The suspicious death of a Beijing tech company manager in Inner Mongolia and recent reporting about the many other deaths of people held in RSDL (“residential surveillance at a designated location”) pending trial has revived public debate about abolishing the reviled RSDL system once and for all. Criminal defense lawyers, legal experts, and other commentators have weighed in, arguing that the system is rife with exploitation and abuse, and citing examples of suspects who were tortured or even killed while under this form of detention. A 2022 report by Safeguard Defenders noted that the authorized use of residential surveillance has expanded dramatically during the Xi era, with 270,000 documented instances of RSDL since 2013. The report also estimated that the actual number of people subject to legal RSDL during this period is likely far higher, between 560,000 to 860,000. For now, there seems to be no end in sight to these prolonged, opaque, and sometimes extralegal detentions.
Discussions about whether to abolish or reform the RSDL system have surged since a viral Weibo post by the brother of Xing Yanjun, a Beijing tech company manager who died mysteriously while under RSDL in Hulunbuir, Inner Mongolia. His brother alleged that police in Hulunbuir—without the permission of local prosecutors—illegally detained Xing Yanjun and a dozen of his colleagues and used torture to get them to confess to running a gambling operation. The police informed the family, four months after the fact, that Xing had died during RSDL, but the family did not accept their explanation that Xing had hanged himself. A report from SCMP’s Phoebe Zhang looked back at Xing’s case and quoted a number of legal experts who participated in a recent online discussion—hosted by the Hongfan Institute of Legal and Economic Studies, a private liberal think tank based in Beijing—about abuses taking place within the RSDL system. Chen Yongshen, a Peking University law professor, cited documented cases of torture within the RSDL system and said, “Reported cases are only a fraction of what happens in reality, so we have reason to believe that the real situation is more severe. […RSDL is] a serious violation of human rights.”
An article published last Friday by Southern Weekend reporter Han Qian noted the large number of unexplained deaths in the RSDL system, detailed some specific cases, and included interviews a variety of legal experts on reforming or abolishing the system:
On April 22 of 2024, 454 days after Bao Qinrui’s death, his family saw the autopsy report issued by the Forensics Center of the Supreme People’s Procuratorate.
The report concluded that Bao Qinrui died of acute respiratory and circulatory failure caused by a pulmonary embolism, brought on by being forced into restrictive stress positions for long periods of time and being subjected to repeated physical injuries and electric shocks.
It was in the early morning of July 20, 2022 that 34-year-old Bao Qinrui died in Xinle City Hospital in Shijiazhuang, Hebei province. That was the thirteenth day of his stint in “residential surveillance in a designated location” (abbreviated as RSDL) on suspicion of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.”
In addition to the Bao Qinrui case, in recent years, the media has frequently reported on the death of suspects held in RSDL. Xing Yanjun, the general manager of a technology company, died under RSDL in Hulunbuir, Inner Mongolia, as did Yuan Shihong, a suspect in a series of thefts in Hubei province. Another suspect in Taizhou, Jiangsu province, fell into a vegetative state after contracting Wernicke’s encephalopathy, which was brought on by the severe malnourishment and sleep deprivation he suffered under RSDL.
The current Criminal Procedure Law defines RSDL as a “semi-custodial measure” that is more restrictive than “release on bail pending trial” but less restrictive than detention or arrest. However, in practice, it has become a “super-custodial measure” that is more stringent than detention.
As past prosecutions and convictions of RSDL custodial personnel reveal, this form of residential surveillance is characterized by a lack of constraints and supervision, and some RSDL handlers have tortured suspects in order to extract confessions.
[…] Several scholars who have participated in legislative research for the Legislative Affairs Commission of the National People’s Congress (NPC) told our reporter that the revision to the Criminal Procedure Law is still at the stage of soliciting expert opinions, and it is uncertain whether the proposed revision can be submitted to the NPC Standing Committee for consideration in 2024.
However, revising the Criminal Procedure Law has become a topic of broad concern, and there is an academic consensus about the need for legislative reform of the existing RSDL system. [Chinese]
China’s Criminal Procedure Law allows public security organs to enforce one of five measures against individuals who are under criminal investigation and/or awaiting trial. From least to most coercive, these are: a bench warrant, release on bail pending trial, RSDL, detention, and arrest. A bench warrant compels an individual to appear for questioning, but they are otherwise allowed complete freedom of movement. Release on bail pending trial requires a guarantor or the payment of a bond, and the individual is not allowed to leave the city or county in which they live. RSDL, which was first introduced in a 1996 revision to the Criminal Procedure Law, allows law enforcement to confine suspects to a hotel room or similar accommodation if they do not live in the jurisdiction where an investigation or trial is taking place. In 2012, the use of RSDL was expanded to include those suspected of “endangering national security, terrorist activities, or major criminal acts of bribery.” The rationale given was that allowing these sorts of suspects to stay in their own homes might “hinder” investigators. Detention and arrest, ostensibly the strictest of the five measures, are similar in that suspects are sent to a detention center pending trial and are thus completely deprived of their personal freedom. But in practice, many defendants have told their lawyers that they prefer detention or arrest to RSDL, because they are more likely to be mistreated, threatened, or tortured under the loosely supervised and oft-abused RSDL system.
In a WeChat post in response to the Southern Weekend article, criminal defense lawyer Hao Chen declared, “I have never seen a ‘normal’ instance of RSDL.” Hao Chen recounted instances in which he was prevented from meeting with clients under RSDL, including one who was being held at a foot massage parlor. He also described clients who were held illegally for extended periods of time, pressured into transferring payments to their police handlers, or tortured into making confessions:
As many people have said, the words “residential surveillance at a designated location” have become almost synonymous with torture.
As mentioned by attorney Zhou Ze, a new trick that has become popular in the past two years is a “mixed doubles approach” that combines liuzhi (“retention in custody”) with RSDL. In cases of government officials suspected of committing crimes while in office, the “retention in custody” period is limited to no more than six months. But what if, after those six months, the suspect has still not confessed to a crime? The solution hit upon by many supervisory agencies is to employ public security procedures to make up other crimes (usually money laundering), which allows them to hold the suspect nominally under RSDL, when in fact the suspect is still being “retained in custody.” In other words, it’s a bait-and-switch: although the case now appears to be under the aegis of public security, it is actually the Supervisory Commission that is investigating and interrogating the suspect.
We’ve seen this phenomenon recently in the corruption cases against Chen Xianqing [former CEO of Hainan Sanya Haiyun Group] in Haikou and Wang Ye [former president of the Shenzhen branch of China Construction Bank] in Qingdao. The most extreme example I have ever seen is a corruption case I handled in Shaanxi. In addition to being “retained in custody” for six months, the defendant was held for another year and a half under RSDL and other forms of residential surveillance before his case was eventually transferred to the judiciary. The two years he spent effectively being “retained in custody” is likely a record in China. Now, every time I go to the detention center to visit the defendant in this case, they bring him out in a wheelchair.
[…] Carefully combing through my own experience, which admittedly might be limited, I have never once encountered an example of what you might call normal, civilized, or genuinely legal RSDL. The experiences of my clients in residential detention have been a litany of cruelty, with suffering ranging from bad to worse. I follow a lot of criminal defense lawyers of all stripes on WeChat, and we disagree on many issues, but the one thing we can all agree on is that the RSDL system is a scourge on our profession—we’ll all be relieved when it’s dead and gone. So when I read the part of the Southern Weekend article stating that although most legal scholars agree that the RSDL system should be done away with, there are still some experts who think that the system can be reformed and improved (rather than abolished), it made me curious. Exactly who are these experts who still hold such eccentric ideas? I’d like to ask them how they think the system can be improved. Wouldn’t it be good enough to just replace RSDL with some form of house arrest? [Chinese]
Wei Ziyou, a writer and commentator who runs the WeChat account Eggbot, wrote an article describing the use of “instruments of torture” on suspects held in RSDL. He provides a detailed account of the use of shackles and restraints—including a “tiger chair”—that led to the death of Yuan Shihong while he was under RSDL in the city of Jingmen, Hubei province. Yuan’s family later sued, and received a settlement from the police. Wei’s article quotes several legal experts who strongly urge that the practice of RSDL be abolished:
In judicial practice, it is not uncommon for suspects to suffer disguised abuse and corporal punishment, or to be tortured into making confessions while under residential surveillance. Within the legal community, there is a consensus that RSDL as an alternative to custodial detention has evolved into a form of “disguised detention.”
[…] “There is no need to preserve the RSDL system. It should be abolished immediately,” says Yan Xin, an attorney from the Beijing Laishuo Law Office. Yan believes that RSDL has become an unregulated and covert form of detention, and that the unchecked power of guards and handlers has turned RSDL into a breeding ground for torture and forced confessions. “No link in the criminal justice system should be allowed to encourage the evil side of human nature, and we should be especially vigilant of those exercising governmental authority.”
Yan Xin’s assessment is that legislation governing RSDL is overly broad in terms of scope, application, and implementation. It gives decision-making authorities far too much “discretionary power” to arbitrarily assign someone to RSDL. “RSDL is much more pernicious than arrest in terms of its restrictions on personal freedom and the harm it does to those subject to it. In effect, RSDL has become a much more brutally coercive measure than arrest.”
Han Xu, a professor at the Sichuan University School of Law, also believes that RSDL should be abolished, saying that “RSDL is an ‘evil’ system.”
Han Xu holds that separating the functions of investigation and detention is an effective deterrent to coerced confessions, while in RSDL, the investigatory and detention functions are combined. “Some investigating agencies, unable to obtain confessions, transfer criminal suspects into RSDL in order to coerce them to confess.”
“To a certain extent, RSDL has become a special method employed by investigative agencies to illegally obtain confessions and evade responsibility.” Yan Xin also said that any fairly experienced criminal defense lawyer will have encountered clients who have been subjected to abuse and corporal punishment while under RSDL. It is only the degree of torture that varies. “One of my clients,” said Yan, “was once forcibly restrained in a chair for several days and nights without being allowed to go to the toilet, and his buttocks were caked in excrement.” [Chinese]
