Mr. Zhou, 47 years old, lives under the Sandong Bridge in Chongqing. He does not think there is much worth complaining under such living conditions. “We suffered from wage arrears before, but this is no longer a problem now,” He smiled,“We get 20 kuai (yuan) every day for meals and there’s always meat.” He is pretty content with things as they are now ….

There’re 3 arches of 100 square meters and they hold sometimes more than 40 people. They’ve installed lights, water, and the public toilettes and bath houses pitched with canvas. Crude and simple, people respect each other. Men have a drink together after work while women chitchat about the day.

Some workers live on the site because they have to keep an eye on the heavy equipment, while other workers live usually under the bridges. “It’s not cold during the winter, but it’s really hash when it’s summer”, explained Li Mei, “Yes, it’s not as good as being at home, but since we are all from the rural areas, we’ve been through tougher days. Some dwellings back at home are even worse than this. Anyway, we didn’t hear much complaint around.”

A set of pictures taken by Sim Chi Yin in Beijing last year shows the bleak situation of another group of city outsiders: petitioners living on the streets or in shacks, sometimes for years, while trying to present their grievances to the central government. From VII Photo, via Kathleen McLaughlin (@kemc):

At one end of the chilly underpass, a young girl wailed. Her father, Liu Guojun, limped over as quickly as he could with a bowl of sweet potatoes he had picked up at a wholesale market’s rubbish heap and roasted over a street-side stove. He hoped it would get her warm.

With his mentally ill wife and three young children in tow, the 47-year-old electrician spent weeks under a bridge near Beijing’s Southern Railway Station at the start of this year (2011), trying to ward off winter with a few blankets, canvas sheets and cardboard.

They have a home in China’s central Henan province — over ten hours’ train ride from Beijing — but were forced to sleep rough in the capital in order to right what they see as a terrible wrong.

See more via CDT on the hardships facing migrants, the violence facing petitioners, and the hukou registration system excluding both groups from urban society.

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Media reports said yesterday the project’s biding process will start soon. The system will be set up at Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station, Tianjin W. Railway Station and Jinan W. Railway Station.

The equipment will be set up at security check areas in the stations, according to the China Academy of Railway Sciences.

“The quick identification system will enable the police to recognize faces via surveillance cameras and comb criminal databases on computers for the final match,” authorities said.

Researchers added the technology works when people are moving and is helpful even if suspects have had cosmetic surgery.

The South China Morning Post, however, reports that the notice calling for bids on the project was quickly removed, apparently in response to online criticism:

Since the academy pulled the notice, no further details about the project have emerged, including its cost. Attempts to find how why the notice was removed were unsuccessful yesterday, as the academy’s office did not answer phone calls.

Many online commentators responded negatively to the proposed system.

“A government that treats its whole population like suspects is worse than a few criminals on the run,” a Beijing-based commentator wrote on 163.com a major Chinese internet portal ….

In 2006, rail authorities in Beijing set up a still-image face-recognition system at the city’s West Station and they said it helped police catch more than 100 fugitives within the first month.

But the process of scanning each person severely impeded passenger flow, and it is now rarely used.

The new system, if reliable and widely deployed, could be used and abused against other targets. Charles Custer pointed out its potential for identifying kidnapped children (the subject of his forthcoming documentary, Living With Dead Hearts), while Tom of Seeing Red in China warned that the system could aid the interception of petitioners.

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On November 30, 2010, the head of the local police substation said: “Stop saying that Zhao Ziyang was innocent.” I said I would not stop. He then said: “Sign your name on the demolition agreement.” I said no, I did not agree with the terms: they were giving me 100 square meters worth of compensation for 800 square meters. “Since you don’t agree, let’s take this discussion somewhere else!” Ten police officers dragged me into a police vehicle and handcuffed me. They took me to Chaoyang District Shuangqiao No. 3 Hospital, also known as the Chaoyang Mental Health Center, a psychiatric hospital. When I saw the sign, I started to cry. I tried to control my emotions—I said I didn’t break the law and wasn’t ill. They said, “If we say you’re sick, you are sick.” They took me into a room for the seriously disturbed.

There were a total of three people in this room. The other two were not lucid so I had nobody to talk to. There were nurses in this room whose job it was to keep watch on us round-the-clock and who separated me from other patients, not letting me have any contact with them ….

Twenty days later, they wanted to do a blood test, but I wouldn’t let them. They tied me down onto the bed and took my blood forcibly. After the test, they said I had Hepatitis B and forced me to take medicine. It was Risperdal [an anti-psychotic drug known to have potentially fatal side effect]. They told me it was medicine to regulate my moods. After I took the medicine, I had a numbing pain in my whole body, and I felt pain in my head and my heart.

At USA Today last month, Calum MacLeod described the growing use of politically-motivated forced hospitalisations, particularly against petitioners, and the beginnings of legislative action against the practice.

The Communist Party does not acknowledge its mental facilities are used to silence critics, but according to numerous human rights groups and Chinese dissidents, China’s Communist-led government has for decades incarcerated healthy people in mental wards to suppress dissent. In the past two years, wrongful confinement cases have sharply increased, says Liu Feiyue of Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch, a human-rights organization based in Suzhou ….

Rights activist Liu says officials commit troublemakers to mental hospitals because the process is secretive and, unlike the courts, requires no evidence of wrongdoing. He says the full extent of wrongful confinement in recent years far exceeds the 1,000 cases his group has compiled in a database since 2009.

Corruption also plays a major role. Unethical doctors and hospital administrators can benefit financially by allowing police to turn hospitals into “black jails,” Liu says.

In 2010, the Ministry of Public Security ordered that psychiatric hospitals “must not admit anyone who is not a mental patient” without obtaining police approval, an obviously less than airtight safeguard. The previous year, a Peking University professor controversially stated that 99% of petitioners were mentally ill and should be hospitalised for their own safety and that of others, even if most displayed no symptoms. In 2006, the Los Angeles Times reported the story of Wang Wanxing, who was forcibly hospitalised for 13 years after unfurling an anti-government banner in Tiananmen Square on June 3rd, 1992.

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Reuters reported last week that, faced with intransigent officials and empty guarantees of safe passage in Linyi, some of Chen’s would-be visitors have taken their complaints to Beijing:

Some of the supporters were beaten by dozens of men in plain clothes while trying to visit Chen on Sunday, and their complaints were later ignored by the local police, said Mao Hengfeng, a petitioner from Shanghai.

She said the petitioners then went to Beijing’s Ministry of Public Security, but it was not clear whether officials accepted their petition expressing concerns about Chen’s treatment.

“We were roughed up and pushed around, and some of us were hurt, but the police didn’t lift a finger and ignored our complaints,” Mao told Reuters about the weekend incident in Linyi.

“Now we want the Ministry of Public Security to do something about Linyi — it’s a place without any law or rights.”

But Jerome Cohen, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed based on his Nov. 1 testimony to the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China, wrote that the image of the Linyi government as a rogue, independent actor is a misconception. While limited aspects of the story may indeed be cases of local-vs-national government, he argues, the situation as a whole is part of a broader program in which Beijing is entirely complicit.

There are three myths about Mr. Chen’s plight that must be dispelled. One is that such cases of persecution and abuse of lawyers and legal activists are rare in China, and only occur when a few heroic dissidents openly invoke the law to confront injustice rather than rely less confrontational methods ….

A second myth is that Mr. Chen’s recent suffering is merely another example of local government run amok, neither approved nor condoned by the central government. Many attacks on lawyers are indeed local in origin, and Mr. Chen’s case started out that way in 2005 when local authorities first sent thugs to illegally confine him and his family at home. However, the case soon came to the attention of national leaders. After representatives of the Ministry of Public Security reportedly met with local officials to discuss the situation, the authorities launched a criminal prosecution against Mr. Chen, a more conventional type of repression.

A third myth is that there must be some purported legal justification for the suffering that the Chen household has endured since his release from prison last year. Governments, even the Chinese government, normally like to maintain some veneer of plausible legitimacy for their misconduct, however thin it might be. Yet no such justification has come to my knowledge in this case, which seems to have exceeded the bounds of police ingenuity.

See also Andy Yee’s post on Chen’s house arrest as a facet of China’s stability maintenance machinery at Global Voices Online, a slightly different adaptation of Cohen’s testimony at The New York Review of Books, and Human Rights in China Executive Director Sharon Hom’s testimony to the same Congressional-Executive Commission:

It is important to note that Chen Guangcheng’s situation reflects the fate of countless other human rights defenders in China subject to extra-legal measures, including being restrained under constant surveillance within closed premises – in their homes, temporary residences such as boarding houses or hotels (also known as “black jails”), or other undisclosed locations – where they are not permitted to leave. As distinguished from formal sentences of imprisonment, in which authorities officially charge and detain individuals pursuant to cited criminal laws and procedures, Chinese government officials have articulated no specific legal basis for these detentions. As a result, extra-judicially detained rights defenders are left entirely outside the protection of the law, without any recourse to procedures to challenge their detention, under circumstances that could permit serious rights violations – including the use of torture or other ill-treatment.

The commission’s chairman, Representative Chris Smith, announced his intention to visit Chen if possible, and to pursue other avenues if not. From the AFP:

“Enough is enough. The cruelty and extreme violence against Chen and his family brings dishonor to the government of China and must end,” said Representative Chris Smith, chairman of the Congressional Executive Commission on China.

Smith, a Republican from New Jersey who is active on human rights issues, said he would shortly ask China to allow a US congressional delegation to travel to Chen’s village of Dongshigu in eastern Shandong province.

“I am trying to put together a trip to go there and go to his house. We’re already checking flights,” Smith told AFP after the hearing, saying that the lawmakers “desperately hope” that Chen is still alive.

Even if China does not allow the trip, Smith said that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or the US ambassador to China, Gary Locke, should raise the case at the highest levels.

Locke told GlobalPost last Friday that he had actually already expressed his concerns:

“We are very concerned about his treatment and, for instance, the reports his daughter was not allowed to go to school. Although he’s been freed, he is still under severe restrictions on his movements,” Locke told GlobalPost in a private interview Friday. He said the Chinese government has not yet responded to the letter he sent in September ….

Since Locke sent the letter, Chen’s 6-year-old daughter has been allowed to leave her home to attend school, under guard.

The ambassador, who arrived in Beijing in August, added his voice to the chorus calling for China to ease its extreme treatment of the self-taught lawyer, who is known for exposing forced abortions in his hometown in Shandong province.

A new report from the Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers, ‘Legal Advocacy and the 2011 Crackdown in China: Adversity, Repression, and Resilience‘ (PDF) describes earlier interference with efforts to help Chen (pp. 9-10):

On February 16, 2011, a group of activists and lawyers gathered over lunch to strategize about how to come to the aid of Chen Guangcheng, a blind, self-taught legal activist facing an extraordinary level of government abuse. A week earlier, on February 9, Chen and his wife Yuan Weijing publicly released a series of videos describing the 24-hour surveillance and house imprisonment he and his family had been subjected to since his release from prison on September 9, 2010. There was absolutely no legal basis for these measures or the ongoing deprivation of liberty of Chen and his family. The following day, Chen and his wife were beaten in their home in retribution for releasing the videos online. (For more details on Chen’s case, see Box B. [p. 23])

Authorities barred seven individuals from leaving their homes to attend the February 16 meeting, including Li Xiongbing, Li Heping, and Xu Zhiyong, three lawyers whom authorities would proceed to illegally detain at various times in the following months. Another person prevented from attending the meeting, Internet activist and rights defender Wang Lihong, was detained sometime before March 26 and has since been convicted for “assembling a crowd to disturb social order” and sentenced to nine months imprisonment. The February 16 meeting mirrored other gatherings held during the period of Chen’s pre-trial detention in 2006, making Chen’s case notable because it inspired lawyers, human rights defenders, and activists to coalesce as a community in his support.

Enforced disappearance is defined under international law as the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty of a person either by state agents or with official support, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the detention or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person. Chinese authorities proceeded to employ this illegal measure against many of the lawyers who managed to attend the meeting. Police seized lawyers Jiang Tianyong and Tang Jitian that afternoon. Tang was disappeared for three weeks, while Jiang was interrogated and beaten before being released in the evening, only to be disappeared for 2 months from February 19 to April 19. Beijing-based rights lawyer and university lecturer Teng Biao was disappeared for 69 days between February 19 and April 29.

The Economist cited Chen’s would-be visitors as a key demonstration of the Internet’s potential for coordinating activism in China:

The use of the internet to mobilise people to visit Mr Chen has rattled officials far beyond Shandong province. It is the first time in China that activists have made such a persistent effort to show up in solidarity with someone under house arrest. It also coincides with attempts to use weibo, or microblogs, to gain support for independent candidates in elections to low-level “people’s congresses” that have been taking place around the country. Though the congresses have little power, and it is very difficult for truly independent candidates to stand, the polls still make the Communist Party nervous.

Activists know they have little chance of meeting Mr Chen, whose house is floodlit at night and cut off from mobile-phone networks. But there have been numerous quixotic forays. On October 14th a number of disabled men and women from neighbouring Anhui province were turned away. On October 30th, says Human Rights in China, an NGO based in New York, a group of 37 people who made the attempt to get through was attacked by around 100 thugs.

The Globe and Mail’s Mark MacKinnon sees Chen’s predicament as akin to the death of Yueyue and the authorities’ pursuit of Ai Weiwei in reflecting an underbelly sometimes concealed by the bright plumage of China’s economic hi-scores and scientific leaps.

His neighbours stand aside and let it happen. “These people must have known Chen Guangcheng. They might have even been his student, friends, or relatives. But in this place, at this time, no one cared about what was happening to him. These villagers treated him as if he were a stranger, or an enemy. All these villagers had gotten together to gang up against one blind man,” writer Murong Xuecun wondered after he and four friends were roughed up and prevented from seeing Mr. Chen ….

The Communist Party’s supporters will say that dissidents like Mr. Ai and Mr. Chen don’t matter in the big scheme of things. The argument goes that the persecution of these few is a small price to pay for ensuring the stability that allows the People’s Republic to get wealthier, to build a space program, and to experiment – a little – with civil society.

Reading that half of the headlines, it’s hard to argue that progress isn’t being made. But as little Yueyue’s case illustrated so vividly, the costs of that stability – the institutionalized injustice and indifference – are still being tallied.

Italy’s Post Internazionale has interviewed “Crazy Crab”, the cartoonist behind ‘Hexie Farm‘ (which was included in CDT’s recent list of search terms blocked on Sina Weibo) and the ‘Dark Glasses. Portrait‘ project in support of Chen Guangcheng:

The CCP has a long history of using art as a powerful propaganda tool. However, artists can also use art to protest against the one party dictatorship and censorship. If an art work shocks the audience, give them a new perspective and let them think in a different way, then it can help to change the system gradually …. One month ago, I started ‘Dark glasses. Portrait’ campaign to support a blind lawyer, Mr. Chen Guangcheng, who is under house arrest in a village. I received hundreds of photos from unknown people already. Reading their emails I can feel their fear, even from people who are thousands kilometers away from China (in Europe or the US ). But the more I read from participants’ words is still courage and strength.

See more on the Crazy Crab interview via CDT.

Meanwhile, in the Relativity Media Linyi film shoot subplot, Relativity CEO Ryan Kavanaugh was due to appear at the Asia Society’s US-China Film Summit in Los Angeles last Tuesday. He cancelled at the last minute, however, possibly calculating that continued celebration of his firm’s valuable business relationships in China might be derailed by awkward questions about his partners’ other activities. The Washington Post, though, talked to a Linyi official whose enthusiasm for the city’s cinematic prospects remained undented:

In a telephone interview, Su Guiyou, director of the Linyi Propaganda Department’s Culture Industry Office, said that the district hoped to become a center for movie-making and that the American comedy “will be a good chance to publicize Linyi and will help make Linyi famous not only in China, but also the world.” The Hollywood team, he said, filmed for four days last week and shot a “dream scene” in a local quarry.

Asked about Chen and complaints about his treatment, Su said he had never heard of the activist and hung up.

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These demonstrators have a narrow agenda and concrete demands: Farmers want a stop to confiscations of their land or to get better compensation for lost property. Homeowners want to stop demolitions. People want cleaner air and water and safer food. Truckers and taxi drivers want relief from soaring fuel prices ….

The number of reported “mass incidents” rose from 8,700 in 1993 to more than 90,000 in 2006, according to the Chinese Police Academy. A professor at Tsinghua University, Sun Liping, has told Chinese reporters he believes the figure last year was up to 180,000 ….

In China, it is impossible to go to court to get a temporary restraining order if, for example, a factory is spewing harmful sustances into the water supply or somebody starts building on your land. Petitioning, an archaic practice dating to imperial times, requires the aggrieved to travel to Beijing and wait for months, if not years.

Rioting gets results. Quickly.

A new China Labour Bulletin report, meanwhile, focuses on the growing number of strikes and other labour protests, as young migrant workers become increasingly assertive in demanding wage increases. From Reuters:

Although migrant workers have often won pay rises in recent years, they feel poorly served by China’s official, Communist Party-run trade union, which has often sided with management in factory disputes, the China Labour Bulletin said in the report.

Instead, strikes and labor protests have spread through informal channels, with workers often using mobile phones and Internet message sites to coordinate, it added.

“They are giving each other in real time updates of their protests, and this has allowed workers’ rights groups, lawyers interested in workers’ rights, to offer advice, help them push their demands,” said Crothall, the Labour Bulletin spokesman, speaking of these digital tools.

The China Labour Bulletin report estimates that in 2009 China experienced about 30,000 collective labor protests, and adds there is “certainly no reason to suspect that the number of strikes is decreasing.”

A common theme is the conviction that official channels offer little chance of satisfactory resolutions: see Mainland Justice Blind to Plight of the Powerless on the widespread lack of faith in China’s legal system. See also Velvet Glove Trumps Iron Fist in South China Land Riot, on a possible change in approach to riot response in Wang Yang’s “Happy Guangdong”.

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According to today’s Beijing News, Zhao was mistaken for a petitioner when he booked into a Beijing hotel on the evening of Sep 15. The report states that Zhao was taken away by people dressed in military fatigues the next morning.

Together with “real” petitioners, Zhao was forcibly removed from Bejiing and sent back to Luoyang. On the way back to his home town, Zhao was beaten and not provided with any information about why he was being held against his will ….

When he finally regained conciousness on the evening of Sep 16, he was confused and couldn’t remember clearly what had happened.

For more on China’s booming interception industry, see The Interceptor: “Persuading the Return” of Petitioners and Saving Face in Beijing: Regional Policemen Sent to Intercept Petitioners, on CDT.

In Anhui, meanwhile, a migrant worker asking to be paid was beaten to death, while his brother was hospitalised with a broken back, according to Caijing:

A family member of Wang Genxiang is crying with one part of his skull at her hands on September 19. Wang Genxiang, a migrant worker in north China’s Anhui Province, was beaten to death when asking salaries from the employee, a construction project in Wuhu city of Anhui on September 14. His brother, Wang Genhai, has also got beaten, with his left hand and left leg hurt and his back broken.

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Meanwhile, lawyer Pu Zhiqiang recently found and posted on his microblog a flowchart explaining the complex division of labor for all officials and departments assigned with managing petitioners. Titled, “Workflow Diagram for Managing and Persuading the Return of Abnormal Petitioners According to Law,” the document was reportedly first published by the Henan government in a book titled, “Mass Work Data Compilation” (群众工作资料汇编) in 2007. (translated by CDT)
:

(Click to expand)

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For more than two years, a small group of Uighurs upset in one way or another by Chinese officials has lived under bridges that span the narrow, murky Hucheng River paralleling the Second Ring Road, one of Beijing’s busiest highways. Under the bridges, people are eager to have an audience and provide a glimpse of the hardships faced by Uighurs.

They come from villages thousands of miles away to petition the central government for compensation or other resolution of grievances suffered at home. Many complaints stem from the rapid development of the Xinjiang region, as part of the country’s economic expansion, and from the accompanying Uighur resentment of the influx of Han Chinese, who they say receive preferential treatment when searching for jobs and opportunities.

Tohti, 41, said that in 2004 the government seized and demolished the house her father left to her and her brothers on the outskirts of Kashgar.

” ‘This is not your place any more…. Go back to wherever you came from with your family,’ ” Tohti said she was told by the local Communist Party secretary, a man named Lee, when she complained.

Tohti said she replied, “I was born here. My ancestors were born and raised in Xinjiang. How can you make us move?”

Their encampment was raided by police soon after the anniversary of the 1009 riots in Urumqi, according to the LA Times report:

Mattresses and clothing were confiscated. Mud ovens the petitioners had built in the traditional Uighur style were smashed. The police tossed their flour, sugar and cooking oil into the river.

“We walk every day to the police station and wait, asking to get our stuff back,” said Tohti, showing her swollen feet clad in red rubber sandals because she doesn’t have shoes.

“If they hadn’t taken our possessions, if they hadn’t taken our homes and our land, we would have gone back and fasted there,” she cries. “There is no place for us, not in Beijing, not in Xinjiang.”

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In March 1997, Jia Hongling was raped by a low-level manager of a mining company in Henan Province. The 28-year-old daughter of a farmer and a construction worker, Jia reported the sexual assault to the police in her hometown of Jiyuan in central China.

That July, the policeman assigned to investigate her allegations invited Jia to a room and then, with two men standing watch outside, raped her, according to Jia’s account.

It took Jia eight years of filing complaints in Jiyuan and making trips to Beijing to beg for justice before the first man was sentenced to five years in prison. The policeman in the second incident, however, was never brought to trial — despite a report from the Jiyuan prosecutor’s office saying there was “strong evidence” a rape had occurred.

Source:
Woman’s Rape Case Shows Pitfalls Of Chinese Justice. McClatchy

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A woman surnamed Zhou from Jiangsu Province said she was suddenly pushed and crammed into a minibus by four unidentified men, who refused to tell her the reason, after she left a government building in Beijing on July 4, The Beijing News reported yesterday.

Zhou said she and two other women in the vehicle were deprived of mobile phones and handbags before they were driven to a residential building in Changping District and locked up. Zhou said she saw at least 50 people, including a white-haired elderly woman, who were held captive in the poorly furnished apartment.

“It was basically ‘black jail,’” Zhou said, adding that they were given inadequate food and hardly slept at night as there was no bed or pillow.

The woman reportedly said she and other detainees were beaten by the guards if they didn’t behave well.

After a four-day detention, Zhou was released due to her “good behavior.”

Read more about black jails via CDT.

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