The secrets of Beijing’s ‘black jails’

The secrets of Beijing’s ‘black jails’
The terrible secrets of Beijing’s ‘black jails’
Aidan Hartley
Wednesday, 10th October 2007

The author’s arrest while investigating Chinese prisons

A crowd of faeces-stained, starving figures with haunted eyes stared at us from behind the bars. Some looked cold and wet, as if they had been hosed down with water. Most of them were old, and some handicapped. They began wailing and pleading with us. ‘Let us out!’ they sobbed. ‘This is a prison!’ They showed us one ragged woman. ‘Look at this. She was beaten!’ They carried another elderly woman towards the bars who appeared to be paralysed. Guarding the inmates were young men in black jumpsuits. I knew they would stop us filming any second now, but at first the guards reacted slowly. ‘Those are the thugs that beat us!’ yelled one of the inmates, pointing. ‘They strangled and beat me!’

‘I’ve been held here for 14 days!’ an old man hobbling on a walking stick said to me. ‘In one room there are about 20 to 30 people. The conditions are awful.’

I was with a film crew making a documentary for Channel 4. We were inside one of Beijing’s secret ‘black jails’, where the poor and destitute are held without trial or charge. Officially these jails do not exist, since arbitrary arrest and detention are against Chinese law. But in fact there are many of them, and they exist with the full knowledge and backing of the government. My colleagues and I were the first Western TV crew to enter a black jail, and we paid for our temerity: we were assaulted, our camera was smashed, and we were arrested and detained.

The black jails are where ‘petitioners’ end up. There are thousands of petitioners in Beijing, poor Chinese from the provinces who have flooded into the city to seek the help of state officials in settling their grievances — something they have a legal right to do — but who are branded as ‘troublemakers’ by the authorities. The sole reason for locking them up seems to be that they are an eyesore, and spoil Beijing’s image as a modern, harmonious city. That image has never been more important: next week is the Communist Party Congress and next year the city hosts the 2008 Olympic Games.

In Beijing last month we found these petitioners living like tramps, sleeping rough in underpasses. Among them were peasants evicted from farms, elderly men with goatee beards trying to clear their names after jail sentences as ‘counter-revolutionaries’ during Mao’s reign of terror, mothers trying to have their children’s murders or rapes investigated by lazy, corrupt officials. We even met a disabled ex-military serviceman who had been deployed among the forces that suppressed protests in the Tiananmen bloodbath.

The prisoners in the black jail we visited were from Nanyang City in Henan province. As we spoke to the inmates and the guards, a black-shirted goon came storming towards us shouting his head off. In unison the inmates pointed and screamed, ‘He’s the director!’ They wept and grimaced. ‘He’s the one who runs this place!’ Black Shirt went nuts. ‘Don’t film!’ he shouted. ‘This is illegal!’

Suddenly a dozen snarling guards in jumpsuits surrounded us. I tried reasoning with them. ‘Be polite,’ I said — to no avail. They shoved us away from the jail gates. Black Shirt tried to rip the camera out of my cameraman Andrew’s hands. In the tussle, the guards smashed it. Outside, we jumped into the taxi that had driven us to the jail — amazingly it was still waiting for us — and tried to drive off.

Black Shirt ordered the entrance gates to be slammed shut, blocking our way. We were dragged out across the tarmac. In the mêlée I said to Andrew, ‘Quick, give me the tape.’ He removed it from the camera and I stuck it in my sock while Andrew put another blank roll into his dead machine.

Just when the goons had apparently decided to give us a beating, the police turned up and arrested us. So much for Beijing’s promise that in the run-up to the Olympic Games ‘there will be no restrictions on media reporting and movement of journalists’. When the International Olympic Committee (IOC) awarded Beijing the 2008 Games, China promised it would improve its appalling human rights record. But there is no sign of improvement. Human rights, and human beings, are being brushed aside in the ruthless preparations for the Games.