“The law is the first in China that defines the concept, the standard and the procedure of ‘involuntary medical treatment’ in an effort to prevent healthy and innocent people from being wrongly diagnosed as ‘insane’ and placed against their will in a mental hospital,” Zhou Zijun, a professor with Peking University’s School of Public Health, told the Global Times.

The law has attracted a lot of attention since its draft was submitted for discussion last year. Although there are no official records on the number of people wrongly institutionalized, Xinhua has reported that such cases have increased over the past few years.

[…] According to the law, the decision whether to admit a patient in a mental hospital should be based on a diagnosis made by licensed psychiatrists rather than law enforcement departments. The diagnosis must be verified by two independent professionals should the family of the patient demand a re-evaluation.

[…] But some feel it does not go far enough. “This newly released law is only a general guideline and does not answer detailed questions such as how to determine the consent of a potentially mentally ill person,” said Zhang Xinkai, a senior psychiatrist from the Shanghai Mental Health Center.

BBC Monitoring rounded up more Chinese media commentary on the new law:

Southern Metropolis Daily questions the impact of the law, saying it gives the guardian too much power. As a result, it will not protect people from being sent for treatment forcibly.

It is yet to be seen whether the law will terminate the practice of “being mentally ill-ed”, the paper says.

“Being mentally ill-ed”, a buzzword in today’s papers, is a situation where a mentally sound person is pronounced ill by others, quite often by family members over personal grudges, and forced to stay in hospital.

[…] The website of China National Radio carries an article titled “Expert elaborates on how to avoid being mentally ill-ed”.

(Perry Link and CDT founder Xiao Qiang explained this “involuntary passive” idiom in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in January.)

At China Law & Policy in December (via CDT), Elizabeth M. Lynch pointed out other shortcomings in the new law besides the remaining potential for abuse:

In reality, the Mental Health Law does little to foster an environment where those with mental illness can lead an independent life and be accepted by society. Furthermore, although the law discusses the very real (and dire) need to increase the number of mental health professionals in China, that has remained aspirational. As of yet, the Chinese government has remained silent on how much money and what incentives it will provide to achieve that goal. Providing adequate and sufficient medical assistance for those suffering from mental illness is just as important to making sure that those individuals will be able to lead a full life.

Estimates of the rate of genuine mental illness in China range from 8% to 17.5% of the population.

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Post tags: healthcare, illegal detentions, laws, mental health, mental hospitals, mental illness, petitioners, public health
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Wang Gaowei and his other nine accomplices, natives of Yuzhou City in central China’s Henan Province, imprisoned the 10 petitioners, also from Henan, in April 2012.

They were falsely imprisoned at two courtyards in Wangsiying Township in Beijing’s Chaoyang District for several days, according to the Beijing Chaoyang District People’s Court.

The court ruled that Wang and the other nine respondents had infringed the personal rights of the 10 petitioners, which constituted the crime of false imprisonment.

The case had previously surfaced in December, when premature reports of the sentences appeared in state media but were quickly dismissed as “fake news” by the court. Its resolution revives hopes that change may be afoot for the petitioners who flock to Beijing to air their grievances, but promising signs in the past have not brought an end to the illegal detentions, and uncertainty remains. From Josh Chin at China Real Time Report:

“If it’s the start of a sincere effort to curb the use of black jails and punish those involved, it’s quite significant,” said Joshua Rosenzweig, a human rights researcher at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “But I’d be reluctant to draw too many conclusions from just one case when it’s a problem that’s been so widespread for so many years.”

Nicholas Bequelin, senior Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch, described the court’s decision as one of a several signals the city has recently sent to local governments on the petitioner question. “Beijing’s message to the local officials has been: one, we don’t want your petitioners in Beijing, but two, we don’t want to know how you do that, and three, if something goes awry we won’t necessarily cover up for you,” said Mr. Bequelin.

See also a sympathetic Economic Observer profile of two Beijing-based interceptors and Yu Jianrong’s recent critique of the “rigid stability” machinery of which they are a part, via CDT.

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Post tags: Beijing, black jails, Henan, human rights watch, illegal detentions, petitioners
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Unemployed journalist Li’s report created so much pressure that the official media finally weighed in on the story as well. On Nov. 19, the government-owned television network CCTV contacted Li and asked him to find the garbage collector. On Nov. 20, Universal Children’s Day, state-owned news agency Xinhua published a report that even pointed out the contradiction between the deaths of the five children and Xi’s rousing words.

Now officials in Bijie released the names of the dead boys: Zhonglin, 13, Zhongjing and Chong, both 12, Zhonghong, 11 and Bo, 9, all had the same last name, Tao. They were cousins, the children of three brothers, two of whom were migrant workers in the booming city of Shenzhen, near Hong Kong. The boys had been left in the care of the third brother, who was struggling in the bitterly poor village where he lived. Conditions were so bad there that the boys had run away. The city of Bijie also fired or suspended eight officials, including the director of the elementary school the children had attended, and where they hadn’t been seen in weeks.

But the children weren’t the only victims. While he was doing his research for CCTV, state security officers parked their SUVs on Li’s street and knocked on his door. They told him that things had gone too far, and that the case had been solved and he should delete his blogs and stop working on the story. Li refused. They threw him and his wife into a car, took them to the provincial capital Guiyang and put them on a flight to Haikou on Hainan, a resort island in the South China Sea.

When someone recognized the prominent dissident there, two officials dragged him off to another city. They told Li that the authorities had in fact considered issuing him a passport after the 18th party congress, so that he could visit his son. But that, they added, was now no longer an option. “Assume that you won’t see your son for the next 10 years, and perhaps not even for the rest of your life,” they said. They forced him to write a last blog entry, to the effect that he was traveling for personal reasons, to resolve a “family matter.” After that, Li’s voice fell silent, and he disappeared from the radar for the next four weeks.

Zand and a colleague visited Li in December, getting a first-hand glimpse at his situation and running into trouble of their own while investigating the boys’ deaths. From Part 2 of his report:

When Li told us about his arrest, his research and his abduction, it was with the muffled fury of a journalist who has been repeatedly prevented from reporting on what he knows. When he talked about his son in Ohio, he paused and swallowed. And when he reached the point in his story when the police came knocking on his door, there was another knock on the door. Li placed his finger over his mouth, disappeared for a few minutes, returned and said quietly: “That was one of the neighborhood security men. He had noticed movement.” A few days after his return from Hainan, Li said, outgoing President Hu Jintao was in Bijie, and after that he was no longer guarded as closely as before. But that, he said, would likely change again.

…

When we arrived at the village, neighbors prevented us from meeting with the boys’ family. It was unclear to us whether this was because the family didn’t want to see us, or whether the presence of Zhao and our other escorts intimidated them.

When we returned to the city, one of the police officers from the hotel joined us for dinner. After apologizing for the rude reception on the previous evening, he tried to ascertain what our next plans were. He also suggested that we refrain from reporting too critically on conditions in Bijie, noting that criticism is bad for the investment climate in the region. We remained under observation, and government agents sitting in the lobby filmed us whenever we left the hotel.

…

When we returned at 10:30 p.m., the light was on in my room, the bedspread had been pulled back and the curtains were closed. When I switched on my camera I noticed that my memory card was empty. My iPad had been plugged in incorrectly and I couldn’t switch it on anymore. Water was dripping from the plugs for the headphone and the charger. A mobile phone that I had left in the room had also been submerged in water. All the files on the desktop of my computer — and that of my colleague — had been deleted. Someone had broken into our rooms while we were out and manipulated and destroyed our devices.

See also censorship instructions regarding the incident sent to the media by China’s Central Propaganda Department, part of CDT’s “Directives from the Ministry of Truth” series.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: central propaganda department, Der Spiegel, Guizhou, homeless, illegal detentions, journalists, Li Yuanlong, Ministry of Truth
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Two years ago, on June 4 — the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre and the most sensitive date in the Chinese political calendar — Ji Pomin received a text message from a high-placed friend: It said that former president Jiang Zemin had been taken to a military hospital in a critical condition. Ji fired off a coded message to hundreds of people in his address book to seek confirmation, asking: “The Supreme Old Master ascended to heaven?” Many of Ji’s politically connected friends forwarded the text to their friends, who misinterpreted the cryptic question as a statement. By June 6, overseas Chinese websites were reporting that former president Jiang Zemin was dead.

[...] A few days after Ji’s text message, he received a phone call from someone claiming to be from a parcel delivery service. They said the package was too big to fit down the lane in which he lived, so he walked to nearby Dongdan, one of Beijing’s busiest shopping areas, to collect it. Standing there, he said, in the blind spot between two security cameras outside an upmarket wedding photography store, were two burly men. They pulled a cloth hood over Ji’s head and bundled him into a car.

[...] The daylight abduction of a princeling like Ji, in downtown Beijing, shows just how delicate the subject of elite politics has become. That Ji wasn’t tortured, that he felt emboldened to speak his mind, and that his captors politely drove him back to where they found him two days later, shows the privileges afforded by his status. The secret police had originally lured him out on to the street, says Ji, so they would not disturb his then 86 year-old mother, who had joined the revolutionary struggle with his father at the age of 14 in 1938. By contrast, Ji says they ransacked the homes of several people who received his message. And a historian whose work had influenced Ji’s negative views on Jiang was reportedly arrested and convicted of subversion in May 2011.

See more on “princelings“ and illegal detentions via CDT.

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: illegal detentions, Jiang Zemin, kidnapping, princelings, rumors, stability maintenance, state security
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Those convicted were hired by authorities from Changge city in central Henan province to stop petitioners airing their grievances in Beijing, the People’s Daily said on its website, citing a Beijing newspaper.

They held them in rented houses in a Beijing suburb where the petitioners said they were beaten, the report said.

The men wore badges identifying them as employees of the Beijing representative office of the Changge government, it added.

Petitioning officials has deep roots in China, where courts are seen as beyond the reach of ordinary people, who often try to take local disputes ranging from land grabs to corruption to higher levels in the country’s capital Beijing.

Although this sentencing would be a rare judiciary handling of interceptors, the report could not be confirmed, from AP:

Beijing’s Chaoyang District Court sentenced one defendant to a year and a half in prison on Nov. 28 and gave months-long sentences to nine others, according to state media reports. The plaintiffs were not identified and calls to the court rang unanswered.

The report could not immediately be confirmed and it wasn’t clear when the sentences were handed down. The official China Daily newspaper briefly ran a story on its website saying the sentences had not yet been handed down, but later removed the report.

The official Guangmingwang website said the men had detained a number of people from central Henan province who had traveled to the capital hoping to have their complaints settled by the central government. Such petitioners are frequently intercepted by local government agents and detained illegally in shabby hostels commonly known as “black jails.”

The government has recently begun acknowledging the existence of black jails as part of modest attempts to stamp out the most glaring abuses of power, but has met with only middling success. A central government order to close representative offices maintained in Beijing by local governments for the purpose of blocking complaints and lobbying for projects and funding has been mostly ignored.

According to the Global Times, the report circulated about the sentencing was fake:

A Beijing court Sunday denied a report that 10 people who had intercepted and detained petitioners coming to Beijing were sentenced for illegal detention on November 28.

“The court did not pass sentence on a case like that on that day and we are investigating to what extent the story was untrue,” said Huang Shuo, spokesman for Beijing’s Chaoyang District People’s Court, telling the Global Times that the widely circulated report was fake.

A report by Beijing Youth Daily said that 10 suspects, including three minors, from Changge, Central China’s Henan Province, had detained a number of petitioners travelling from Henan to Beijing to petition higher authorities.

Huang admitted the existence of the case but said a sentence has not yet been passed.

Moreover, the court is asking for an apology from the Beijing Youth Daily, AFP adds:

 A Chinese court has asked for an apology from a newspaper which said it jailed 10 “interceptors” who illegally held petitioners attempting to lodge complaints with the government, state media reported on Sunday.

But a court spokeswoman branded the report, which was carried by most major Chinese news websites and widely spread on Chinese social networking websites, as “fake news”, another state-run newspaper, the China Daily, reported.

The spokeswoman, who was not named, “confirmed a case involving city officials from Henan had been heard”, but “denied judges had handed down any verdict”, the paper said.

Beijing’s Chaoyang District Court, which reportedly handed down the verdict, is “in negotiations with Beijing Youth Daily over the printing of an apology and explanation”, the paper said.

See also Inside China’s ‘Black Jails,’ via CDT.

© Melissa M. Chan for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Beijing youth daily, black jails, illegal detentions, petitioners
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Li Yuanlong, who once worked as a reporter for the state-run Bijie Daily in the city of Bijie in Guizhou province, was taken to the airport along with his wife early Wednesday afternoon and “told to take a vacation” his son, Li Muzi, told China Real Time on Friday.

[…] The Bijie Public Security Bureau could not be reached for comment. A person answering the phone at the Bijie city government propaganda office said Mr. Li was traveling with his wife, citing messages posted to former journalist’s account on the web portal KDnet. “They are very happy now! That’s his own personal matter – why are you asking us?” the person said before hanging up.

[…] Li Fangping, a Beijing-based lawyer who has been keeping track of the situation, said that he had talked to Li Yuanlong when he was on his way to the airport. “I can confirm that he is travelling under control,” the lawyer, who is not related to Li Yuanlong, said.

“This is a way for (the local government) to maintain stability,” he added. “The public still wants more details, even though the local government has already dismissed the relevant people. Because Li Yuanlong is the main information provider, and because he was a reporter who has a lot of friends in the media, they authorities are afraid that people will continue to contact him in search of more clues or that Li might even leak out information about other instances of social injustice.”

Chin had previously explored why this story in particular resonated so deeply with the public. Also from China Real Time Report:

Stories of suffering children are always hard to stomach, but they tend to hit with particular impact in China, where the one-child policy and a strong belief in the family as the most basic unit of society have combined to imbue the young with an aura of unsurpassed importance. In this case, the impact of appears to have been amplified by similarities between what happened to the brothers and the Hans Christian Anderson short story “The Little Match Girl.”

The story, about a poor Danish girl who dies from exposure on New Year’s Eve after running away from her abusive father and trying to sell matches on the street, was once included in Chinese primary school text books as an example of the difficulties faced by the poor in capitalist countries.

[…] Cao Lin, a columnist for the state-run China Youth Daily, [wrote:] “At a time when we’re crowing about the rise of the nation and the creation of a moderately well-off society, to have five children die while seeking warmth in a trash bin is truly bizarre [….”]

Cao Lin was one of many in the state media to ask what had gone wrong, and who was to blame. Eight local officials were swiftly identified and fired. From Lin Xi at Global Times:

Eight local officials including two district chiefs in charge of civil affairs and education were dismissed or suspended from their duties by the Bijie municipal party committee on Monday because of the accident. Some people believe that these boys’ families and society should bear the primary responsibility for the accident instead of the officials. They think that it was the ignorance and indifference from the boys’ relatives and society which caused this tragedy.

However, the officials are not innocent because it is their duty to guarantee every citizen’s safety. The death of the five boys reflects management problems within government.

If the education system was better, these boys would have been taking lessons in warm classrooms instead of leaving school. If the assistance system was more active, they could have been found earlier and may have escaped death. Indeed, governments and officials have done nothing which directly caused this accident. However, it was the officials’ inaction which left the boys to die in the cold.

Many doubted, however that the sacking these eight officials had adequately addressed the root of the problem. From Rachel Wang at Tea Leaf Nation:

[…] As @bll2012 opined: “We are used to finding scapegoats when we encounter problems, then they give you a scapegoat! Then you shut up! You are so pathetic! Why not find the real cause: The failure of the social protection system.” Independent Chinese media Caixin (@财新网) also sounded a note of caution: “The tragedy in Guizhou did not only reflect management loopholes in Bijie alone, but also the defects of the mechanism protecting Chinese children’s rights. China is among the few countries that does not have a professional child welfare department. Administrative systems for child protection and rescue urgently need to be built.”

Therefore, according to the lawyer Li Fangping, Li Yuanlong was detained to prevent the damage from spreading any further. At The Daily Beast, Duncan Hewitt linked his treatment to the cases of Zhai Xiaobing (@stariver) and Ren Jianyu, and suggested—as did Charles Custer at ChinaGeeks—that while local government may be directly responsible, the political climate in which such actions are tolerated and encouraged is one of Beijing’s making:

Li’s detention echoes what is now a common pattern in China, in which sensitive individuals are removed from circulation at sensitive times, and held either under effective house arrest at home, or in what are known as “black [i.e. unofficial] jails.” During the run-up to the recent Communist Party Congress, rights groups say over a hundred people faced such treatment—including the well-known human-rights activist Hu Jia, who was only released from a three-year jail sentence last year.

In some cases the hard line taken against dissidents may be the choice of local authorities rather than necessarily being decreed from the center, says Professor Kerry Brown, executive director of the China Studies Center at the University of Sydney, but he adds that it is nevertheless a sign of the prevailing mood in Chinese political circles:

“The golden rule seems to be that no one gets bad marks for picking on dissidents and others labeled trouble makers,” he says, “while for those who are lenient, on the other hand, the risks if things go wrong are still high.

Furthermore, a Central Propaganda Department directive previously published by CDT suggested that Beijing, while allowing some coverage, had chosen to grant local government considerable control:

[… Y]ou may report moderately on the incident according to Xinhua wire copy and authoritative information released by the local government. Do not put this news on the front page, do not lure readers to the story, do not link to the story, to do not comment on it, and do not dispatch journalists to the scene.

Li, the primary remaining conduit of information on the case, had long been a thorn in the side of local authorities. In 2006, he was sentenced to two years in prison for allegedly inciting subversion in a series of articles posted to overseas Chinese websites. From the Committee to Protect Journalists’ report on his trial in May 2006:

“Like many committed reporters in China, Li Yuanlong began posting his articles online after facing censorship at his newspaper,” CPJ Executive Director Ann Cooper said. “He is guilty of nothing more than expressing his criticism of official actions and should never have been brought to trial. We call for his immediate and unconditional release.”

Li reported for Bijie Ribao on rural poverty and unemployment in his native Guizhou province and had frequently been censored in recent years because of complaints by local officials embarrassed by his reports, according to the New York-based advocacy group Human Rights in China and CPJ sources.

[…] Li pleaded not guilty to the charges against him, and his lawyer rejected the notion that his criticism threatened state authority.

“He only criticized wrongdoings of some Communist Party officials or local governments,” the lawyer told Reuters. “The Communist Party and state power is not the same concept.”

At EastSouthWestNorth, Roland Soong translated one of Li’s essays, On Becoming an American Citizen in Spirit, originally posted to exile site Boxun under the pen name Ye Lang (Night Wolf). In it, Li pecked at the raw nerve of China’s ‘crucifixion’ by foreign imperialists, defending former Peking University professor Jiao Guobiao‘s suggestion that it would have been better for the U.S. to “liberate” China from Communist rule at the end of the Korean War:

[…] If America really sent its soldiers to drive for Beijing, then this is more than ‘interfering internal politics of other countries’ and it is really the invasion by the ‘world police.’ I have been pondering why interfering in the internal politics of other countries and being the world police man have become terms of denigration that are natural and indisputable in “our” vocabulary. If your internal politics is a totalitarian regime covered up by dark curtains, then why should not the police in charge of maintaining world peace come and show you? As a common example, I am beating my wife and kids at home and someone else (such as the police) comes to stop me. I yell: “I’m beating my wife and my kids. What is this to outsiders? Why are you entitled to mind my family business?” Is that acceptable? As another example, a Chinese person falls into the river, or his house catches fire. There is an American on the side, but the patriots won’t let the Chinese person accept the help of the American. Instead, the Chinese person must wait for other Chinese to save him. The Chinese person will have to “sacrifice himself for the greater good.” Is this not the modernized version under the cover of patriotism of the old saying “It is a minor matter to starve to death; it is a major matter to lose your chastity”?

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: central propaganda department, china youth daily, Committee to Protect Journalists, Global Times, Guizhou, Hu Jia, illegal detentions, jiao guobiao, journalists, Korean War, Li Fangping, Li Yuanlong, local government, local officials, Ministry of Truth, poverty, poverty alleviation, subversion, vacation-style treatment
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At the end of December, on the day of the Laba Rice Congee Festival, when Chinese families typically eat congee, a type of rice porridge, Mr. Song wanted to deliver some congee to the petitioners. I told him that if he distributed it in the evening, I could go with him. But he said that in accordance with Northern custom, the congee should be eaten at lunchtime and so Mr. Song did it on his own. On his way, he was stopped by the police, and the porridge was confiscated. On the day of the Lantern Festival, which marked the end of the annual Chinese New Year holiday, Mr. Song was detained once again, because he gave the petitioners glutinous rice dumplings.

[...] After the coldest months of the winter had passed, I contacted Mr. Song and learned that he’d turned his focus toward rescuing petitioners who were being illegally detained in the infamous black jails, ad hoc detention centers that were set up in hotels to hold “troublemakers” from outside of Beijing until they could be returned forcibly to their hometowns.

[...] After the escape of the blind, barefoot lawyer Chen Guangcheng from his farmhouse in Shandong Province, where he’d been under illegal house arrest, Mr. Song took an even more dangerous risk. He drove to Dongshigu, Mr. Chen’s village, and helped the wife of Mr. Chen’s nephew, who had also been arrested, to escape to Beijing, where she went into hiding to avoid being abused by the local government.

Song's lawyer Liang Xiaojun gives a detailed account of their meeting in a detention center before Song's disapperance. From Yaxue Cao at Seeing Red in China:

I asked how he had been taken to custody and what the interrogation had been like. He spoke fast and clear: He was seized by policemen in the morning of May 4th while waiting in Beijing South Railway Station for a petitioner who had called and asked for his help in what now looked like a premeditated trap. He was then interrogated by policemen from Fengtai District Public Security Bureau and Beijing Headquarters respectively from the afternoon to early next morning. And as Xu Zhiyong predicted, it was about his visit to the black jail in Beijing set up by Chenzhou municipality, Hunan (湖南郴州) and his rescue of petitioners there, but also his online posts to help the petitioners. He was also asked his relationship with Xu Zhiyong—how he met him and how he became a volunteer for Citizen. On May 5, he was charged with “provoking disturbances” (寻衅滋事罪) and transferred to the Fengtai detention center.

[...] After that I was taken up by other obligations. I felt that Song Ze would be released soon, because, legally I couldn’t think of anything that he could possibly be convicted with. His detention was based on charges of “provoking disturbances” (寻衅滋事) as defined by Article 293 of China’s Criminal Law. They refer to the followings: beating another person at will; chasing, intercepting or hurling insults to another person; forcibly taking or demanding, willfully damaging, destroying or occupying public or private property; creating disturbances in a public place. As far as I could see, Song Ze had simply done what a citizen should have done, and he displayed no behaviors punishable by law.

Looking back now, I was too optimistic.

[...] On June 12 I went to Fengtai District detention center again. The officer in charge of the case told me that Song Ze had been switched to residing under surveillance and taken away by people from Beijing PSB a few days ago. He said he didn’t know which department of the PSB they were from, nor did he know where they had taken Song Ze. All he could tell me was that Fengtai District was no long on the case anymore.

Xu Zhiyong also expresses his concern about Song Ze's plight and explains the operation of black jails and surveillance in China. Translation by Hannah at Seeing Red in China:

Black prisons are places where local governments illegally detain petitioners. If the petitioners try to go to the Prime Minister’s house or foreign embassies near Dongjiaominxiang (东交民巷), Wangfujing Street (王府井大街) or other places where they are not supposed to petition, they could be taken away by police. During the so-called sensitive time of Two Meetings each year, they could be apprehended just passing through Chang’an Street (长安街) and being found carrying petitioning materials. All these are labeled “irregular petitioning” and the petitioners who have been rounded up are sent to Jiu Jing Zhuang (久敬庄), the detention and deportation center run by the State Bureau of Letters and Calls. Jiu Jing Zhuang would order local governments’ Beijing offices to take away petitioners from their jurisdictions on the same day they arrive in Jiu Jing Zhuang. However, most petitioners cannot be dispatched back to their homes that same day. They must wait to be sent home, perhaps needing a few days or a few weeks, and this turns into a profiteering opportunity for some people.

People running the black prisons are those who have connections with officials in the State Bureau of Letters and Calls or local governments’ Beijing offices. They rent hotel basements, hire thugs, forcibly take the petitioners from Jiu Jing Zhuang, illegally detain them, and then order the local governments to come to get the petitioners and pay a fee for the latters’ stay. They fetch 80 to 200 RMB per petitioner per day.

[...] In reality, residing under surveillance is more formidable than imprisonment. According to the new Criminal Procedure Law, the authority may designate the location for residing under surveillance, but it shall notify their relatives. But China being China, Song Ze’s family has not received any notification. He can still meet with his lawyer when detained in the detention center, but it’s been more than 40 days since he was put under residential surveillance, no one has been able to see Song Ze; and the PSB has refused to answer any questions on his whereabouts.

See more on China's criminal procedure law and black jails via CDT.

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: activists, black jails, civil society, criminal procedure law, illegal detentions, lawyers, surveillance, Xu Zhiyong
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Under the new law, there should be no infringements upon the dignity, personal safety or the property of mentally ill people.

The law also stipulates that institutions and individuals should protect the privacy of mentally ill people by preventing leaks of private information, such as their names, addresses and employment status, unless the sharing of such data is necessary for institutions and individuals while exercising their lawful duties.

China currently has about 16 million people suffering from severe mental disorders, according to the Ministry of Health.

[…] The law is expected to curb abuses regarding compulsory mental health treatment and protect citizens from undergoing unnecessary treatment or illegal hospitalization.

Xinhua notes the 2011 case of Chen Guoming, held in an asylum for 56 days at his wife’s instructions after he refused to lend money to her family. But forced psychiatric incarceration has also been used as a political weapon against activists, petitioners and whistleblowers. From Reuters’ Sui-Lee Wee:

“We welcome it because having a law is better than not having one,” Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, a New York-based advocacy group, told Reuters.

“The most important thing that this law does is it will allow civil society to step in to monitor and press for improvement in the management of mental health in China, including … pushing for greater transparency and progressive curtailment of police rights.”

[…] But Bequelin said he was still concerned about China’s police-run psychiatric hospitals, which confine people the authorities consider troublemakers.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: human rights watch, illegal detentions, laws, legal system, mental health, mental hospitals, mental illness, psychiatry
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“I hope he can achieve his freedom as soon as possible,” Mr. Mo, 57, told reporters during a news conference held a day after he won the 2012 prize for literature. He spoke not far from his family’s home in rural Shandong Province, the setting for many of his epic novels.

Even if Mr. Mo’s remarks were spare and decidedly nonconfrontational — he went on to suggest he was not an admirer of Mr. Liu’s pro-democracy essays — they are nonetheless likely to infuriate China’s leadership, which has been exulting in the Swedish Academy’s decision to give China its first Nobel in literature.

[…] Ran Yunfei, a sharp-tongued writer persecuted for his pro-democracy views, said he was heartened by Mr. Mo’s comments but doubted that he would become a crusader for human rights and free expression. “He has become very skilled at walking on a tightrope,” Mr. Ran wrote in a microblog post. “Now that he has become a household name with the government’s backing, it’s only going to become harder for him to be a real critic of the government.”

Other critics have also softened their tone. Activist Hu Jia said to Reuters that “what has happened in the last 24 hours has changed him. A Nobel prize, whether for peace or for literature, bestows on one a sense of wrong and right.” Outspoken artist Ai Weiwei, who had previously called Mo’s award an “insult to humanity and to literature“, told China Real Time Report that “I want to welcome Mo Yan back into the arms of the people. If this sort of courage is the result, I hope more Chinese writers will be given Nobel prizes.”

Also at China Real Time, Human Rights Watch’s Nicholas Bequelin commented on Mo’s politics and his support for Liu Xiaobo:

“Mo Yan certainly has a mind of his own. He’s not a government puppet. His novels make very clear that he’s not a cheerleader for the state of Chinese society today,” said Nicholas Bequelin, senior Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch. The novelist’s willingness to talk about Mr. Liu, he added, “will make it a little more difficult for China to conceal that they’re holding a Nobel Peace Prize winner in prison.”

Avant-garde writer Bei Cun wrote on Sina Weibo (via South China Morning Post’s John Kennedy):

Journalists and friends have messaged me asking for my view, as I’ve expressed both congratulations as well as opposition to the hand-copying [of Mao's speech]. What we must remember is that this is a literature award, and is limited to that profession. As I said several days ago, a writer’s political position will not inevitably affect his or her professional ability, otherwise someone such as Heidegger would be difficult to understand. Writers aren’t saints, maintaining a spiritual contradiction is allowed. I can only hope Mo Yan uses his influence to encourage people to act on conscience.

Jeffrey Brown discussed Mo’s political tightrope-walking with University of Virginia’s Charles Laughlin and China Digital Times Editor in Chief Xiao Qiang on PBS NewsHour:

For more views on the politics of Mo and his award, see David Wertime’s post at Tea Leaf Nation and Yaxue Cao’s at Seeing Red in China.

Even before the press conference, Mo’s English translator Howard Goldblatt had discussed with Reuters how the author might make use of his new prominence:

“I think Mo Yan could actually, in a very nuanced way, make a difference and get some of this stuff happening,” Goldblatt said by telephone from Boulder, Colorado, referring to improving freedom of speech and conditions for writers.

“To be honest with you, I doubt that he will. I think he’s just a novelist who doesn’t want to be involved in those things.”

[…] “You know, he respects and likes the dissidents,” said Goldblatt.

“He just doesn’t want to become one of them in exile.”

While thanking his supporters and detractors alike, Mo himself has taken on his critics directly. From Reuters:

“I believe that the people who have criticized me have not read my books,” he said. “If they had read my books they would understand that my writings at that time took on a great deal of risk and were under pressure.

“Many of the people who have criticized me online are Communist Party members themselves. They also work within the system. And some have benefited tremendously within the system,” he added.

“I am working in China,” he said. “I am writing in a China under Communist Party leaders. But my works cannot be restricted by political parties.”

While Mo’s bold statement in front of the media was uncontainable, references to Liu Xiaobo elsewhere have faced tight controls. China Media Project highlighted a weibo post by deputy director of the School of Law at China University of Political Science and Law He Bing, which was swiftly deleted, despite not mentioning Liu by name:

As Mo Yan receives his [Nobel] prize, regardless of whether it is from the perspective of domestic or international politics, we should all consider changing the fortune of another Nobel Prize winner. Our country cannot remain idiotic to the very end. Full reconciliation is the prerequisite for a stable society.

Meanwhile, Liu remains in prison, while his wife Liu Xia is under house arrest in the legal black hole where she has spent the last two years. The Financial Times’ Jamil Anderlini, discussing her case as a weathervane for judicial reform in China, described the Catch 22 situation imposed on visitors. “Their attempts to impose arbitrary and impossible conditions on would-be visitors rather than just forbidding them from seeing her seemed to betray a desire to somehow legitimise her detention,” he wrote.

The BBC (via CDT) reported this week that her incarceration is designed to pressure Liu Xiaobo into agreeing to leave the country, and to control the flow of information to and from the jailed laureate. Reporters Without Borders, meanwhile, has published haunting video of Liu Xia smoking at her window—”one of the few freedoms she can still enjoy”.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ai Weiwei, house arrest, Hu Jia, illegal detentions, literature, liu xia, Liu Xiaobo, mo yan, Nobel Peace Prize, Nobel Prize, Ran Yunfei, Reporters Without Borders, Xiao Qiang
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Having traveled for about half an hour, first on highway and then over a bumpy road, we arrived and got out of the car. Intuitively I tried to remove the black cover over my head when a man huffed, “Don’t!” and two men seized me by the arms.

We got into a room, as I sensed, and I was pressed down into what seemed to me like the corner of a sofa. I was stripped of my belt, my shoe laces and everything I had with me. People were shuffling in and out of the room. One voice said to me, “For now, think what you have done lately. Think hard! We’ll ask you questions in the afternoon!” I sat still and said nothing.

Xu recalls that last year he was detained by security police for organizing “a relatively large-scale petition for equal rights for education”. He was taken to a hot-spring resort but refused to cooperate with security police in this so-called “tourism”. On both occasions, Xu protested his illegal detention by refusing to accept the meals provided by security officers.

After an officer threatened to prosecute Xu for “inciting subversion of state power”, Xu argued that “all of our efforts are to protect the liberty and human rights of each and every Chinese …. No one will be able to reverse the historical tide, so don’t overdo it.”

Xu attributed the relatively humane treatment he received to “wide attention” from the outside world, contrasting this with other cases of illegal detention involving physical abuse and even deaths. He expressed gratitude towards the “new citizens” who are concerned with human rights conditions in China. He ascribed his detention and harassment to his endless efforts to promote civil rights and stated that he would be willing to “pay a price for the freedom of the people”. From Seeing Red in China:

The new civil movement calls individual citizens to spread the principles of democracy and rule of law, to abide a civil code of actions, to reject privileges and corruption. And we advocate liberty, justice and love, which is the spirit of the new civic movement. Our mission is to end, from the root, the cycle of regime change through violence and give freedom back to each and every Chinese. This is the reason for which I lost my own freedom for the time being.

Xu signed his blog post “Citizen Xu Zhiyong”: his organisation, ‘Citizen’, has been distributing pins bearing the Chinese characters for the term, 公民 gongmin, in Sun Yat-sen’s handwriting. A recent post on CDT described the “decapitation” of Sina Weibo users who had adopted these characters as their avatars.

Xu was accused of tax evasion in 2010, but the case was dismissed soon afterwards. Read more about Xu Zhiyong on China Digital Times.

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: civil society, human rights conditions, illegal detentions, lawyers, Xu Zhiyong
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Feng Zhenghu may be best known for his three-month stay in Tokyo’s Narita Airport after Chinese officials refused to allow him to re-enter the country. His eventual return in February 2010 did not mark the end of his problems, however. His persistent work to help petitioners hold the authorities to their own laws has led to an extra-legal house arrest similar to Chen’s. From Tania Branigan at The Guardian:

Since February the 57-year-old scholar has been barred from leaving his home, except when escorted to the police station for 10 hour sessions – as he was on Saturday. At one stage, unable even to shop for food, he resorted to lowering a basket from his window for well-wishers to fill with groceries every few days [see video of this process at Shanghaiist].

“What they have done to me is a breach of the law. It has no legal basis. I am very angry,” said Feng, speaking to the Guardian by telephone.

[…] Police have never formally notified Feng that he is under house arrest. An officer at the local station referred queries to the Shanghai police media department, where calls rang unanswered.

“Maybe people think Chen Guangcheng’s case was unique and that this has been won. Feng Zhenghu and Chen’s cases are both extreme, but they are on a continuum of illegal punishment and detentions for activists that is very, very common in China,” said Wang Songlian of Chinese Human Rights Defenders.

In spite of his anger, Feng, like Pu Zhiqiang and Ai Weiwei, shows a remarkable lack of bitterness towards his guards. Feng’s neighbours include American journalist Lara Farrar, who describes his attitude at The Huffington Post, and explains how Chen’s escape increased the harshness of Feng’s own situation:

“If I escape, those guards, the local public security bureau chief, the district governor, all of them will lose their jobs,” he said. “I have been with them for two years, and I understand them. It is also hard for them, so I don’t want to try to run away. Summer is coming, and I worry for them. The sun and mosquitoes are coming, and they have to stay outside. It is a pretty hard life for them as it is for me.”

Since the blind Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng dramatically escaped from house arrest in a rural village in northern Shandong Province at the end of April, the layers of security surrounding my apartment complex have multiplied. The guards are still at the gate. But now there are more who hang around all day near the entryway to Feng’s building. There are new security cameras by the entrance. This week, new ultra bright lights were installed on the grounds.

[…] “They are very worried right now that in Shandong a blind person could escape such heavy security,” Feng said. “They afraid that I might run away too, and then they will lose their jobs. So their days are not easy right now.”

Meanwhile, journalists have taken advantage of their new freedom to visit Dongshigu. Speculating on the sudden disappearance of the village guards, Chen’s older brother Chen Guangfu told Reuters’ Sui-Lee Wee that “perhaps the ‘nation’ of Dongshigu has surrendered to Beijing or Beijing won the war against Dongshigu. The policies of the central government can finally be carried out here. In the past it was like ‘the mountains were high and the emperor is far away’, this was a place where the law could not reach.”

Nevertheless, the shadow over Dongshigu has not entirely lifted, as McClatchy’s Tom Lasseter found:

“Chen Guangcheng is a good man,” said the farmer, wearing navy cotton pants and a green camouflage shirt. Before he could get another word out, however, a man identified by locals as a village official rode by on a scooter, honked his horn and said, “Don’t talk.” Moments later, the official circled back and bellowed, “Bu zhidao! Bu zhidao!” – Chinese for “don’t know” – apparently the only response the farmer was supposed to give.

A second farmer had explained earlier that, “Chen Guangcheng had a very good reputation, the common people sympathized with him,” when the same official, in a grey-striped polo shirt, rushed over to command, “Go! Go!”

It was a far cry from the previous year and a half, when dozens of men enforced a brutish cordon around this village of less than 500 people in eastern China’s Shandong Province. But the scene of petty bureaucrats – the village representative was joined by others from county offices — harassing anyone who wanted to publicly discuss Chen seemed a fitting coda as his story fades from the headlines. It has been a remarkable example of how dissent is silenced in China.

The fragments of praise Lasseter was able to gather contrast with blogger Sima Pingbang’s account, published in the Global Times in May. The “grass-roots intellectual” accused Chen of wielding tyrannical control over the local water supply based, apparently quite loosely, on a case described in Lijia Zhang’s recent portrait of the activist at The Diplomat.

Others visiting the village had experiences similar to Lasseter’s, as photographer David Gray recounted in a photoessay at Reuters:

[…] [Guangfu] arrived on a bike, smiling and very happy to see us. We walked with him to the family home, just five minutes away, and discovered of course that it was at the exact spot where we had first asked someone after entering the village. [Guangfu] said he was certain that all the villagers had been told not to talk to any foreigners, because normally they would all be out of their homes watching them.

We entered the gate to the Chen family home and met Wang Jinxiang, the mother of [Guangfu] and Guangcheng. This sweet lady greeted us with open arms and we quickly started the interview. It didn’t take long for her to begin crying as she recounted the many sleepless nights over the past years.

[…] Finally, a goofy-looking man dressed exactly like an official would be (with long dress pants and a collared shirt, in the middle of a farming village) approached us and asked where we were from. We told him we were from Beijing and we were doing interviews – would he care to comment? There was “No need” he replied, “As you can see, all is fine here.”

See also Charles Custer’s reflections on Chen’s escape and the ensuing diplomatic standoff at ChinaGeeks.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Chen Guangcheng, detention, Feng Zhenghu, house arrest, Hu Jia, illegal detentions, security guards, Shandong, Shanghai
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“The government spent lots of money to watch the little blind one,” Liu Wencai, an elderly farmer, told The Associated Press as he walked down a village alley. But when asked about the hired enforcers, Liu said, “I cannot answer.”

Asked about the guards who once stood at a bridge entrance to Dongshigu and chased outsiders away, a middle-aged man in blue overalls on a motorcycle refused to answer. Before riding away, he made a throat-slashing gesture as a warning that the topic of security remains taboo ….

On the road outside Chen’s home, three women — taking a rest from field work — told reporters they are happier now that the security guards are gone. But they quicky dispersed when four local officials showed up and asked reporters to leave so as not to distract farmers during harvesting season.

“This village is very peaceful. Nothing happens here,” one of the officials said. “It needs a quiet environment to develop its economy.”

A likely factor in the villagers’ lingering wariness is suspicion that the dismantling of the security machine has more to do with a cover-up than with any real resolution or relaxation. Chen’s brother, defying local authorities’ request that he “keep a low profile”, voiced these concerns to Reuters’ Sui-Lee Wee:

Chen Guangcheng’s eldest brother, Chen Guangfu, told Reuters by phone that the authorities in the northeast Shandong province last Saturday night destroyed “black houses” – which he called symbols of “barbarity and tyranny” and where he said countless supporters of his brother had been beaten.

[…] “Not a shred of evidence is left after they’ve destroyed everything at the scene. Everything has been moved,” Chen Guangfu said.

“The two guard posts that were built specially for putting Guangcheng under house imprisonment at the entrance of the village,” he said. “For the past two years, countless netizens (Internet supporters of Chen) endured violent beatings in these houses.”

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Post tags: Chen Guangcheng, cover-up, Dongshigu, house arrest, illegal detentions, linyi, local officials, police brutality, security crackdown, security guards, Shandong
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Last weekend, overnight, the security presence vanished. From Didi Tang at the Associated Press:

So thorough was the cleanup this past weekend that locals said the surveillance cameras trained on Chen home had been removed and the high voltage street lamps dimmed. Two adjoining huts built at the village’s entrance to house the guards — and where outsiders trying to visit Chen had been beaten — had been torn down. Even the trash they piled up had been taken away.

“It was as if the whole thing evaporated,” said Chen’s older brother, Chen Guangfu, who lives in the village with several others in the Chen family. “I feel liberated.”

[…] Rights lawyer Jiang Tianyong, a friend of Chen Guangcheng, said local authorities likely got rid of the surveillance to destroy evidence ahead of a promised investigation by the central government.

“If Beijing wants to go through the motion, it can do so” with the absence of evidence, Jiang said. “But if Beijing wants a real investigation, it can still do so because there are plenty of witnesses.”

Such an investigation is one of two urgent remaining tasks in Chen’s case, argues Ng Tze-wei at the South China Morning Post.

[…] The second is guaranteeing the fair handling of the prosecution of Chen Kegui, the activist’s nephew, who was arrested and charged with “killing with intent” after he waved a knife and injured three officers who barged into his house on April 26 in Linyi, Shandong, after his uncle’s escape came to light.

Beijing lawyer Ding Xikui said the last time Chen Kegui’s wife heard from him was via text message in the early hours of April 27, when he asked her to help him hire a lawyer. But when Ding and another renowned defence lawyer from Shanghai, Si Weijiang, tried to approach the police bureau in charge of the case, they were told that Chen Kegui had already requested legal aid counsel, so neither Ding nor Si could see him.

Assigning government-friendly lawyers in sensitive cases has become a common tactic for mainland authorities in recent years – even though it is against the spirit of the law, as it strips the defendant of the right to select a lawyer.

In this case, the appointment of a legal aid lawyer is particularly ridiculous because legal aid exists to protect of the rights of defendants who cannot afford a lawyer. It should be granted only when a defendant can’t afford a lawyer, rather than be used as an excuse to prevent a defendant hiring a lawyer of his choice.

While the grip on Dongshigu may finally have relaxed, politics and money continue to drive the expansion of extra-legal security operations against “perceived troublemakers” elsewhere. From Charles Hutzler at the Associated Press:

While China has long been a police state, controls on these non-offenders mark a new expansion of police resources at a time the authoritarian leadership is consumed with keeping its hold over a fast-changing society.

“Social activists that no one has ever heard of have 10 people watching them,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher with Human Rights Watch. “The task is to identify and nip in the bud any destabilizing factors for the regime.”

Mostly unknown outside their communities, the activists are a growing portion of what’s called the “targeted population” — a group that also includes criminal suspects and anyone deemed a threat. They are singled out for overwhelming surveillance and by one rights group’s count amount to an estimated one in every 1,000 Chinese — or well over a million.

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Post tags: Chen Guangcheng, Dongshigu, human rights watch, illegal detentions, Jiang Tianyong, lawyers, legal aid, linyi, security guards, Shandong, surveillance
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The policeman yanked the black hood over Ai Weiwei’s head. It was suffocating. Written in white across the outside was a cryptic phrase: “Suspect 1.7.”

At the rear of a white van, one policeman sat on each side of Mr. Ai, China’s most famous artist and provocateur. They clutched his arms. Four more men sat in the front rows.

“Until that moment I still had spirit, because it didn’t look real,” Mr. Ai said. “It was more like a performance. Why was it so dramatic?”

On the morning of April 3, 2011, the policemen drove Mr. Ai, one of the most outspoken critics of the Communist Party, to a rural detention center from Beijing Capital International Airport, where Mr. Ai had planned to fly to Hong Kong and Taiwan on business. So began one of the most closely watched human rights dramas in China of the past year.

See more on Ai Weiwei, his detention and subsequent skirmishes with the authorities via CDT, and look for a nearby screening of Alison Klayman’s documentary, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry.

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Post tags: Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei detention 2011, illegal detentions, People's Armed Police, police
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Talking through an interpreter to CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Chen was reluctant to discuss his four-year prison term or subsequent confinement in Dongshigu, but asked that the latter be referred to as “illegal detention”, rather than the more innocuous “house arrest”. “It’s hard for me to describe what it was like during that time,” he said, “but let’s just say that my suffering was beyond imagination.” He also highlighted the role of Guo Yushan in his escape, but made an apparent attempt to defuse recent disagreement over who deserved credit, and once again expressed concern for family and supporters still in China.

“There’s one thing I want to mention that may be a surprise to many people,” Chen said. “When a group of people come together and accomplish something, they often fight for credit. In my case, all those people who went to Shandong to pick me up, when the news broke, they were fighting for risk instead of credit. They were all trying to claim responsibility to make others safer.”

Chen, who’s blind, fears the Chinese government may retaliate against acquaintances who helped him, he said.

“Of course, I’m very worried. We can see their retribution against my family since my escape has continued and been intensified,” Chen said.

The full interview is available at CNN.com.

Foremost among the reprisals is the prosecution of Chen’s nephew, Chen Kegui, for attempted murder. Local authorities have rejected his family’s choice of lawyers and appointed their own to defend him: an echo, Chen Guangcheng says, of his own treatment in 2006. Chen’s family are now fighting this decision. From Josh Chin at China Real Time Report:

In the most recent development, Liu Fang, the wife of Mr. Chen’s nephew, Chen Kegui, has written a letter to local authorities demanding that her husband be allowed to meet with the lawyers she has commissioned to represent him.

The letter comes a few days after Mr. Chen’s brother, Chen [Guangfu], escaped guards in the family’s home village near Linyi in Shandong province to consult with lawyers in Beijing about his son’s case.

Chen Kegui faces a charge of attempted murder for slashing local officials with a kitchen knife after the officials burst into the home of his father a few days after Chen Guangcheng escaped. Lawyers and family members argue Chen Kegui was acting in self-defense and say the attempted murder charge is wildly excessive.

Liu’s letter is translated in full at China Real Time. Chen Guangcheng also discussed his nephew’s case in an interview with Reuters:

“My older brother escapes house arrest and comes to Beijing in search of a lawyer for my nephew,” Chen said in the interview.

“This is an extremely normal thing, and the most basic right of a Chinese citizen. If even this right cannot be ensured then I think development in the construction of China’s legal system over the past few decades has already been undone by law-breaking officials within the political system,” he said ….

Chen described the harassment and abuse of his family and supporters as “obviously a violation of China’s constitution, and is despicable.”

“The Chinese Foreign Ministry has said more than once that I am a free person. Did I do anything wrong by leaving my home? If other people helped me leave … this is something that should be praised. Why then when I leave do they break into my home to beat people, detain them,” he said.

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Post tags: Chen Guangcheng, house arrest, illegal detentions, lawyers, linyi, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Shandong
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