A Chinese activist who has spoken out about the country’s “black jails” said he is being held against his will in one of the unofficial detention centers used to discourage people from complaining to the central government.
Zheng Dajing stood behind a locked metal door, whose screen window was covered with semi-opaque plastic, and answered questions from a reporter on Saturday. The location was a two-story building in the dim courtyard of an alleyside hotel in west Beijing.
The stocky 48-year-old recited his wife’s cellphone number to confirm who he was.
“I have no idea when I can leave,” he said.
China has denied the existence of “black jails,” but a state-run magazine last month described the secret detention centers where petitioners — citizens who come to Beijing with complaints about corruption in their home towns — are held and sometimes beaten.
The report said officials are under pressure to reduce the number of petitioners from their localities to zero and pay people to detain those who come to Beijing before they can complain.
Zheng said he was detained on Friday with several thousand other people marking China’s annual “Legal Publicity Day” — meant to promote awareness of China’s legal system — with numerous protests around the capital.
The China-based Chinese Human Rights Defenders reported on Saturday that Zheng, from Hubei Province, was an organizer of the protests, but Zheng said he was merely standing near a Beijing railway station observing them when he was taken away.
“We were just standing there watching,” Zheng said.
“They must have detained thousands of people” around the city, he said.
The rights group’s statement said it had no idea about the number of people detained on Friday and there were no other reports of mass detentions.
A man answering the phone at a police station in Beijing’s Fengtai district, the area where the hotel is located, said he could not deal with media questions and had no way of checking Zheng’s case.
Zheng was being watched by a guard inside the locked room who protested loudly at first to the interview but then walked away.
Other guards earlier on Saturday stopped Zheng’s wife from getting inside to see him.
Zheng said he and others were taken to Majialou, which Chinese Human Rights Defenders described as “a central ‘black jail’ for petitioners,” for processing before being taken to his current location, a dingy guesthouse with “Siyuan Hotel” spelled out in neon lights.
Zheng said he and three other people were being held there.
A small tear in the plastic covering the door’s screen showed a fluorescent-lit room with a water cooler.
At first, the guard behind the locked door said Zheng was not there, but Zheng then came to the door.
Zheng said the guards hit his wife and pulled her hair when she tried to get inside to speak with him. Zheng’s wife said the same earlier on Saturday.
Zheng, who has spoken with foreign media in the past about being held in “black jails,” said he himself had not been beaten.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS