Black and White Cat

The Youth Hotel in Beijing which does a side trade in locking up petitioners

Up until 2003, Custody and Repatriation (shourong) centers were used by the big cities to detain people without permits to work and live there before sending them back to where they had come from. Detainees would usually be held until relatives sent payment for their transport home. In the meantime they would have to work for their keep and there were many allegations of violence.

Then, one night in March 2003, a young designer in Guangzhou called Sun Zhigang was picked up on the street and detained for not being able to produce the required documentation. While he was being held, he was beaten to death. There was a storm of protest around the country which spread through the internet and mainstream media, and the entire legality of the system was challenged. Then, suddenly in June that year, the government announced it was abolishing Custody and Repatriation.

One of the groups of people who were detained through the abuse of the Custody and Repatriation system were petitioners. All Chinese citizens have the legal right to petition the authorities if they feel they have been wronged. Government departments have offices of Letters and Visits - at local, provincial and state levels. Officials at lower levels have a strong interest in preventing people from embarrassing them by petitioning at a higher level, so they frequently intercept petitioners, take them home, and often take revenge. Human Rights Watch published a useful study of this abuse in 2005. (Summary; full report)

When Custody and Repatriation was abolished, the so-called black jails sprang up to replace them as makeshift detention centers for petitioners. Officially, they don’t exist. Below, is my translation of three blog posts about one of these places written by Xu Zhiyong, a young professor at the Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications. In 2003, he was elected as an independent deputy to the Haidian District People’s Congress.

If you’re wondering why there’s no action in the photos at the top and bottom of this page, that’s because they were taken by me about a week after Xu Zhiyong’s first two posts. Once you’ve read his account, I think you might understand why I had no great desire to attract more any more attention than necessary while I was taking the pictures.

Early in the morning of September 21, I received an SMS from a petitioner from Henan saying they were locked up in a black jail in an alley behind the Youth Hotel on Taiping Street near Taoranting park.

For the last few years, I’ve kept hearing about black jails, but I thought they’d disappeared as we entered 2008. With this reappearance, I decided to go and take a look. This evil, ugly phenomenon cannot be tolerated.

I arrived at the dilapidated Youth Hotel on Taiping Street, followed the alley that runs along the south of the hotel up to the No. 62 Middle School on the corner. Turning right along the alley after a hundred meters or so I saw several residents. A fat, bare-chested middle-aged man was squatting there. I couldn’t see any sign of the black jail so I asked the bare-chested guy, where they lock up the petitioners. He asked, where from. I said Henan, and he pointed to the side. It’s at the back of the Youth Hotel, there’s a white metal door and that’s the place.

The white metal door was locked. To the side was a window. Inside, a girl was watching television and a man was lying on a bed. I knocked on the door, but no one answered. I knocked on the window. The girl woke up the man saying “Someone’s come to pick someone up, quick, open the door.” The man hurriedly looked for his keys, asking me “Where from?” I said Henan. Then he suddenly seemed to feel something wasn’t quite right and told me to contact him via the Henan representative office in Beijing. I said I knew someone called Wang Jinlan and wanted to see her. He said there was no one by that name there. So I phoned Wang Jinlan and after a while she came to the window, demanding to go out, but she wasn’t allowed. I started to take a photograph of the window and the man closed it.

Very quickly, six or seven men rushed out around me and one of them reached out to grab my camera. The bare-chested guy suddenly rushed up and punched me in the chest, acting like a crazy devil and carrying a chain-lock.

I was very calm and submitted to their insults and occasional blows. At one point they wanted to drag me into the black jail, but they were stopped by their boss. When they’d spent all their aggression I said, “Can I go now?” They said no. Then they must have thought of something because they let me go. As I was leaving, I looked back and said “You’ll regret what you did today, whether it’s because you’re punished or because of your conscience.”

I will go back. This isn’t meddling in other people’s business. Black jails are a tumor on Beijing. They’re a tumor on China. In the broad light of day, that there should be such dark and ugly corners. As a Chinese man, I have a duty to rise up in indignation.

September 22, 2008

Yesterday I received an SMS from a petitioner from Henan called Wang Jinlan. She was illegally locked up in a black jail run by a local government at the Youth Hotel on Taiping Street near Taoranting park.

It’s in no way an exaggeration to call this a black jail. Dozens of petitioners are locked up there and the government has put hired thugs in charge of them. What makes this different from a regular jail is that the petitioners who are imprisoned here are completely innocent. They were petitioning in a normal way when they were taken from the State Bureau for Letters and Visits, the Supreme People’s Court and other letters and visits departments, and brought here to be locked up without any legal process.

I plan to expose these black jails. Today, I went there again. I hadn’t got far down the alley to the south of the Youth Hotel, when I saw a tall guard from the black jail sitting on a stool chatting with some others. Almost at the same time, they recognized me.

On the corner, several dozen meters from the black jail, is the entrance to No. 62 Middle School. From the school entrance, I checked out the lay of the land, looking for a good place to take photographs and contacting a friend. Li Yongbin the lawyer was hurrying over.

I waited until nearly 6 o’clock. Li was stuck in traffic and was still a long way off. I was afraid it was about to get dark so I decided to go in alone. A journalist friend was at the No. 62 Middle School entrance as back-up.

Before I reached the entrance to the black jail, four or five guards were already waiting. As soon as I got close, they demanded to know what I was doing. I said I was looking for someone. They told me to leave right away. One of them, wearing a red jacket, looked familiar. If my memory is right, this person is Deputy Director Liu Fengxiang of the Kaifeng Bureau of Letters and Visits. Three years ago he and a group of other people picking up petitioners beat me up in an alley in front of the State Bureau of Letters and Visits. I hadn’t thought I’d bump into him here. I said, “You’re illegally detaining petitioners. It’s illegal.” Director Liu said, ” Who says we’re detaining people? They’re all here volutarily.” I said, “Well, for example, is Wang Jinlan voluntary?” He said, “How do you know she’s not?”

I fished out my cell phone and was about to call Wang Jinlan who was locked inside. Director Liu snatched my phone. A fist hit my face and he yelled at me to fuck off. He said, “This is government business. It doesn’t concern you.” I later learnt that Director Liu has been the fiercest in beating petitioners. Many petitioners are afraid of him and they all know the guards all call him “Director Liu.” I suppose this is the only kind of person from the Bureau of Letters and Visits who’s suitable to come and work here.

I refused to leave. The tall guy next to Director Liu violently shoved, punched and slapped me, pushing me towards the entrance to the No. 62 Middle School. The bare-chested guy from yesterday rushed towards me carrying a chain and lock, bellowing, but he was held back by the others. I shouted to the students who were coming out of the school gate, “Please remember this, there’s a black jail just next to you locking up innocent petitioners.”

Wang Jinlan sent me an SMS from inside saying, “They won’t let me out. There are 21 people in here. Just now a woman from a steelworks in Luoyang called Liu Cuihua had a rib broken by local officials. She was brought here wearing an infusion needle. Now she’s in the corridor.” Earlier, she sent an SMS warning me not to come under any circumstances. “It’s dangerous!” She said the local government had hired gangsters as hired thugs. They’d be paid 1,000 for a light beating and 3,000 yuan for a heavy beating. I think the bare-chested guy from Beijing is probably the most ferocious and ruthly of the hired thugs.

At the entrance to the No. 62 Middle School, the guards had discovered my journalist friend. The tall guard grabbed her mobile phone and violently smashed it on the ground. I told them to get away. Several guards held me there, at the same time anxiously phoning the local government and demanding that they hurry up and take Wang Jinlan away.

Things calmed down for a while. I mildly asked the tall guy who had just been hitting me what his job was. Surprisingly, he yelled at me, “What do you want to know about me for? If you’ve got any ability then take a civil service exam. When you’re an official you can change this!” I said, “I spoke to you calmly. Why are you angry?”

After ten minutes or so, the local authorities arrived and Wang Jinlan was brought out. The person who came to get her was a court official. At this point, both Wang Jinlan and I were both free. The guards wanted an excuse to extricated themselves from the situation and were anxious for us to leave quickly. She said she had gone to the Supreme People’s Court to make a normal petition and had just finished filling in a form when she was brought here. She hadn’t broken any law.

I asked Wang Jinlan if she was willing to go with the court official. She said she was as long as the local government was willing to discuss things properly. The court official promised that nothing more would happen to her and promised to discuss her case properly. And so we parted.

When I got back to my office and calmed down, I started to feel very sad. Not because I had been hit and it wasn’t just because of those hired thugs. It was because of the long existence of these black jails. This is a contradiction in the state system. Many of the people who used to be locked up in custody and repatriation centers were petitioners. After 2003, the custody and repatriation centers didn’t exist anymore, and the black jails sprang up to take their place.

The Henan provincial government’s letters and visits departments paid off hotels that were willing to forget about principles for the sake of profit. They employed gangsters as hired hands as well as arranging jobs for their own relatives and created these black jails. There are many other similar black jails around the State Bureau of Letters and Visits. A standard room in the Youth Hotel costs 120 yuan for normal customers. But six or seven petitioners can be locked up in one room and the local governments give the hotel 150 yuan a day for each petitioner.

I’m wondering if I should try to understand them more. When the tall guy told me that if I had the ability I should take the civil service exam, become an official and change the situation, I can understand that he wasn’t happy with this system. But when I think of so many innocent and weak people being beaten up, sometimes to the point of being crippled, I just can’t take standards of human dignity so low. In some ways, this is far more terrible than the black kilns. It has to change. I will do my best to shine some light on this, even if it’s only a little. I believe that one day, eventually, this dreadful corner will disappear.

September 22, 2008

On September 26, Teng Biao, Zhou Shuguang and I went to the black jail, but it was already getting dark when we arrived so we didn’t take any action. We just had a quick look at the terrain. A guard appeared to have noticed us.

Today, I received a phone call from a woman who said four middle school students had been taken to the black jail and she hoped I could help get them out. They have to go to school tomorrow. They’re 13 or 14, one boy and two girls. They came to Beijing with their parent(s) to petition and were taken to the black jail in the Youth Hotel. They’d sent an SMS to their family using a mobile phone that a petitioner in the jail had kept hidden.

We agreed to go to the Youth Hotel at noon tomorrow. I hope some friends will go with me and at least get the middle school students out. (October 4. To be continued.)

At midday on October 5, I set off with Zhou Shuguang and Zhang Yadong. Before that I received a phone call from a petitioner and agreed to meet her at one o’clock outside the entrance to the Youth Hotel. A netizen called Zuoqio also phoned, saying they were already at the Youth Hotel. This time I was prepared for the worst and prepared quite well.

The first person I saw was the woman. She’s from Henan. She believes the police didn’t investigate the killer in a murder case, so she started petitioning. Because of her petitioning, she spent a year doing reeducation through labor. I suppose she felt petitioning was difficult and dangerous, so this time she brought the children with her, trying to get the higher authorities to take it seriously. Presumably the children carried banners, so the police sent them here. She said she’d just seen Director Liu and some others coming out and going to the Huapu supermarket across the road.

We joined Zuoqiao and two others with him and went towards the back entrance to the Youth Hotel. At the window, we asked the guard on duty for the four children. He said, “The local government already took them away this morning.” We said we wanted to go in and look. He refused, but his tone was noticeably more calm. At this point, some petitioners were brought out by the local government. We asked about the four children and they said they had already been taken away this morning.

The entire atmosphere was completely different to the last two times I went there. On the previous two occasions, the guards started hitting people immediately. This time the attitude was unusually mild and the hired thugs were nowhere to be seen. The words I wrote on my blog probably had some effect. Perhaps it’s because I announced that I was going to go there today that they hastily took the children away.

There are at least four black jails in Beijing where Henan province locks up petitioners: the Youth Hotel, the Fenglong Youth Hostel, the Juyuan Hotel and the Jingyuan Hotel. These black jails are just like the custody and repatriation centers of the past and they’ve become an industry. If we take the Youth Hotel as an example, the general situation is this: the man surnamed Liu and another surnamed Yin rent a room from the Youth Hotel. They employ some hired thugs and they’re entrusted by the Henan representative office in Beijing to grab petitioners from the Jiujingzhuang shelter and bring them here. The county governments come and pick them up and pay 150 yuan a day for each person.

Many thanks to friends for their care and support! We will go back there again. And I hope that more and more citizens will care about this dark corner.

October 5, 2008

And that, for now, is all of Xu Zhigang’s account of his visits to the Youth Hotel. Here are the rest of the photos I took of the area at the end of September. As I said earlier, sorry, no action. I didn’t want any.

For a vivid personal account of a recent mass petition (and subsequent detention) involving parents of kidnapped children see Oiwan Lam’s translation at Global Voices.

Front entrance to the Youth Hotel on Taiping Street

Side road to the south of the hotel - at the end of the street is the gate to the No. 62 Middle School

Back alley behind the hotel facing south. The side road is ahead, to the left.

The entrance to the ‘black jail’

UPDATE: Xu Zhiyong and others revisited the black jail on Monday, October 13. Again, the guards responded with violence. Meng Zhang at Global Voices has translated excerpts with photos from Xu, Doubleleaf and Zola.