The Wire China’s cover story this week is an essay I wrote based on my foreword for Safeguard Defenders’ new book, The People’s Republic of the Disappeared. This third edition collects new first-person accounts of both PRC and foreign citizens abducted by the Party-state’s security apparatus under a sinister procedure it calls zhiding jusuo jianshi juzhu 指定居所监视居住 or zhiju 指居 for short. The official English translation is “Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location” (RSDL), a bland bureaucratic mouthful that deliberately masks pre-arrest detention in a secret facility where your tormentors subject you to appalling abuse and your only right is to obey. Please buy the book to read the full account—the money goes toward helping victims and stopping human rights violations. Preview below.
China’s secret police have detained you.
The ordeal begins with a surprise raid by security officers. They accuse you of crimes, restrain you and shove you into a vehicle. You are hooded or blindfolded, handcuffed, abducted to a secret location, locked in a padded cell, and threatened with severe punishment for “harming China”. Meanwhile, your home and office are searched.
If you are a critic of the regime who has lived with the perennial anxiety that it might one day move against you, this can be a moment of strange relief: your worst-case scenario has unfolded. If you thought you understood the rules and could count on official connections or the reasonableness of the authorities, you experience the shock of illusions dispelled and trust betrayed.
You struggle to adjust to solitary confinement and sensory deprivation. The room has only a hard bunk; you have only a few articles of clothing and basic toiletries. There are no mirrors — not even the reassurance of seeing your own face. Most maddeningly, you cannot go out. Your universe is now measured in a few square feet.
The plainclothes Public Security or State Security officers holding you won’t inform anyone of your location or conditions. The law entitles you to retain and consult a lawyer. But in state security cases, it also empowers your jailers to deny access to counsel, which they are sure to do, at least until they have finished questioning you and building their case, which could take a year.
Disconnected from loved ones and friends, from the world, from your own identity, you experience a chill of isolation and a longing for connection. From now on, your only human relationships are with your captors. Human rights lawyer Sui Muqing speaks for many when he recalls that “the pain of missing my family was the worst suffering.”
What cinematic depictions of torture achieve through shock and spectacle, RSDL accomplishes through comprehensiveness and duration. By law it can last up to six months, usually followed by years of detention and prison. The scars it inflicts last much longer.
In writing this book’s foreword I wanted to reflect the suffering and survival of others, rather than relating my own experience as a political hostage from 2018–2021. I analyzed its ten essays and several more from the two previous editions, as well as stories of prisoners from the PRC’s early decades to the present, from Dries van Coillie, Anthony Grey and Bao Ruo-wang, to Wei Jingsheng, to Peter Humphrey. I read the account by Japanese detainee Suzuki Hideji of his six years of arbitrary detention and prison, and the recent memoir of Cheng Lei, the Australian broadcast journalist whose stint as a CGTN news anchor was abruptly terminated by Ministry of State Security officers in 2020. They detained her in retaliation against Australian policies that had enraged their Communist Party masters. Together, these accounts reveal an enduring core curriculum of fear, coercive interrogation, thought remolding and forced submission to the power of the Party-state.
For the rest of the article, non-subscribers can visit The Wire China. Better yet, buy The People’s Republic of the Disappeared (3rd ed.) and learn more about human rights in China from Safeguard Defenders.
