Chinese officials straining to stifle protest ahead of a key Communist Party congress have been paying to have troublesome petitioners held in violent squalor in a secretive Beijing prison, many complainants said.
Eight petitioners told Reuters of being held in the prison with dozens of others who had come to the capital to press grievances over confiscated property, police brutality and official corruption.
They described a ”black jail” on Beijing’s south-western outskirts run by officials from Nanyang city in the central province of Henan.
A reporter who visited the Nanyang ”liaison office” and attached hotel this week found more than a dozen petitioners still being held in a two-storey cell block enclosed by steel grating behind the building, along with a boy aged about three.
Former detainees said they had been confined there unwashed for days or weeks on a diet of rice gruel, steamed bread and restaurant scraps, with beatings dealt out by teenage guards.
”It was an underground jail. There were no procedures, they showed no identification,” said Hui Shuzhen, a protester from the north-eastern province of Jilin.
President Hu Jintao, set to extend his hold on power at a Communist Party congress opening on October 15, has promised a more ”harmonious society” cured of social discontent.
The petitioners, and two local rights advocates who said they had heard complaints about the detentions, bore witness to a harshly different reality.
”That night they beat an old man until the floor was spattered with blood,” Chen Chaoji, from the south-eastern province of Fujian, said of his first night in the jail.
Service to other provinces
They said the detentions had been offered as a service to other provinces willing to pay for the appearance of stability.
A staff member at the hotel adjoining the jail said other regions had ”entrusted” it with holding unruly petitioners.
Senior staff there refused to answer questions after they chased down and roughly held this reporter for nearly two hours, with a dozen plainclothes guards present. One official said the detention site was sanctioned by Beijing.
Government spokesperson from Nanyang, Henan province and the State Council Information Office, the central government’s public relations arm, did not answer faxed questions about the claims.
But ex-detainees insisted they had been held without procedures or documents, not what the government had promised petitioners.
”President Hu has promoted a harmonious society and so we petitioners are a threat to the records of local officials,” said Chen Lijian, looking like a shy student with his cropped hair and glasses. He said he had been locked up in the ”underground jail” for nine days in August.
”But I never expected I’d be held like that — the filth, the beatings, no procedures.”
<.b'Petitioners village'
The source of these detentions can be traced to ”petition village” in Beijing’s south, where every day hundreds gather with complaints that often involve small disputes snowballing into epics of red-tape, malice and corruption.
The walls outside the nearby supreme court petitions office are daubed with graffiti and hand-written posters bewailing unsolved murders, lost land and homes and lost hope.
Many of the ragged citizens gathered there have been complaining for years. Some plainly are mentally unwell.
”Petitions and appeals” are one of the few legally sanctioned ways of voicing grievances in this one-party state.
Over the past decade, the number of petitioners journeying to provincial capitals and to Beijing has swollen. Nationwide, petitions and complaint visits grew from 4,8-million in 1995 to 12,7-million in 2005.
This open wound of discontent is an embarrassment to Hu, who came to power promising to defuse strife over corruption and abuses. In 2005, he introduced rules that promised more protection for petitioners.
But local officials often prefer to intercept petitioners and threaten or cajole them into silence before their complaints reach central officials’ ears, critics and petitioners said.
”There’s official grading based on the number of petitioners reaching Beijing,” said a Beijing human rights lawyer who asked that his name not be used, fearing it would compromise his own inquiry. ”This grading creates huge pressure to stop them, especially with the Party congress coming up.”
‘‘Feed the mosquitoes’
Provincial officials have long played a cat-and-mouse game with the petitioners thronging Beijing, trying to nab them at railway stations and ministry gates before they can register their complaints and become embarrassing statistics.
Petitioners speak of being held in detention offices run by their home towns and provinces in Beijing as a routine fact.
The novelty of the Nanyang operation appears to be turning detention into a commercial service, with other local governments paying it to catch and hold protesting residents.
The eight petitioners from east and north-east China separately said they had been lured or dragged from streets, government offices and a state-run detention centre to the jail.
”They said I’d be taken there for a few days to feed the mosquitoes,” said Wang Yanjie, another petitioner from Jilin. She said officials from her home town had handed her over to the Nanyang-run detention centre.
Petitioners said they believed from guards’ comments that the jail charged other local governments from 200 to 300 yuan ($27 to $40) a day to hold them until they were taken home, sometimes released on the spot, or dumped outside the city.
The current detainees said they were all from Nanyang, and those from other places had been moved away a few weeks ago — possibly after former detainees’ complaints to local police.
They stretched their arms through the grating to offer their own written complaints to the reporter, but police later confiscated them
The father of the young boy yelled out that the two had been held there for months. – Reuters