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China models brainwash camps for use by
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China's Legal System Steps Up Use Of Secret Detentions

https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/report_pdf/china1216_web.pdf
https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Michael-Caster/dp/0999370685/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+people%27s+republic+of+the+disappeared

On the eve of Jan. 11, former lawyer and human rights defender Xie
Yang was on a video call with Lyndon Li, a Chinese law student in
England, when police suddenly appeared at his home, and the call ended
abruptly.

The news leaked out within a few days that Chinese authorities had
taken Xie away—this was not the first time.

Lawyer Xie Yang (center) and his client Xu Yan (right), wife of human
rights lawyer Yu Wensheng, try to meet with Yu outside the Xuzhou
Intermediate Court in Xuzhou, in eastern China’s Jiangsu Province, on
Oct. 31, 2019

Xie shot to fame after spending six months inside China’s system for
secret jails or Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location
(RSDL). He described in detail to his lawyers the prolonged, severe
physical and psychological torture he had experienced inside the
system.

As Xie’s testimony made headlines worldwide, China’s RSDL was not
widely known until that point. Many other lawyers, alongside Xie, who
were also placed into the RSDL system around the same time, have
helped to slowly expose it as more victims came forth willing to speak
about the reality behind those four letters.

The Dual Rise of Xi Jinping and RSDL

The RSDL system was put into place as Xi Jinping took power, and it
has expanded in scope and size alongside the leader’s growing control
over Chinese society.

RSDL allows the police to take any target(s) off the street, place
them inside solitary confinement at secret locations, hold them
incommunicado, and deny their family or anyone else knowledge of their
whereabouts. It is essentially legalized kidnapping, and the United
Nations has stated as much, if in more diplomatic language.
A drawing of an RSDL facility in southern Beijing by Antlem

Around the time of the Winter Olympics in Beijing this year, court
data (some of which are available online in a database hosted by
China’s Supreme Court) revealed that RSDL remains extensively used.
During the pandemic, against all odds, its use increased even more.
The RSDL may now have claimed as many as 100,000 victims, the
equivalent of 150 Guantanamo Bays.

The first known victim, Zhu Chengzhi, was put in the RSDL on Jan. 4,
2013, within the first three days the system was first put into use.
Zhu happens to be from the same province as Mao Zedong, a man to whom
Xi is often compared. Zhu would later claim another distinction; in
mid-2018, he became the first known victim to be placed into the
system a second time.

It wasn’t always like that. In the same year that Zhu became RSDL’s
first victim, there were close to 1,000 victims nationwide. At the
time, RSDL was primarily used in exceptional circumstances; for
example, when an individual couldn’t be arrested due to illness or
detention made it challenging to carry out an investigation. But
gradually, the lack of oversight allowed the Chinese police to abuse
the RSDL system.

By the time the “709” crackdown started in 2015, a nationwide campaign
that targeted human rights lawyers, the use of RSDL had grown
significantly. A year or two later, sources showed that local police
started using the system indiscriminately against those charged with
minor and regular crimes.
Lawyers and activists gather for a silent protest at the court of
final appeal in Hong Kong for the fourth anniversary of the “709”
crackdown on human rights lawyers across China on July 9, 2019

With RSDL, the Chinese police have expanded their power significantly
and in a way that undermines more or less every basic rights one has
come to expect. Those placed into RSDL cannot be held in detention
centers, police stations, or anything deemed a “case-handling area.”
Instead, police can use either custom-built facilities, for example,
secret jails and renovated rooms in controlled facilities such as
guest houses, training centers, etc.

Once taken into RSDL, one simply disappears.

To make matters worse, a victim can be held under the system for six
months. Once inside the RSDL, the law states that individuals must be
kept in solitary confinement and in facilities designed to protect
them from self-harm. In short, suicide-padded, solitary confinement
cells.
A drawing of police raiding a victim’s home and taking him into RSDL by Antlem.

This absolute power that RSDL affords police over its victims has not
been lost on local police forces, who have taken up the use of RSDL
with enthusiasm, which would explain its rapidly expanding deployment
in recent years.

How One Man’s Testimony Exposed the Realities of RSDL

Xie’s testimony was the first detailed account of what goes on inside
RSDL and revealed why it had become the preferred tool of the Chinese
authorities. Why detain (bound by supervision and regulation) an
individual when they can instead disappear (and act with impunity)?

For Xie, it began like many other days. One morning, he had left to
travel out of town to represent a group of farmers over a land
dispute.
A photo of Xie Yang in 2021. As one of the lawyers victimized during
the “709″ crackdown, Xie was recently abducted by Chinese state
security

“There was nothing different about this time. Like before, he left for
work,” his wife, Chen Guiqiu, told this author.

Two days later, while he stayed at a hotel out of town, he was awoken
before daybreak by a large group of both plain-clothed and uniformed
officers who took him away. Within 24 hours, Xie was officially placed
under RSDL, and authorities told him: “Your only right is to obey,”
according to author Michael Caster.

In reality, the police can do anything under RSDL, short of killing a
person, as they have six months of total control over their victim.

A doctor attending to those who disappeared under RSDL put it plainly
once: “Don’t let them die. A dead person would create big problems.
Someone who is only injured doesn’t matter,” according to a report by
Human Rights Watch.

Six months of torture would follow. Through it all, interrogations,
which often occurred while the victim was shackled to a tiger chair,
would happen frequently. At some point, Xie thought some 40 different
people had interrogated him. He was deprived of sleep and spent up to
20 hours a day on the “dangling stool.” It is a small, narrow, high
stool where the victim’s legs cannot reach the floor. Slowly, over
hours, blood gets cut off from the legs, causing intense, crippling
pain. This would be alternated with being kicked, kneed, punched, or
hung from the ceiling and beaten unconscious.

Death threats were common. According to Caster, one person, a
middle-class, white-collar IT engineer, was threatened before even
arriving at the custom-built RSDL facility in southern Beijing. He was
told: “We are crossing the mountains. If you want to come back alive,
you should think well about what you tell us.”

Of course, not everyone suffers the same abuses. A young man from
northeastern Dongbei—China’s rust belt—said he was stripped naked in
his cold cell, with extra guards brought into the room, and then told
to stand on one leg and sing the Chinese national anthem.

Xie might have avoided the same fate as Zhu, who was taken into RSDL a
second time, but that is precisely what happened to fellow lawyer
Chang Weiping not long before the police took Xie away.

Chang spent nearly half a year inside RSDL before being arrested; he
is now awaiting trial. So far, no one knows what Chang has had to go
through.
Chinese rights lawyer Chang Weiping’s parents protest the torture of
their son in front of the Gaoxin branch of the Baoji City Public
Security Bureau, China, on Dec. 14, 2020

Raising Awareness of RSDL

Many lawyers, journalists, non-governmental organization (NGO)
workers, and others who work in sensitive fields and are often
targeted by authorities were oblivious to the system for quite some
time. Those who heard about RSDL often thought it was a mild form of
detention, something less severe.

When co-workers of Wang Quanzhang, another well-known rights lawyer,
learned that he had been placed into RSDL instead of being arrested,
they felt relief and thought it was a good sign. I was one of those
colleagues with that very same thought.

For better or worse, those days are long gone within China’s rights
defense community. RSDL has become as feared a tool as they come. As
what goes on inside leaks out, the community has been given a wake-up
call. The worse the stories that leak out, the more RSDL terrifies the
larger community. It has, in effect, become a tool of political
terror.

Wang Yu, a lawyer, didn’t know much about RSDL until she was held in a
secret jail for six months. Her husband, Bao, a local activist, went
through the same ordeal. But torture wasn’t enough to break them.

Police went further and threatened to arrest the couple’s then-teenage
son, Bao Mengmeng. He made headlines worldwide when he was captured by
Chinese police inside Burma (commonly known as Myanmar), alongside two
activists trying to smuggle him out of China after his parents had
been disappeared. Those two activists were taken back to China and
likely placed into RSDL, while Mengmeng spent about two years under
police custody until 2018.

The True Scope of China’s Use of Disappearances via RSDL

In 2018, the United Nations Human Rights Council condemned China’s
RSDL system and called for its complete abolishment. However, until
early 2020, there had been no attempts to figure out the extent to
which the system was used. That changed with a small report, a data
analysis from the NGO Safeguard Defenders, which showed how it is
possible to track the use of the system—by using China’s public
database on verdicts.

Now, some two years later and after a new round of research from the
database China Judgments Online, more information on the scope and
scale of the system can be presented—and it is grim reading. As with
any statistics in China, the data is flawed at best. In addition,
thousands of verdicts mentioning RSDL use have been removed from the
database, and more are disappearing almost every day as the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) tries to hide such information.

Despite that, and using knowledge derived from detailed studies on how
RSDL cases are published, or not published, even such studies carried
out by pro-CCP legal scholars in China, one can get a strong idea of
how the RSDL system has developed.
(Courtesy of Peter Dahlin/Safeguard Defenders)

As clearly indicated by the U.N. in its condemnation of the RSDL
system, its use often constitutes enforced disappearances, as the
location of the victim is kept secret. Torture is rampant, and in
addition, using solitary confinement for prolonged periods for
interrogation purposes is in itself an act of torture.

This qualifies China’s use of RSDL as a crime against humanity on at
least two points, if proven to be systematic or widespread, according
to the aforementioned author Michael Caster, who is also an
international law analyst and co-founder of Safeguard Defenders.

Furthermore, the consistent year-by-year data available on RSDL use,
Safeguard Defenders spokesperson Laura Harth says, shows beyond doubt
that it is both systematic and widespread.

For 2020, the last year for which more complete data exists, the RSDL
system reached new heights, with some 15,000 new victims that year
alone. For 2021, the figure remains high, at over 10,000, yet it may
be too early to properly assess the data. By now, the system is likely
to have seen anywhere from 85,000 to 115,000 victims.

The real problem with the aforementioned data is that they only
scratch the surface. Many of those named in this article did not go on
trial and were released often “under bail.” Such cases simply won’t
show up in the database or anywhere else. It is impossible to know how
much of the iceberg we are seeing in the data above, but most likely a
big part is underwater.

RSDL Is Here to Stay, May Expand Beyond China’s Borders

The growing awareness of the CCP’s use of “hostage diplomacy” has
centered on RSDL. Just like families are denied knowledge of victims’
whereabouts, so are foreign governments when their citizens are placed
into the system. Whether it is British Lee Bo who was kidnapped in
Hong Kong, Swede Gui Minhai who was kidnapped in Thailand, Canadians
Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, or American basketball player Jeff
Harper, among others, they were all quickly placed into the RSDL
system.

With a more aggressive communist China—more willing to detain foreign
citizens to get what it wants—every indicator points toward foreigners
becoming a more common target for RSDL.
Members of the pro-democracy Civic Party carry a portrait of Gui
Minhai (L) and Lee Bo during a protest outside the Chinese Liaison
Office in Hong Kong

Worse yet, according to Harth, is “the deafening silence from Western
governments about the system and its rapid expansion. … The complete
lack of any political cost imposed on the Chinese Communist Party for
engaging in what is clearly yet another crime against humanity sends a
clear-cut message to other authoritarian governments, especially in
Southeast and Central Asia” and “who study China’s methods to silence
dissent,” that may adopt similar “legalized” forms of disappearances.

Even though disappearances never went away, since its heyday in the
1960s and 1970s, it has become an anomaly and was used mostly on an
ad-hoc basis, as it had become a crime, like torture, considered so
heinous that even the worst dictatorships at least pretended to not
engage in it.

With China’s “legalization” of disappearances and normalizing it by
expanding its use to mass scale, the international human rights system
stands before yet another challenge: how to fight back against such
normalization.

“How many other countries can adopt similar systems until the norm is
broken?” said Caster. “Will we see it spreading to other parts of the
world, moving from authoritarian to authoritarian-leaning or
‘illiberal democracies'”?

There is far more at stake here than “merely” the abusive treatment of
Chinese human rights activists.

With stronger pressure from the central government to maintain
stability, lawyer Wang Quanzhang believes local governments are
encouraged to use any means necessary, and RSDL is an easy, yet very
powerful tool for just that purpose. It took a long time and
ever-mounting criticism to get the CCP to abolish the reeducation
through labor system. But it may take a lot more to get the CCP to
abolish the RSDL system.

Until then, RSDL will continue to expand. It will be used to destroy
Chinese civil society and, sooner or later, start spreading beyond
China’s own borders.

*  *  *

Peter Dahlin is the founder of the NGO Safeguard Defenders and the
co-founder of the Beijing-based Chinese NGO China Action (2007–2016).
He is the author of “Trial By Media,” and contributor to “The People’s
Republic of the Disappeared.” He lived in Beijing from 2007, until
detained and placed in a secret jail in 2016, subsequently deported
and banned.