioning system, whereby people with grievances against local and provincial authorities are permitted to go to Beijing and lobby with the relevant ministries. In response, local authorities have set up offices in Beijing whose job is to intercept petitioners and detain them illegally in unofficial black jails, where they are maltreated in various ways until they agree to return home.
The link above goes to an account by Xu Zhiyong of his attempts last year to investigate a Beijing black jail, an attempt that nearly got him badly beaten up at the time. In late July Xu was arrested for “tax evasion” and has not been heard from since.
Black Jails have no legal status in China, but the fact that so many of them exist and have been able to continue operations for years right under the nose of the central government indicates that they are officially tolerated. Victor Shih explains the rationale here.
Last week Southern Metropolis Daily carried an account of Li Ruirui, a 20 year old student from Anhui who went to Beijing to petition against unfair treatment by her college. She was duly intercepted by the Anhui authorities and jailed in a compound established inside a local hotel:
At the end of a hallway on the ground floor of the hotel is a filthy storeroom crammed with metal-framed bunk beds and old blankets. There are no mattresses or pillows. Garbage litters the floor and bare bulbs hang from the crumbling ceiling. There is a small squat toilet in the corner and a bolted door made of plywood that opens onto the hotel’s parking lot.
The student said she arrived in the evening, after the other detainees had finished dinner. “I asked another petitioner what I could eat and they said: ‘Here you will eat like a pig and sleep like a dog,’” she said.
Shortly after this she was beaten and raped by a guard in front of the other inmates, which led to a mass breakout the following morning.
The Southern Metropolis Daily article was pulled from the newspaper’s website shortly after publication, and has since followed a fairly typical process of being re-posted and deleted at different venues across the Sinosphere. Black and White Cat has a full translation of the article. Read it here.
Link as well if you’re so inclined. It’s the kind of issue where embarrassing foreign publicity could make a difference.
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