'My hair turned white': report lifts lid on China's forced confessions

Those coerced into confessing are dressed by police, handed a script and given directions on how to deliver lines
The Guardian

 Chinese courts have a conviction rate over 99% and cases rely heavily on confessions.

China must stop airing forced confessions from human rights activists, a campaign group has said in a report that details how detainees are coerced into delivering scripted remarks.
There have been at least 45 forced televised confessions in China since 2013, according to the report from Safeguard Defenders, a human rights NGO in Asia. 

The group called on the international community to put pressure on the Chinese government to end the practice and recommended imposing sanctions on executives at China’s state broadcaster, including asset freezes and travel bans.
Those coerced into confessing describe being dressed by police and handed a script they are required to memorise, and even being given directions on how to deliver certain lines or cry on cue, the report says. 

One person described enduring seven hours of recording for a television piece that ultimately amounted to several minutes. 

Others reported police ordering retakes of confessions they were unhappy with.
Some occur in jailhouse settings, with the accused wearing an orange prison vest and sometimes seated behind bars, while others are made to look more neutral. 

The confessions are almost always aired before a formal conviction, violating Chinese law asserting a presumption of innocence.
Chinese courts have a conviction rate over 99% and cases rely heavily on confessions. 

Five of the 37 people described in the report who have confessed on Chinese television have since publicly retracted their confessions.
Since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012 there has been a wholesale crackdown on civil society and dissent, leading to hundreds of arrests targeting human rights activists and the lawyers that defend them. 

The practice of forced confessions was especially prominent during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, a decade of political upheaval during which “counter-revolutionaries” were paraded through the streets and forced to confess to their alleged crimes.
“[The police] threatened that if I did not cooperate with them they would sentence me to jail time, I’d lose my job, my family would leave me and I’d lose my reputation for the rest of my life,” said one person quoted in the report, identified only as Li. 

“I was only 39 years old, my hair turned white with the enormous pressure and torture of it all.”

Peter Dahlin, a former China-based NGO worker from Sweden, was forced to say he had violated Chinese law in a televised confession in 2016. 

He said the purpose, especially when foreigners were involved, was to shape the conversation from the beginning and preempt any international criticism.
“This goes to show this is not done simply by police for murky propaganda purposes but directly by the state as a part of foreign policy,” he said.
Confessions by a range of suspects have been aired on China Central Television, the nation’s official broadcaster, including those by a British corporate investigator, a Chinese-born Swedish book publisher and dozens of Chinese activists who agitated for change.
Gui Minhai, the bookseller, has been paraded in front of media outlets on three separate occasions. He went missing from his apartment in a Thai resort town in late 2015 only to reappear months later in a Chinese jail, confessing to a traffic incident from 2003.
“These ‘confessions’ are about the crushing of dissent wherever it may arise,” David Bandurski, a researcher at the University of Hong Kong’s China Media Project, said in a conversation on the website China File last year. 

“The supposed crimes are of middling importance relative to the act of submission itself, the knuckling under to authority. In a word, then, this is political bullying.
“As Xi Jinping trumpets the principle of rule of law, these clearly forced admissions telegraph exactly the opposite message.”

Rogue Nation

How China Uses Forced Confessions as Propaganda Tool
By STEVEN LEE MYERS

BEIJING — In the unpolished video that appeared on state television one October morning in 2015, Wang Yu, one of China’s most prominent lawyers, denounces her own son.
While she was herself under arrest, the young man had been detained after leaving the country without permission or the proper papers. 

He first flew to the southern province of Yunnan and then rode on the back of a motorcycle into Myanmar, his movements captured on closed circuit cameras.
“I strongly condemn this type of behavior,” Ms. Wang says in a monotone, sitting inside a featureless room. 

“This kind of action is very risky and is illegal.”
It was all a lie, as her colleagues suspected when the video first aired.
Ms. Wang’s videotaped contrition was merely an example of how the Chinese authorities routinely coerce detainees into making statements that serve the government’s propaganda needs.
A human rights organization, Safeguard Defenders, has now detailed her case and others like it to draw attention to a practice it says violates fundamental due process and international legal standards — and to call out the media organizations in China and in Hong Kong that abet the practice by circulating the “confessions” and in some cases even participating in them.
Critics have long assumed these televised acts of confession and contrition were frauds. 

The organization’s report, released this week, analyzes 45 high-profile examples recorded and broadcast between July 2013 and February 2018.
More than half of them involved lawyers, journalists and others involved in promoting human rights in China. 

Many were shown “confessing” even though the formal legal proceedings against them had not yet begun, ignoring the presumption of innocence that is embedded even in Chinese law.
In 12 cases, the organization’s researchers interviewed those who were forced to record confessions, documenting in detail how the videos were carefully scripted and then broadcast.
What follows are examples of how the security forces use the confessions to demonstrate their raw jurisdictional power and to score propaganda points in an effort to deflect criticism at home and abroad. 

They ultimately show how powerless detainees are once they are swept into the Chinese legal system.
“I don’t expect everyone to understand,” Ms. Wang said, explaining the agonizing decision she made to agree to the interrogators’ demands in exchange for her release. 

“I just want to say that my son is everything to me. Perhaps I had no other choice.”

Confessions send a message
Lam Wing-kee was the manager of Causeway Bay Books in Hong Kong, a store that sold titles that displeased the authorities in Beijing. 

In 2015, he was arrested as he crossed the border from Hong Kong to the mainland, swept up in a series of cases against booksellers that continue to reverberate in Hong Kong, the special administrative region of China feeling the heavy hand of the central government.
Mr. Lam reappeared in February 2016 on Chinese television, where he “confessed” that his books — which included titillating descriptions of the private lives of Chinese leaders — were sensationalized and misleading.
In the report, Mr. Lam told researchers that he had to make a dozen recordings before those holding him were satisfied. 

He said they were made to seem like interviews and, in one case, a court proceeding, with a police officer posing as a witness. 

When Mr. Lam was released, he held an explosive news conference in Hong Kong, after which the authorities broadcast more recordings in an effort to embarrass him further.
Confessions are “much more than simple admissions of guilt,” the report said. 

They are meant as warnings to others who would challenge the state, and to discredit accusations of abuses of power by the Communist Party or the state security organs.
“China’s televised confessions are reminiscent of violent and degrading episodes of political persecution from history,” the report added, noting Stalin’s show trials and the public shaming sessions that were characteristic of China’s Cultural Revolution.

Deflecting international criticism
Gui Minhai, a Swedish citizen, was another of the booksellers caught up in the sweep in 2015. In his case, he was abducted from his vacation home in Thailand and returned to China. 

There he faced charges under mysterious circumstances that provoked international condemnation and the involvement of the government of Sweden.
Mr. Gui has since appeared in three recorded videos. 

In the first, he declared that he had returned voluntarily, which his relatives and colleagues strongly dispute.
The latest, shown in February, came after a bizarre turn of events. 

Mr. Gui, who was released from prison last year but kept under close scrutiny in the city of Ningbo, near Shanghai, was arrested in January aboard a train traveling to Beijing while he was accompanied by Swedish diplomats, who were ostensibly escorting him to medical treatment.
In a video broadcast on state television, Mr. Gui appeared tense, often pausing or repeating himself, saying that the Swedes were using him as a pawn. 

He was also shown being interviewed by the media in Hong Kong. 

The video here appeared on the website of The South China Morning Post. 

The newspaper faced criticism for its role but later said the interview was done without preconditions, with the "cooperation" of the authorities.
Mr. Gui’s daughter, Angela, who has campaigned for his release, told the report’s researchers that it was painful to watch. 

“It’s the kind of thing nobody should ever have to experience,” she said, “so there shouldn’t be words for it.”