Washington Post: Amnesty International Says Torture on Rise in China

By Philip P. Pan Washington Post Foreign Service Monday, February 12, 2001 Amnesty International alleged in a report released today that the practice of torture is expanding in China, with growing numbers of officials inflicting physical pain on a wider range of victims through beatings, whippings, electric shocks, sexual abuse and other sometimes deadly means. The report cited witnesses' accounts, Amnesty International's own research and increasingly candid articles in government-controlled newspapers in describing the "widespread and systemic" use of torture against political dissidents, Tibetan nuns, migrant workers, criminal defendants and their lawyers, as well as people accused of violating China's one-child policy or failing to pay taxes. Without referring to Amnesty International or the new report directly, the Foreign Ministry issued a statement declaring that it has been the "consistent position" of the Chinese government to ban torture and that there is "no factual basis to think there is a 'systemic and large-scale' practice of torture in China." Amnesty International said it had broached almost all of the cases noted in the report with Chinese officials but that its questions were met with silence or categorical denials. In recent years, there has been a growing public debate about the abuse of police power here. Hou Zongbin, a ranking member of China's parliament, acknowledged in December that the use of torture to extract confessions "is rather serious in certain places, causing terrible social consequences" and must be "conscientiously dealt with rather than tolerated." Amnesty International, which is based in London, often issues reports documenting allegations of torture in China, but its last comprehensive report was a decade ago. The new, 58-page report details more than 75 specific incidents of torture and provides less complete information about more than 600 other cases. The accounts include that of a farmer in central Hunan province who was allegedly tortured to death on May 15, 1998, by family planning officials searching for his wife, who was suspected of being pregnant without permission. The report said Zhou Jianxiong, 30, was hung upside down, whipped, beaten with wooden clubs, burned with cigarettes and branded with soldering irons before his genitals were ripped off. "The testimony that Amnesty receives is just the tip of the iceberg," said Curt Goering, the group's senior deputy executive director in the United States. Torture "is no doubt a daily occurrence in China. . . . It's an attempt to destroy and control . . . and intimidate and punish." Goering called on the Bush administration to support a resolution condemning China's human rights record at the annual meeting of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in Geneva next month and to do so more forcefully than the Clinton administration, which he said failed to lobby other countries effectively. China's human rights record has come under increasing international scrutiny recently. An International Olympics Committee delegation arrives in Beijing next week to evaluate the city's application to host the 2008 Summer Games; it was criticism of China's rights record that helped sink its bid for the 2000 Games. In addition, human rights groups are drawing attention to the trial of a computer engineer and entrepreneur that begins Tuesday in the western city of Chengdu. Huang Qi was charged with subversion last year after articles about the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy demonstrations appeared on his Web site. Police allegedly beat him on Sept. 25, knocking out a tooth and leaving a scar on his forehead. China is also under fire for its crackdown on the Falun Gong spiritual group, which it considers an "[Chinese government's slanderous word]" and has banned. Since the sect was outlawed 18 months ago, as many as 120 Falun Gong members have died in police stations, labor camps and mental hospitals, many of them tortured to death, according to human rights groups. Amnesty International said it was not able to verify all the reports of abuse of Falun Gong adherents, but that it is "extremely concerned at the inadequate, contradictory response of the authorities to mounting credible evidence." The report said the crackdown on Falun Gong fit a pattern in which the Communist Party creates the conditions for torture to occur by launching high-profile campaigns, demanding quick results from local officials and then looking the other way. For example, the report said, officials have been urged to use "every means possible" against alleged separatists in western Xinjiang province, where a majority of the population is ethnic Uighur and Muslim. The report quoted an unidentified former court official in Xinjiang as saying that 90 percent of defendants there tell judges that they confessed after being tortured but that the judges ignore such allegations. In one case, a man named Zulikar Memet denied charges he had taken part in separatist activity and showed the court that his fingernails had been pulled out. He was executed on June 14, the report said. Goering said Amnesty International concluded that torture in China was expanding by comparing the reports it receives with those received in previous years, taking into account the improved flow of information from China.