HONG KONG - Prisoner Li Qiaoming's death was the first in Chinese penal history
ever attributed to a game of hide-and-seek. Given the public protests it
sparked and the official calls for prison reform prompted by those protests, it
will hopefully be the last.
The death of 24-year-old Li last month in southwestern Yunnan province was just
one of the countless fatalities that occur every year behind the security cloak
of China's notorious prison network, but the official explanation in Li's case
was so outlandish that it attracted the notice of China's growing and
increasingly assertive band of netizens, who cried foul.
According to police authorities in Jinning county, where Li had been
incarcerated on the charge of illegal logging, the Yuxi farmer
died from head injuries sustained when, blindfolded, he ran into a prison wall
on February 8 while playing a game called "eluding the cat", a Chinese version
of hide-and-seek. Li was hospitalized for his injuries but died four days
later.
Li's father, Li Defa, who viewed his son's corpse, told local media that his
head was swollen and his body "covered with purple abrasions" that were not
consistent with the police report. Netizens were outraged and even mainstream
media called for an independent investigation.
To appease rising public ire, Yunnan officials invited a panel of 15 netizens
and journalists to inspect the detention center in which Li had been fatally
injured. But when the panel's visit turned into a sham that produced no
evidence to contradict the police report, outrage only heightened.
Meanwhile, officials in Yunnan's capital of Kunming, sensing the public mood,
launched their own investigation into Li's death, ultimately concluding that
the prisoner had been killed by three cellmates who, after beating him,
fabricated the hide-and-seek story. This conclusion, of course, may also be
false. But public anger was assuaged by the identification of the alleged
culprits, as well as by the promise that officials at the detention center in
which Li was housed will be punished for their negligence and that so-called
"jail bullies" - inmates appointed by wardens as often violent enforcers of
prison rules - will no longer be tolerated.
The Li case made prison reform one of the hot topics discussed during the
annual meeting of the National People's Congress (NPC) earlier this month in
Beijing.
Presenting his agency's work report to the NPC, procurator general Cao Jianming
promised to improve oversight of courts and prisons to prevent bullying,
torture, unjustified detentions and other abuses of human rights.
Former vice minister of justice Duan Zhengkun also made a pointed critique of
the country's prison system, calling for the administration of prisons to be
taken away from the Ministry of Public Security.
"Detention houses should not be managed by public security departments," Duan
was quoted in the China Daily as saying, "because they make the arrests and
sometimes torture the accused to force them to confess."
Sometimes stating the obvious, as Duan has done, is the greatest contribution
that can be made to a debate. Clearly, China's criminal justice system will not
rid itself of intimidation, bullying and outright torture until some checks and
balances have been put in place. With security forces currently empowered to
arrest, interrogate and imprison - as well as to investigate any alleged abuses
that may occur during this multi-faceted process - there should be little
wonder that the system has failed to protect the rights of the accused.
Lack of confidence in the criminal justice system was embarrassingly apparent
when the work reports for the Supreme Court and the Supreme People's
Procuratorate were delivered to the NPC. In what is usually a rubber-stamp
parliament, more than 500 of the 2,898 delegates voted not to accept the two
reports, and nearly 200 more abstained from voting.
Those dissenting delegates were no doubt thinking about the public outrage
provoked by Li's death in Yunnan. But a number of other cases have also come to
light in the wake of the NPC meeting.
Hu Fenqiang, a suspect in a number of robberies and assaults dating back to
2007, was declared dead on March 12 after collapsing in a detention center in
the city of Xiangtan in south-central Hunan province, according to the official
Xinhua News Agency. The agency reported that police officers who interrogated
Hu had been suspended from duty while an investigation into the prisoner's
death continued. Xiangtan city officials have promised a speedy, thorough and
fair investigation.
In another case, suspected murderer Xu Gengrong, 19, reportedly died on March 8
at a Danfeng county detention center in northwestern Shaanxi province. Xu's
death raised public alarm after friends and relatives accused police of
torture.
The Beijing News reported that Xu had confessed to the murder of a schoolgirl a
week before he died, but there were telltale signs that the confession was
forced. A relative present at Xu's autopsy told the paper that his naval cavity
was full of blood, his head covered with bruises and his brain swollen with
fluid.
Xu's relatives led a protest at the entrance to the county government office,
and investigators have since charged two police officers with "dereliction of
duty" in the case.
Reports of Xu's death surfaced after news that another prisoner in a detention
center in southern Hainan province had been beaten to death by fellow inmates
because he refused to remove his clothes before taking a shower. The head and
deputy head of the center, located in the city of Danzhou, have been detained,
as has a police officer who allegedly witnessed the beating but did nothing to
stop it.
Again in Hunan, two inmates in juvenile detention centers - Xia Haixing, 18,
and Qiu Xialong, 17 - also died under suspicious circumstances this month. And,
again, it was family members, posting photographs of their bodies online, who
rallied the public to their cause.
Horrible as these cases appear, they represent only the tip of the iceberg in a
system that is designed to deny basic human rights and to snuff out life itself
in the interest of the state. But the fact that they have come so prominently
to light is a promising development. It was only last November that a United
Nations panel accused China of "routine and widespread use of torture" on
suspects in police custody, in answer to which Beijing promptly denounced the
panel members as prejudiced and the report as "untrue and unprofessional".
But now, thanks to reports started by Chinese netizens and then picked up by
mainstream media, these recent cases have sparked a debate that could result in
meaningful reform.
That reform, however, must go beyond the procuratorate's promise to increase
monitoring and inspections at prisons and detention centers. As Duan and a
number of academics have suggested, the management of China's prisons must be
taken out of the hands of the police and turned over to another authority, such
as the Ministry of Justice.
Without this check on police power, the horror stories behind the bars of
Chinese prisons will continue.
Kent Ewing is a Hong Kong-based teacher and writer. He can be reached at
kewing@hkis.edu.hk.
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