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.
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ￥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, was sacked yesterday, days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he no longer trusts him, and fallout from a report on the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. “The Government unanimously approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to end ISA Director Ronen Bar’s term of office,” a statement said. He is to leave his post when his successor is appointed by April 10 at the latest, the statement said. Netanyahu on Sunday cited an “ongoing lack of trust” as the reason for moving to dismiss Bar, who joined the agency in 1993. Bar, meant to
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
‘HUMAN NEGLIGENCE’: The fire is believed to have been caused by someone who was visiting an ancestral grave and accidentally started the blaze, the acting president said Deadly wildfires in South Korea worsened overnight, officials said yesterday, as dry, windy weather hampered efforts to contain one of the nation’s worst-ever fire outbreaks. More than a dozen different blazes broke out over the weekend, with Acting South Korean Interior and Safety Minister Ko Ki-dong reporting thousands of hectares burned and four people killed. “The wildfires have so far affected about 14,694 hectares, with damage continuing to grow,” Ko said. The extent of damage would make the fires collectively the third-largest in South Korea’s history. The largest was an April 2000 blaze that scorched 23,913 hectares across the east coast. More than 3,000
RSS