This account stands out as a prime example in which new media has helped citizens expose human rights abuses.
China-based blogger
Black and White Cat has translated three extraordinary blog posts penned by a professor who visited one of China's notorious black jails. The local governments have been throwing petitioners into these jails. After reading the posts, Cat personally visited the neighborhood in which the jail was located and took photos. Cat explains:
When Custody and Repatriation was abolished, the so-called black jails sprang up to replace them as makeshift detention centers for petitioners. Officially, they don’t exist. Below, is my translation of three blog posts about one of these places written by Xu Zhiyong, a young professor at the Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications. In 2003, he was elected as an independent deputy to the Haidian District People’s Congress.
If you’re wondering why there’s no action in the photos at the top and bottom of this page, that’s because they were taken by me about a week after Xu Zhiyong’s first two posts. Once you’ve read his account, I think you might understand why I had no great desire to attract more any more attention than necessary while I was taking the pictures.
Xu Zhiyong made several visits to the jail, getting physically abused on one occasion. By way of background concerning the black jails, Xu Xhiyong explains:
- One of the groups of people who were detained through the abuse of the Custody and Repatriation system were petitioners. All Chinese citizens have the legal right to petition the authorities if they feel they have been wronged. Government departments have offices of Letters and Visits - at local, provincial and state levels. Officials at lower levels have a strong interest in preventing people from embarrassing them by petitioning at a higher level, so they frequently intercept petitioners, take them home, and often take revenge.
- After 2003, the custody and repatriation centers didn’t exist anymore, and the black jails sprang up to take their place.
- There are at least four black jails in Beijing where Henan province locks up petitioners: the Youth Hotel, the Fenglong Youth Hostel, the Juyuan Hotel and the Jingyuan Hotel. These black jails are just like the custody and repatriation centers of the past and they’ve become an industry.. . .
Xu Zhiyong explains the circumstances that led to his first visit to a black jail:
... Early in the morning of September 21, I received an SMS from a petitioner from Henan saying they were locked up in a black jail in an alley behind the Youth Hotel on Taiping Street near Taoranting park.
After his first attempt to visit, Xu Zhiyong blogged on 22 September 2008:
I will go back. This isn’t meddling in other people’s business. Black jails are a tumor on Beijing. They’re a tumor on China. In the broad light of day, that there should be such dark and ugly corners. As a Chinese man, I have a duty to rise up in indignation.
Determined to returned once again to the jail, Xu Zhiyong blogged:
Yesterday I received an SMS from a petitioner from Henan called Wang Jinlan. She was illegally locked up in a black jail run by a local government at the Youth Hotel on Taiping Street near Taoranting park.
It’s in no way an exaggeration to call this a black jail. Dozens of petitioners are locked up there and the government has put hired thugs in charge of them. What makes this different from a regular jail is that the petitioners who are imprisoned here are completely innocent. They were petitioning in a normal way when they were taken from the State Bureau for Letters and Visits, the Supreme People’s Court and other letters and visits departments, and brought here to be locked up without any legal process.
I plan to expose these black jails. Today, I went there again. I hadn’t got far down the alley to the south of the Youth Hotel, when I saw a tall guard from the black jail sitting on a stool chatting with some others. Almost at the same time, they recognized me.
Xu Zhiyong reflects:
I’m wondering if I should try to understand them more. When the tall guy told me that if I had the ability I should take the civil service exam, become an official and change the situation, I can understand that he wasn’t happy with this system. But when I think of so many innocent and weak people being beaten up, sometimes to the point of being crippled, I just can’t take standards of human dignity so low. In some ways, this is far more terrible than the black kilns. It has to change.
What is a black kiln?! Xu does not say. On October 5, 2008 Xu Zhiyong blogs about his return to a black jail:
At midday on October 5, I set off with Zhou Shuguang and Zhang Yadong. Before that I received a phone call from a petitioner and agreed to meet her at one o’clock outside the entrance to the Youth Hotel. A netizen called Zuoqio also phoned, saying they were already at the Youth Hotel. This time I was prepared for the worst and prepared quite well.
The first person I saw was the woman. She’s from Henan. She believes the police didn’t investigate the killer in a murder case, so she started petitioning. Because of her petitioning, she spent a year doing reeducation through labor. I suppose she felt petitioning was difficult and dangerous, so this time she brought the children with her, trying to get the higher authorities to take it seriously. Presumably the children carried banners, so the police sent them here.. . . .
The entire atmosphere was completely different to the last two times I went there. On the previous two occasions, the guards started hitting people immediately. This time the attitude was unusually mild and the hired thugs were nowhere to be seen. The words I wrote on my blog probably had some effect. Perhaps it’s because I announced that I was going to go there today that they hastily took the children away.
Blogger Cat mentions notes that Human Rights Watch published a useful study of the abuse of petitioners in 2005 (
Summary;
full report). The UK's
Channel 4 has published a video report of a correspondent's search for a black jail.
NY Times reports that China tightened visa controls and religious practice rules for its Muslim population, particularly in Xinjiang:
