A magazine run by the Chinese government has revealed the existence of a network of secret detention centres or “black jails” in Beijing where inmates are often beaten or tortured.
The Liaowang report said that the number of people employed by local governments to abduct citizens can reach over 10,000
The victims of the jails are usually ordinary Chinese who have travelled to Beijing to lodge a complaint, or petition.
By Malcolm Moore in Shanghai
Until now, the Communist Party has strenuously denied running black jails, despite a growing number of testimonies and evidence from former inmates.
However, a report in Liaowang (Outlook), a magazine which is written for elite government officials and published by the official Xinhua news agency, laid the system bare.
The victims of the jails are usually ordinary Chinese who have travelled to Beijing to lodge a complaint, or petition, with the central government that their local officials have ignored.
Every day, hundreds of petitioners arrive in Beijing from across China, only to be hunted down by plain-clothes policemen or even private security firms sent by their home province to “retrieve” them.
Since local governments are judged on the number of grievances that arrive in Beijing, officials are often determined not to let the petitioners file their claims. The Liaowang report said that the number of people employed by local governments to abduct citizens “can reach over 10,000”.
“In Beijing, a monstruous business network has emerged to feed, house, transport, man-hunt, detain and retrieve petitioners,” said the magazine. It added that there are at least 73 black jails in the capital, often in unused homes or psychiatric wards. Private security firms demand fees of 100 yuan (Pounds9) to 200 yuan per person they abduct.
Liaowang said the system “seriously damaged the government’s image”.
Inside the black jails, all mobile phones and identification cards are confiscated, and many inmates are beaten, sexually-abused, intimidated and robbed, according to Human Rights Watch, which interviewed 38 former detainees for a report which it published just two weeks ago.
At the time, the Foreign ministry angrily rejected the accusations from the NGO. “There are no black jails in China,” said Qin Gang, a spokesman.
In the report, one 46-year-old former detainee from Jiangsu province, who spent more than a month in a black jail, said: “They are inhuman…two people dragged me by the hair and put me into the car.
My two hands were tied up and I couldn’t move. Then [after arriving back in Jiangsu] they put me inside a room where there were two women who stripped me of my clothes [and] beat my head [and] used their feet to stomp my body.” At the beginning of November, a guard at a black jail pleaded guilty to raping a 20-year-old woman from Anhui province in front of a dozen witnesses. However, the court dismissed the charges against the “guesthouse” and two provincial liaison officials, according to the official China Daily newspaper.
For some activists, the state-sanctioned articles in Liaowang signalled a possible willingness by the Communist party to confront the problem.
“They have categorically denied there are even black jails. This is the first time an official, high-level magazine acknowledges that they exist. This is fairly significant,” said Wang Songlian at Chinese Human Rights Defenders.
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