China’s Brutal ‘Boarding Schools’

Beijing’s concentration camps for Muslim Uighurs are stark violations of human rights.
The New York Times

A sign warning against "uncivilized" behavior in the main bazaar in Urumqi, the capital of China's East Turkestan colony.

The Trump administration may not be the most unimpeachable source when it comes to human rights, but the head of the State Department’s bureau for human rights, Michael Kozak, was dead on when he said China’s mass incarceration of Muslim minorities was “just remarkably awful.”
Mr. Kozak made the comments on Wednesday as the State Department presented its annual report on human rights around the world, an event at which his boss, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, declared that China was “in a league of its own when it comes to human rights violations.”
That’s a tough call in today’s world.
But China’s brutal campaign to strip Uighur and other Turkic minorities in the East Turkestan colony of their culture, religion and identity through a network of secretive concentration camps must rank among the more outrageous continuing violations in the world. 
What makes it all the more galling is the Beijing government’s feigned umbrage whenever the camps are mentioned, and its absurd efforts to depict them as China’s contribution to the war on "terrorism".
After initially denying the existence of the camps, China in October began a campaign to portray them as “campuses,” “vocational training centers” and “boarding schools” intended to bring Uighurs into the modern era.
China has made direct news reporting from East Turkestan all but impossible, giving access only to carefully monitored official tours. 
On one, Reuters reported that camp inmates praised their new life and sang, in English, “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.”
Reports from survivors, Uighur dissidents, the Uighur diaspora, satellite imagery and other sources depict something far more akin to the gulag than a happy boarding school, with more than a million Uighurs, out of a population of more than 10 million Muslims in East Turkestan, forced to undergo Cultural Revolution-style coercion to adopt state-sanctioned norms of political thought and behavior.
Writing in The Times, Mustafa Akyol, a senior fellow on Islam at the Cato Institute, described camps at which “people are forced to listen to ideological lectures, sing hymns praising the Chinese Communist Party and write ‘self-criticism’ essays.” 
He said survivors told of sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, beatings and torture.
Conquered and incorporated into China in the 18th century, East Turkestan has long been a thorn in China’s side.
The Chinese government attributes scores of violent events, including bombings and assassinations, to Uighur separatists.
Violent riots in July 2009 in Urumqi, the East Turkestan capital, escalated into attacks on Han Chinese people and a vicious crackdown and several death sentences.
But trying to extinguish national identity through what amounts to mass brainwashing is an atrocity that smacks of some of the worst experiments of our time — including China’s own Cultural Revolution — with some thoroughly modern twists. 
A key part of China’s campaign to control the Uighurs has been collecting DNA from members of the minority under the guise of a free health check.
Sadly, Muslim nations have been reticent about supporting the Uighurs, because of the economic clout China wields among them and the solidarity these states have with an anti-Western authoritarian regime.
In February, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was quoted on Chinese television after a meeting with Xi Jinping as saying, “China has the right to carry out antiterrorism and de-extremization work for its national security.”
That should not dissuade other governments and organizations from continuing to focus attention on the camps, as the State Department has.
A bipartisan bill introduced in Congress, the Uighur Human Rights Policy Act, would require the State Department and intelligence agencies to report on what the Chinese government is doing in East Turkestan.
The bill should be promptly passed.
The United States should also support the request of 15 Western ambassadors to Beijing — America’s was not one of them — to meet with the Communist Party secretary in East Turkestan.
What is happening in East Turkestan must not be ignored.

China’s Gulag for Muslims

In modern-day “re-education” prisons, Beijing is forcing ethnic Uighurs to forsake their religion. Why don’t Muslim governments rise up in anger?
By Mustafa Akyol

An Acehnese Muslim woman cries as she takes part in a protest rally in support of ethnic Uyghur Muslims in China, in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, 21 December 2018.

One of the darkest episodes of the 20th century was the gulag — the Soviet system of forced labor camps where dissidents were imprisoned in terrible conditions, often to perish. 

The camps were established by Lenin, expanded by Stalin and finally exposed to the world by the great Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, with his 1973 masterpiece, “The Gulag Archipelago.”
“Thin strands of human lives stretch from island to island of Archipelago,” he wrote, and “it is enough if you don’t freeze in the cold, and if thirst and hunger don’t claw at your insides.”
Today, Russia’s gulags are long gone, as is the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that operated them. 

But now another dictatorship, ruled by another Communist Party, is operating a new chain of prisons that evoke memory of the gulags — more modern, more high-tech, but no less enslaving.
These are China’s “re-education camps,” established in the far-western East Turkestan colony, where up to a million Uighurs are imprisoned in order to be indoctrinated. 

People are forced to listen to ideological lectures, sing hymns praising the Chinese Communist Party and write “self-criticism” essays. 

Survivors also tell about military-style discipline, sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, beatings and torture.
The target of this mass persecution is China’s Muslim minorities — especially the Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking people based in East Turkestan. 

They follow a mainstream, moderate interpretation of Sunni Islam. 

But that is enough of a “mental illness” for Chinese Communists, whose ideology considers all religions, including Christianity, to be backward superstitions that must be diluted and nationalized. 

That is why they go as far as forbidding people from having beards or fasting during Ramadan, and forcing them to consume pork and alcohol, both of which are forbidden in Islam.
Chinese authorities say they are alarmed about extremists among the Uighurs — and, in fact, a handful of extremists have carried out attacks against government targets over the years. 

But those extremists arose in response to a decades-old policy of subjugation, along with ethnic colonialization, that Beijing has pursued against the Uighurs. 

That history suggests that Beijing’s current “counterterrorism” campaign will be only counterproductive — deepening a vicious cycle that authoritarian minds are often unable to understand, let alone break.
And here is the strangest aspect of this story: China’s “re-education” policy is a major attack on Muslim people and their faith, Islam, yet the Muslim world has remained largely silent. 

While the policy has been condemned by human rights groups and the liberal news media in the West, along with Uighur organizations themselves, only a few Muslim leaders, like the Malaysian politician Anwar Ibrahim and Pakistan’s minister of religion, Noorul Haq Qadri, have raised some public concerns. 

Not until last month did the Organization of Islamic Cooperation finally express concern about “the disturbing reports on the treatment of Muslims” by China.
That is all very meek given how grim the situation is — and how it compares to what we would have seen if the same persecution had been carried out by some other country, such as, say, Israel.
Why is that? 

Why are Muslim leaders, especially those who love to be the champions of oppressed Muslims, so lenient toward China?
There are three answers. 

One is that coziness with China, the world’s second-largest economic power, pays. 

China is the top trading partner of 20 of the 57 member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. 

Its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, a huge path of commercial and transportation infrastructure intended to pass through much of the Middle East, holds a lucrative promise for many Muslim nations.
Moreover, China does not shy away from offering its economic assistance as hush money. 

In July 2018, The Global Times, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, ran an interesting editorial suggesting that China’s government would help Turkey secure its “economic stability” — but only if Turkish officials stopped making “irresponsible remarks on the ethnic policy in East Turkestan,” which means stop criticizing China’s human rights violations. (At about the same time, Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, was also promising to help the Turkish economy, but only if Turkey corrected its own human rights violations. In other words, Turkey was being pulled in opposite directions, and, sadly, the dark side has proved stronger so far.)
A second reason for Muslim silence is that the Chinese government crackdown on Uighurs is based on a premise that law and order can be restored by eradicating enemies of the government and traitors within a society.

This is authoritarian language that most Muslim leaders understand well. It is their own language.

The third reason is that most Muslims who are likely to feel solidarity with their oppressed coreligionists think of the oppressors as “the West,” defined as the capitalist, hedonist, Zionist civilization led by the Great Satan. 

These Muslims, particularly the Islamists, believe that all of their coreligionists should unite with other anti-Western forces — a stance that evokes Samuel Huntington’s prediction of a “Confucian-Islamic” alliance against the West in his 1993 article in “Foreign Affairs” titled “The Clash of Civilizations?”
For Muslim autocrats and Islamists, a Confucian-Islamic alliance may still be alluring. 

China can look like a great model, in which the economy grows without Western nuisances like human rights, free speech or limited government. 

For Muslim societies, however, the Uighur crisis must be a wake-up call. 

It shows what can happen to Muslims when authoritarian governments embrace Islamophobia as state policy.
Islamophobia exists in the liberal democracies of the West, too — but there it can be criticized by the news media, checked by the courts and constrained by liberal institutions and traditions. 

Muslims can still practice their religion freely, and can even become lawmakers by being elected to bodies like the United States Congress.
For Muslim societies, in other words, a choice between freedom and dictatorship should not be too difficult. 

In freedom, you can live as a Muslim in safety and dignity. 

Under dictatorship, as China shows us, you end up in a re-education camp.

Interpol Tragicomedy

Meng Hongwei faces indefinite detention in system experts say is cover for a purge of political rivals
By Lily Kuo in Beijing
 

Meng Hongwei appears to be the latest target of the Chinese ruling Communist party’s controversial anti-corruption campaign. 

The bizarre case of the former Interpol president Meng Hongwei, now detained and under investigation in China, has raised concerns about the country’s expanded anti-corruption drive.
Meng, a senior Chinese security official, appears to be the latest target in a far-reaching anti-graft campaign that critics say is a cover for eliminating political figures disloyal to Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.

On Monday, days after Meng was reported missing by his wife, Chinese authorities accused him of bribery in a lengthy statement stressing the importance of the country’s “anti-corruption struggle” and the need for “absolute loyal political character”. 

On Sunday, authorities said Meng was in the custody of the National Supervisory Commission (NSC), China’s new super-agency charged with investigating corruption throughout the government, which is overseeing his case.
Human rights advocates say Meng is likely being held in liuzhi or “retention in custody” – a form of detention used by the NSC that denies detainees access to legal counsel or families for as long as six months.
Liuzhi is meant to be an improvement on the previous shuanggui system, a disciplinary process within the ruling Chinese Communist party known for the use of torture and other abuses. 

Under liuzhi, family members are supposed to be notified.
Rights advocates say there are few indications liuzhi will be much better. 

The Chinese journalist Chen Jieren, who had accused a party official in Hunan province of corruption, has been detained since July by the NSC and denied access to his lawyer, according to Radio Free Asia.
In May, the driver of a low-ranking official in Fujian province died during interrogation after almost a month in liuzhi. 

When family members saw his body, his face was disfigured.
“Liuzhi ’is a very new system, but we can speculate pretty clearly [about] the kind of treatment people are subjected to,” says Michael Caster, a human rights advocate with Safeguard Defenders, a human rights NGO in Asia. 

“Prolonged sleep deprivation, forced malnourishment, stress positions, beatings, psychological abuse, threats to family members certainly, oftentimes leading to forced confessions.”
Meng’s case is the most high-profile yet for the NSC, which was created in March to expand China’s anti-corruption drive to people and entities outside the Communist party, including government ministries, state-owned companies, and people working in the public sector.
“Since its inauguration, however, the NSC has not nabbed any big ‘tigers’, so to speak,” said Dimitar Gueorguiev, assistant professor of political science at Syracuse University, where he focuses on Chinese governance. 

“Meng’s arrest seems like a powerful demonstration of China’s commitment to rooting out corruption, even when it can cost them the directorship of an important international vehicle,” he said.
Speculation for the reasons behind Meng’s swift downfall ranges from his access to sensitive information after a long career at the public security ministry to his tenure at Interpol, when the organisation revoked an international alert for Dolkun Isa, the president of the Munich-based World Uyghur Congress, which is critical of China’s treatment of ethnic Uighurs in East Turkestan. 

While Meng’s exact whereabouts are still unclear, rights activists say his fate is not.
“The formula is simple,” says Maya Wang, a senior China researcher for Human Rights Watch. “Like others forcibly disappeared before him, including human rights activists mistreated in custody by Meng’s public security ministry, he faces detention until he confesses under duress, an unfair trial, and then harsh imprisonment, possibly for many years.”

Rogue Nation: The disappeared

Accounts from inside China's secret prisons
By Chieu Luu and Matt Rivers

Sui Muqing says he was forced to stay awake while he was interrogated for more than four days.
Chen Taihe describes being held in a jail cell so crowded he couldn't relieve himself.
And Peter Dahlin was left so traumatized by his experience, he slept with a knife next to his bed.
Three men, in three different parts of China.

They didn't know each other, but all had one thing in common: They advocated for human rights and became caught up in what activists say is the Chinese government's brutal crackdown on dissent.
Xi Jinping's wide-reaching sweep on perceived threats to both his rule and the Chinese Communist Party has led to the arrests of dozens of activists, bloggers, feminists, artists and lawyers.
The men, who CNN spoke to in detail over the course of the last 12 months, describe being forcibly taken from their homes, detained for weeks, sometimes months, in secret prisons, denied communication with family and legal representation, strong-armed into making videotaped confessions, and ultimately released without being convicted of a single crime.
Sui, Chen and Dahlin all say they were explicitly told not to talk about what happened to them, but have decided to speak out anyway. 

They say they want to shed light on the lengths to which China's government will go to silence anyone it deems a threat.
CNN reached out to the Chinese government for comment on each of the cases in this story, but received no response. 

Beijing has said regularly in the past that it does not torture prisoners and maintains these lawyers and activists are criminals dealt with under the law.

The 709 crackdown
While being a human rights lawyer has never been an easy path in Communist China, forced disappearances of lawyers were rare before 2015.
But on July 9 of that year, prominent Beijing rights lawyer Wang Yu disappeared, along with her husband, also a lawyer, and their teenage son.
The following day, police raided Wang's law firm and detained seven of her colleagues. 

Seven other rights lawyers were also detained or reported missing, according to the Hong-Kong based China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group, which has meticulously documented the cases. It became known as the "709 crackdown" -- a reference to the date the first arrests occurred.
Sui was among them. 

He'd earlier in the day spoken to two foreign media outlets to raise concern about Wang's disappearance.
That night, a security guard called up to Sui's apartment and said his car had been scratched in an accident and when he stepped outside, a group of police quickly whisked him away, said Sui. 

He wasn't seen again for nearly five months.

From left to right: Sui Minqing, Peter Dahlin and Chen Taihe.

Two days later, on July 12, the same thing happened to Chen. 

He said police asked him to come down from his apartment to answer a few questions. 

"I intentionally left my cell phone upstairs in my apartment because I thought I'd be back in a few minutes." 

He didn't return for six weeks.
During a period of less than a week, at least 146 lawyers and their families were detained in a nationwide swoop.
The roots of the crackdown on lawyers can be traced back to an editorial in the overseas edition of state-run People's Daily in July 2012, which warned the United States would use five categories of people to destabilize the Communist Party's near seven-decade rule. 

Rights advocates and lawyers were at the top of the list.
Dahlin, a Swedish national who co-founded a Beijing-based NGO that provided legal aid and training to Chinese lawyers, wasn't caught up in the first wave of detentions, and assumed his status as a foreigner might offer him some protection.
In early January 2016, however, he got tipped off authorities might be after him. 

He was about to depart for Beijing airport when 20 police officers turned up at his apartment.
They detained him and his girlfriend and they ransacked his home, he says, seizing computers and documents.
Dahlin says he was accused of masterminding a plan to smuggle the son of Wang Yu, the first lawyer to be detained in the swoop, into Myanmar, in an effort to evade authorities in October 2015.
He said investigators realized early on he had nothing to do with it, but instead of letting him go, quickly turned their attention to his NGO -- Chinese Urgent Action Working Group -- pressing him to give up information about his colleagues and other activists his group worked with.
Authorities said that Dahlin worked for an illegal organization that sponsored activities that jeopardized China's national security. 

The NGO said it "undertakes rapid response assistance for rights defenders in need."
By October 2017, some 321 lawyers, rights activists, their family members and staff had been caught up in the 709 crackdown.

How lawyers disappear

A key tool in the crackdown has been a relatively new form of detention. 

In 2012, China introduced "residential surveillance at a designated location" (RSDL) into the Criminal Procedural Law.
It appeared to legalize a long-used practice of "black jails" -- a means of temporarily detaining people outside the Chinese legal system who could not be immediately charged with a crime.
The government denied black jails existed in 2009. 

But in 2011 Chinese state media reported on a campaign by the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau to crack down on them.
The amended law says residential surveillance shouldn't exceed six months but requires detainees' families be notified within 24 hours, unless they can't be reached, and guarantees all suspects the right to a lawyer, with whom a meeting should be granted within 48 hours of a request.
The new system gives arbitrary detention a legal gloss and normalizes enforced disappearances. 

Earlier this year, 11 countries called on China to end the practice and investigate reports of torture against human rights lawyers. 

The UN High Commission on Human Rights has also called on China to halt the detention of lawyers.

Chen Taihe, a blogger, was detained in Guilin. He now lives in the US.

Although they were held at opposite ends of the country, Sui, Chen and Dahlin all describe similar conditions: Sparsely furnished rooms with black-out curtains on the windows and fluorescent lights kept on 24-hours a day.
They say they slept on a single bed, and were not allowed any reading or writing materials. 

Guards were always in the room watching their every move, even when they used the bathroom.
"There's nothing to look at except some very beige-looking suicide padding on the wall," said Dahlin.
He described being so bored he almost looked forward to the daily interrogations, "because at least you're taken out to another room ... and have some kind of interaction with people."
The interrogators used methods which Dahlin said reminded him of "bad American movies."
"They would have lots of people rush into your cell at night surrounding your bed just trying to scare you," he said.

Peter Dahlin, a Swedish national, was detained in China on January 4, 2016 and held for three weeks.

Just months earlier, Sui says he was held at a police training facility in Guangzhou, the free-wheeling hub of China's manufacturing heartland where he worked as a human rights lawyer defending a number of high-profile activists.
He says interrogators accused him of inciting subversion and pressed him to give them details ranging from his personal life and finances, to his work, clients, and all of his contacts.
Initially he refused to answer the questions, but his resistance only made his interrogators push harder. 

"They wouldn't let me sleep for four days and nights. By the fifth day, I felt like I was going to die," he said.
Sui said it was the sleep deprivation plus threats of torture which ultimately broke his will and made him cooperate. 

He said investigators threatened to shackle his hands, hang him from the ceiling and shine a flashlight directly into his eyes.
"I knew someone who had a heart attack due to deprivation of sleep in jail, so I was a bit frightened my life could be at risk if I continued to fight back," he said.

Sui Muqing, a lawyer, was detained from July 10, 2015 until January 6, 2016.

Chen, a professor who advocated for a US-style jury system in China on his blog, was first accused of "picking quarrels and provoking troubles," -- a vague charge often used by Chinese authorities that can carry a 10-year prison sentence. 

He told CNN he refused to admit any wrongdoing during a 20-hour interrogation, but then found himself sharing a jail cell with inmates accused of crimes ranging from petty theft to murder.
"The cell was so crammed I had to ask other prisoners to make room so I could urinate and defecate," he said. 

"I didn't have a spoon or chopsticks to eat with. We'd get one scoop of rice and would have to eat it with our hands."

After a month, Chen said he was told to collect his belongings. 

He thought he was going home -- but instead was driven to what appeared to be an abandoned hotel and held for another 10 days.
Earlier this year, CNN visited the nondescript building where Chen said he was held in Guilin, a southern city famed for its stunning landscape of karst mountains. 

Signs posted around the area in Chinese and English marked it as military property, but it otherwise appeared open and accessible.
Local officials denied that the building was used as a secret detention center.

The building in Guilin where Chen Taihe was held.

'You have to confess'
The rights activists held captive weren't just concerned about their own well being. 

Their loved ones were also threatened.
Dahlin's interrogators made it clear that they'd keep his girlfriend, a Chinese national, in custody for as long as it took to resolve his case.
"She was taken hostage just to put pressure on me," he said. 

Dahlin asked about his girlfriend every day but got limited answers.
"They said she was being treated quite well. That she was being given yoghurt and fruit and things like that. She was allowed to make a few drawings and do yoga in her room," he said. 

"They knew she had nothing to give them."
Finally, after more than three weeks, Dahlin was told he was going to be released -- but he had to do one thing: confess on camera.
He said he knew what authorities were really going to do with it. 

But wanting to speed up his release -- and that of his girlfriend -- Dahlin agreed to play his part.

Dahlin 'confesses' on state TV

He was taken into a room where a woman from state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) was sitting with a cameraman. 

Dahlin was handed a piece of paper with the questions that she would ask and the answers he would give.
"I have caused harm to the Chinese government. I have hurt the feelings of the Chinese people. I apologize sincerely for this," Dahlin said in the confession broadcast nationwide and splashed across state-run newspapers.
Immediately after its broadcast activists denounced it as a forced confession -- one of many that have been shown on CCTV in the years since Xi came to power.
Sui and Chen said they had to make similar "confessions." 

All three men now maintain their innocence, but they said they had no choice but to do as authorities wanted.
Sui says he admitted to charges of inciting subversion. 

Chen told CNN he confessed to charges of picking quarrels and provoking troubles, inciting subversion and embezzlement.
"You have to confess," Chen said. 

"Otherwise they won't let you go."

No end in sight
The crackdown on lawyers is still taking place.
On Tuesday, a court in Changsha, central China sentenced human rights lawyer Jiang Tianyong to two years in prison after convicting him of inciting subversion against the state.
In August, he had confessed in a trial that was streamed live online and watched by his wife Jin Bianling in California.
"He used to tell me, if I ever admit to a crime like this, it means I've been tortured," Jin said.
Jiang was a prominent human rights lawyer who had represented some of his colleagues targeted in the 709 crackdown, and was an outspoken critic of the government. 

He disappeared in November 2016, en route to catching a train from the central city of Changsha to Beijing. 

Months went by before the authorities confirmed he had been detained.
"Please give me another chance to be a human being ... and to make up for my wrongdoings," Jiang told a panel of three judges at his August trial.
Albert Ho, a Hong Kong-based activist with the China Human Rights Lawyer Concern Group, said Jiang, like other lawyers his group has spoken to, likely admitted to the charges in order to live to fight another day.
"Only an idiot would believe that he is truly speaking from his heart," Ho said.

Sleeping with a knife
Six days after his "confession" was broadcast on CCTV, Dahlin was released and expelled from China. 

His girlfriend was also released without charge.
Dahlin is now based in Thailand, but has trouble forgetting his time in detention.
"Early on it was quite extreme. Every little noise at night would wake me up. I'd sleep with a knife next to my bed, ready to stab the first Chinese person who comes into my gate," he said.

Wang Yu poses during an interview in Hong Kong on March 20, 2014.

Wang Yu, the first lawyer detained in the 709 crackdown, was charged with subversion, while her husband was charged with inciting subversion. 

They were both released on bail after more than a year in custody, after Wang's taped confession was aired on CCTV.
In it, Wang renounced her legal work and blamed "foreign forces" for using her law firm to undermine and discredit the government. 

Their son, who was detained along with them, was released soon afterward, but his movements have been heavily restricted.
Authorities never aired Chen's statement. 

He was released a day after recording it and the charges against him were dropped.
"I have no criminal record, but they can still use the video to discredit me," he said.
Chen and his family now live in US, where he's a visiting scholar at the University of California's Hastings Law School and studies the US jury system. 

He said he won't return to China until it becomes more democratic.
Sui was released on bail after his "confession," which was also never broadcast. 

He continues to practice law in Guangzhou, but said his movements have been restricted and fears the worst may still be yet to come.
"It's increasingly difficult to maintain a harmonious society through brainwashing," Sui said.
"The only resort left is violence. For anyone who's not submissive, a brutal crackdown is on the way."

China eliminating civil society by targeting human rights activists

Report details use of torture by Chinese security agencies – including beatings, stress positions and sleep deprivation – to force activists to confess ‘crimes’
By Benjamin Haas In Hong Kong

Since coming to power in 2012, Xi Jinping has overseen a sweeping crackdown on civil society. 

China’s human rights situation further deteriorated last year as police systematically tortured activists and forcibly disappeared government critics while state TV continued to broadcast forced confessions, a new report shows.
A creeping security state also attempted to codify much of its existing behaviour on paper, giving the police legal authority to criminalise a host of NGOs deemed politically sensitive by the authorities, according to the report by the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD).
“The Chinese government seems intent on eliminating civil society through a combination of new legislation restricting the funding and operations of NGOs, and the criminalisation of human rights activities as a so-called threat to national security,” Frances Eve, a researcher at CHRD, told the Guardian.
“What stands out is the institutionalised use of torture to force defenders to confess that their legitimate and peaceful human rights work is somehow a ‘crime’.”
Since coming to power in 2012, Xi Jinping has overseen a sweeping crackdown on civil society. 

In 2015, police targeted almost 250 rights lawyers and activists in a “war on law”, and the effects of that campaign continued to be felt throughout last year.
Reports of torture while in detention in 2016 were rampant, with methods including beatings, attacks by fellow inmates on the orders of prison guards, stress positions, deprivation of food, water and sleep, inhumane conditions and deprivation of medical treatment.
In some cases, human rights activists were prevented from receiving medical care even once they were released.
Huang Yan, who was detained in November 2015, was suffering from ovarian cancer and diabetes. Police confiscated her diabetes medication, and despite an exam done at a detention facility in April 2016 showing the cancer had spread, she was not treated and was denied medical bail.
When she was finally released, Huang was scheduled to undergo surgery last November to treat her cancer, but the authorities pressured the hospital and the team of surgeons declined to treat her.
Torture also took more overt forms. 

Last year reports also emerged that rights lawyer Xie Yang was subject to beatings and stress positions in detention, with interrogators warning him: “We’ll torture you to death just like an ant”.
In November 2016, Jiang Tianyong, a respected Christian attorney, disappeared while about to board a train and police waited weeks to confirm he had been detained. 

Jiang’s whereabouts are still a mystery nearly three months later.
In a rare strongly-worded statement, the European Union called for his immediate release along with several other lawyers.
China also continued the practice of airing confessions on state television, a move that is reminiscent of internal Communist party political purges.
In one of the most prominent cases, Swedish NGO worker Peter Dahlin was paraded on the national broadcaster after three weeks in detention, declaring: “I have violated Chinese law through my activities here. I have caused harm to the Chinese government. I have hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.”
The confessions air before detainees ever see the inside of a courtroom, and in Dahlin’s case he was promptly deported.
For those activists that do go to trial, in at least 15 cases last year police attempted to pressure activists into accepting government-appointed lawyers. 

In cases where state-appointed lawyers represented human rights activists, little defence was mounted and the accused pleaded guilty and promised not to appeal their cases.
The report also outlined two laws passed in 2016 that are likely to curb civil society: legislation regulating charitable giving and a law on foreign NGOs. 

The charity law, while not explicitly requiring all NGOs to register with the government, makes it difficult for unregistered organisations to raise funds domestically.
The foreign NGO regulations require overseas groups that give money to Chinese organisations to be registered with the police.
“Together, these laws will hamper the development of Chinese civil society by restricting their funding,” the CHRD report said.
“There are no more ‘grey areas’,” an unnamed human rights activist said in the report. 

“To advocate for human rights in China today, you must be willing to accept the reality that the government views your work as ‘illegal’.”

China torturing suspects in political purge against members of rival factions

Opaque extralegal detention system used by officials to hold suspects indefinitely until they confess
By Benjamin Haas in Hong Kong

Regular beatings, sleep deprivation, stress positions and solitary confinement are among the tools used by China’s anti-corruption watchdog to force confessions, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.
The report throws the spotlight on to Xi Jinping’s "war on corruption", which has punished more than a million Communist party officials since 2013. 

Xi has said fighting corruption is “a matter of life and death” but experts characterise the campaign as a political purge against members of rival factions.
The opaque extralegal detention system is used by "anti-corruption" officials to hold suspects indefinitely until they confess. 

At least 11 have died while in the custody of the country’s widely feared Commission for Discipline Inspection.
“Xi has built his 'anti-corruption campaign' on an abusive and illegal detention system,” said Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch.
“Torturing suspects to confess won’t bring an end to corruption but will end any confidence in China’s judicial system.”
All of China’s 88 million Communist party members can be subject to detention or shuanggui, which in Chinese means to report at a designated time and place, where suspects are held incommunicado and often in padded, windowless rooms.
“If you sit, you have to sit for 12 hours straight; if you stand, then you have to stand for 12 hours as well. My legs became swollen and my buttocks were raw and started oozing pus,” a former detainee is quoted as saying in the report. 

Names were withheld for fear of government reprisals.
Others have described detention simply as a “living hell”. 

It is extremely rare for those who have been through the system to speak openly.
In one account a detainee was kept awake for 23 hours a day, forced to stand the entire time and balance a book on his head, one lawyer said. 

After eight days he confessed “to whatever they said” and was then allowed to sleep for two hours a day.
While Xi champions his "anti-corruption" drive, he has also advocated enhancing China’s “rule of law”, but activists say the two concepts are completely at odds when suspects are tortured and forced to confess.
Although the "anti-corruption" campaign is technically separate from China’s judicial system, Human Rights Watch documented cases where prosecutors worked alongside corruption investigators, using the shuanggui system to gather evidence. 

After the extralegal detention, cases are usually transferred to the courts, where there is a 99.92% conviction rate.

“In shuanggui corruption cases the courts function as rubber stamps, lending credibility to an utterly illegal Communist party process,” Richardson said. 

“Shuanggui not only further undermines China’s judiciary – it makes a mockery of it.”
Those sentiments have been echoed by western governments as Xi has ramped up his "anti-corruption" push and use of the system has skyrocketed.
Shuanggui “operates without legal oversight” and suspects are “in some cases tortured”, the US State Department wrote in its annual human rights report on China. 

Some confessions extracted in detention were eventually overturned by courts, the US government report said.
Government officials are the majority of suspects disappeared into the system, but bankers, university administrators, entertainment industry figures and any other Communist party member can be detained.
Human Rights Watch called for shuanggui to be abolished, adding that successfully fighting corruption required “robust protections for the rights of suspects”.
“Eradicating corruption won’t be possible so long as the shuanggui system exists,” Richardson said. “Every day this system threatens the lives of party members and underscores the abuses inherent in Xi’s anti-corruption campaign.”