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The People's Republic of the Disappeared: Stories from inside China's system for enforced disappearances
"You are now under residential surveillance at a designated location. Your only right is to obey."
With these words, Chinese lawyer Xie Yang was introduced to the brutality of Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location (RSDL), China's rapidly expanding system for enforced disappearances. Little is known of RSDL, or what happens inside.
The People's Republic of the Disappeared will change that. RSDL facilities, often secret, custom-built and unmarked prisons, are run by police or State Security officials. Inside, people are placed outside the normal legal system, left in solitary confinement, interrogated repeatedly, and often subjected to torture. There is no oversight of the police, and no protection for those inside. In RSDL, you simply vanish. In RSDL, the police have total control.
This book exposes what it is like to be disappeared in China. It is the first anthology written by the victims themselves, from lawyer Wang Yu who was abducted in the middle of the night to engineer Tang Zhishun who was taken from across the border in Burma; from IT worker Jiang Xiaoyu who was beaten and threatened with permanent disappearance to Pan Jinling whose only crime was dating an NGO worker.
The People's Republic of the Disappeared includes a foreword by well-known exiled human rights lawyer Teng Biao. The foreword and introduction provide the reader with an understanding of RSDL. The legal chapter at the end offers an exhaustive, authoritative analysis of the domestic law giving rise to RSDL, and the international legal framework that China brazenly violates. These chapters, along with stories by lawyers Tang Jitian and Liu Shihui trace China's obsession with disappearing dissidents from the early 2000s, through to the Jasmine Revolution movement in China in 2011, and into the current system of RSDL.
This book is essential reading for academics and journalists, governments and nonprofit workers alike working on or interested in China, because these stories illustrate, with narrative clarity, the hollowness of China's rhetoric of the rule of law. Likewise, it is worthwhile reading for anyone studying authoritarian regimes and the struggle for human rights.
(From Amazon)
With these words, Chinese lawyer Xie Yang was introduced to the brutality of Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location (RSDL), China's rapidly expanding system for enforced disappearances. Little is known of RSDL, or what happens inside.
The People's Republic of the Disappeared will change that. RSDL facilities, often secret, custom-built and unmarked prisons, are run by police or State Security officials. Inside, people are placed outside the normal legal system, left in solitary confinement, interrogated repeatedly, and often subjected to torture. There is no oversight of the police, and no protection for those inside. In RSDL, you simply vanish. In RSDL, the police have total control.
This book exposes what it is like to be disappeared in China. It is the first anthology written by the victims themselves, from lawyer Wang Yu who was abducted in the middle of the night to engineer Tang Zhishun who was taken from across the border in Burma; from IT worker Jiang Xiaoyu who was beaten and threatened with permanent disappearance to Pan Jinling whose only crime was dating an NGO worker.
The People's Republic of the Disappeared includes a foreword by well-known exiled human rights lawyer Teng Biao. The foreword and introduction provide the reader with an understanding of RSDL. The legal chapter at the end offers an exhaustive, authoritative analysis of the domestic law giving rise to RSDL, and the international legal framework that China brazenly violates. These chapters, along with stories by lawyers Tang Jitian and Liu Shihui trace China's obsession with disappearing dissidents from the early 2000s, through to the Jasmine Revolution movement in China in 2011, and into the current system of RSDL.
This book is essential reading for academics and journalists, governments and nonprofit workers alike working on or interested in China, because these stories illustrate, with narrative clarity, the hollowness of China's rhetoric of the rule of law. Likewise, it is worthwhile reading for anyone studying authoritarian regimes and the struggle for human rights.
(From Amazon)
- GenresChinaPoliticsNonfiction
228 pages, Paperback
Published November 10, 2017
18 people are currently reading
153 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 21, 2021
This collection of stories, one by one, hammers home the reality about the horrible, disgraceful, yet effective mechanisms and techniques that the ruling caste of China use in order to enforce its iron grip of authoritarian power over one fifth of earth's population. In this system, the ruling elites paranoia and fear of the people at large means that they must create an even greater reciprocal fear in the people. Still there are those of unusual moral fibre who dare to insist on justice and basic human rights while risking brutal persecution; human rights lawyers, intellectuals and educators.
The book, by a dozen or so very consistent examples, reveals the brutal, ugly, paranoid, yet effective way in which the regime in practice goes about soiling its hands to not feel its power subverted. The security police simply spirit away the perceived troublemakers; disappear them blind folded, without letting anyone else knowing whereto either. They are swallowed up by the earth and brought to hell. Through extreme sleep deprivation, torture chairs, humiliation, round the clock surveillance, isolation, uncertainty, threats towards family, even the strongest cave in sooner or later and "confess" their alleged crimes and talk about others to whom the same experience awaits.
China is not Soviet or North Korea, through its own peculiar style of capitalism, and one fifth of earh's population, it has become the second largest economy in the world. The Chinese Communist Partys supreme, undivided, gargantuan power should be a concern for everyone on this planet. If most of the planet got under the heel of this kind of orwellian, high-tech authoritarian rule, would it ever be possible to regain basic human rights and dignity? How many of us would have the courage to stand up for what is right, if the rulers feel that what is right is, in whatever far fetched, round about way, a threat to their power? Very few. However, most of us can and should be vigilant, informed and speak up about these most important of matters while we're still free. The future freedom and dignity of humanity depends on enough people, especially in the free world, doing this work.
The book, by a dozen or so very consistent examples, reveals the brutal, ugly, paranoid, yet effective way in which the regime in practice goes about soiling its hands to not feel its power subverted. The security police simply spirit away the perceived troublemakers; disappear them blind folded, without letting anyone else knowing whereto either. They are swallowed up by the earth and brought to hell. Through extreme sleep deprivation, torture chairs, humiliation, round the clock surveillance, isolation, uncertainty, threats towards family, even the strongest cave in sooner or later and "confess" their alleged crimes and talk about others to whom the same experience awaits.
China is not Soviet or North Korea, through its own peculiar style of capitalism, and one fifth of earh's population, it has become the second largest economy in the world. The Chinese Communist Partys supreme, undivided, gargantuan power should be a concern for everyone on this planet. If most of the planet got under the heel of this kind of orwellian, high-tech authoritarian rule, would it ever be possible to regain basic human rights and dignity? How many of us would have the courage to stand up for what is right, if the rulers feel that what is right is, in whatever far fetched, round about way, a threat to their power? Very few. However, most of us can and should be vigilant, informed and speak up about these most important of matters while we're still free. The future freedom and dignity of humanity depends on enough people, especially in the free world, doing this work.
December 25, 2020
Made in China
March 15, 2024
Highly recommended to readers who want to learn more about how a nation violates the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews