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Petitioners Expose Abusive Conditions in Shandong "Education" Facility

February 01, 2007

Human Rights in China (HRIC) has learned that officials in Yantai City, Shandong Province have been carrying out a harsh crackdown against petitioners. Former detainees of a local petitioner education center have told HRIC of verbal, physical and mental abuse and coercive psychiatric treatment, and say this facility is just one of hundreds used throughout China to detain people attempting to exercise their right to petition the government.

Sources in China told HRIC that in 1995, Yantai City established a "petitioner education center" in Shihuiyao Township, Zhifu District, run by the city's Letters and Petitions Office. The current supervisor of the center is Gao Shihai. Sources say that more than a thousand individual "education" sessions have been undertaken at the center since it was established. According to a petitioner who has been detained in the center, 17 other cities in Shandong Province have operated similar facilities, but petitioners are still routinely detained only in the cities of Jinan, Yantai, Qingdao and Rizhao.

According to a former detainee, the Zhifu District facility consists of a row of two-story buildings equipped with iron doors and patrolled by watch dogs. Typically, one to four petitioners are held in each locked room, but in the course of crackdowns during politically sensitive periods, more than 10 people may be held in each room, or a total of more than 100 people in the entire facility. Sources say the buildings are not heated in the winter or cooled in the summer, and poor ventilation results in unacceptable air quality. Detainees are not provided with regular exercise sessions, and lights are kept on all night. Detainees reportedly receive only two meager meals a day, and even these rations are sometimes arbitrarily withheld. Detainees are reportedly also subjected to regular physical and verbal abuse by education center personnel.

Sources provided HRIC with the names of more than 20 individuals who have been detained in the education center in recent years. They include current detainees Yang Keliang and Jiang Shaogui, aged 75 and 83 respectively, and a dozen other individuals who were held for months at a time and only released when they attempted suicide. Detainees also include Yu Xianshan, who was reportedly kicked so savagely by education center guards that he has become incontinent as a result; and Jing Meizhi, whom guards reportedly locked in a room with a guard dog that bit her repeatedly. Jing Meizhi was subsequently committed to a psychiatric hospital against her will and forced to receive treatment for more than five months, and sources told HRIC of at least five other petitioners who were also forcibly admitted to psychiatric hospitals. When another petitioner, Sun Cuijuan, was detained in the education center in 2003, sources say, her six-year-old daughter was detained along with her.

Local authorities have not been criticized for the abusive conditions at the education center; rather, sources say, state and provincial officials have praised the effectiveness of the center's methods and have recommended that the facility be replicated throughout China. According to HRIC's sources, many such petitioner education centers are currently being operated in China. Another facility in Yunxi County, Shiyan City, Hubei Province was recently exposed in the Chinese media for incarcerating a seven-year-old girl, Zheng Linxin, along with her petitioner mother.

HRIC deplores the unlawful and abusive treatment of petitioners in the "education" facility. In recent years, local officials throughout China have expended massive resources in monitoring and detaining petitioners, and even in following them to Beijing and forcibly escorting them home when they attempt to petition the central government. The central authorities have openly acknowledged that the vast majority of petitioners have legitimate grievances, and that they are entitled by law to report injustice and official abuse. In advance of its review by the United Nations Committee Against Torture in May 2008, HRIC urges the central government to launch official inquiries into the "education" facilities in Yantai, Shiyan and other places in China and put an end to the abusive practices employed against petitioners detained there.