From China’s Police State Blotter
This chapter ends with a short series of cases collected and edited from organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Human Rights in China, and Amnesty International. Some are particularly graphic, so please move on to the next chapter if you find them too unsettling. These cases do, however, help shed additional light on the level of Chinese repression—and the high stakes involved in fighting and winning The Coming China Wars:
Beijing-based rights defense lawyer Li Heping was abducted by a group of unidentified masked men and then beaten and tortured with electric rods in a basement outside Beijing. The following day he was dumped in the woods outside the city and told to leave Beijing with his family. When Li returned home, he discovered that his license to practice law and other personal belongings were missing. His computer had also been completely erased.
Yang Chunlin, a land rights activist, had his arms and legs stretched and chained to four corners of an iron bed in prison. According to a released inmate who served time with Yang, he was chained for days in the same position, and then was forced to clean up the excrement of other prisoners subjected to the same torture.
Hunan petitioner Liu Ping was forcibly admitted to a psychiatric hospital. This resulted from her petitions to Beijing on the local government’s failure to provide compensation after the factory where she worked went bankrupt.
Hangzhou-based writer Lu Gengsong was taken into custody on charges of “incitement to subvert state power” and “illegally possessing state secrets.” According to Lu’s daughter, police officers from Hangzhou’s Xihu District Cuiyuan Dispatch Station called Lu in for a talk, and he never came home. Subsequently, several state security police searched Lu’s home and took his computer hard drive. Police prevented Lu’s wife from going to Beijing to petition on Lu’s behalf, and threatened that if she proceeded, she would be dismissed from her job and her daughter’s schooling would be affected.
Blind legal activist Chen Guangcheng was formally arrested after nine months of informal house arrest during which local officials physically abused Chen several times. Officials threatened attorneys and law professors who rallied to defend Chen. Local authorities proceeded to obstruct attempts by lawyers to gather evidence in Chen’s defense; and the night before Chen’s trial, Chen’s lawyers were detained on spurious charges so that they could not represent him. Chen’s court-appointed attorneys effectively conceded the case against him, and he was sentenced to four years in prison.
Guards at the notorious Masanjia Labor Camp stripped 18 women naked and threw them into cells of violent male criminals where they were gang-raped.