Black and White Cat translates an article from Southern Weekend about the rape of a petitioner in a “black jail” in Beijing. From the introduction:
Last week’s edition of Southern Weekly (Aug. 6) carried an extraordinarily rare article on a subject that is usually off-limits for the mainstream media in China: the “black jails” that operate outside of the law in Beijing, detaining people who have committed no crime and have simply come to the capital to exercise their legal right to petition the central government. The report avoids the term “black jail” and does not discuss the widespread use of these illegal places of detention. Nevertheless, it gives a graphic account of life inside one of them.
The spark for this article was the rape of a girl from Anhui province in the middle of the night, six hours after she arrived, by one of the thugs employed by a Henan local official to guard the petitioners in storeroom in the Juyuan Hotel near Beijing South Station.
Not surprisingly, given the importance of this story, it was quickly deleted from Southern Weekly’s website and other news sites that had copied it. Since then, it has spread through the internet, either in full or in part, in an ongoing process of deletion and reposting. Google.cn and Baidu have been heavily filtering their results for searches on the subject.
