Beijing Haze: Stage One: Arrest and Detention

An American citizen living in Beijing is blogging her experiences as she tries to get her husband, a Chinese national, released from administrative detention after he was picked up in a raid on a massage parlor:

My experience that night started with annoyance at being unable to reach my husband and turned to panic around 3:30 a.m. when he still wasn’t home. Panic alternated with shock ruled the next day; no one had heard from him and no police stations reported car accidents involving a blue Hyundai. At 4:00 p.m. I went with a friend, who is a colleague of my husband’s, to file a missing persons report. It took 5 hours. We told the story to an officer at the station who asked questions and wrote everything into a report booklet. Name, ID number, car plate number. Last seen? What was he wearing? Where does he work? What are his habits? Recent family tensions? After we had answered the questions, reviewed the record and signed it, we left only to be called back…. To repeat the process with his supervisor who filled the same data in on his computer. We were then advised to go eat something while we waited for someone from the criminal division to come from downtown. After we repeated the information for the third time to be written into another white report book and signed off on, we were assured they would be in touch. At 1:00 a.m. the cop from the criminal division called to say my husband was at the Taiyanggong police station.

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