Routine torture of prisoners

The use of torture to extract confessions is routine in China's penal system. Furthermore, torture does not appear to result from random police brutality, miscarriage of justice, or anomalies in the application of the law, but is inherent in the system. An Amnesty International Report released in 1987 concluded: "We believe the law enforcement system and the justice system in China actually fosters torture." China signed the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment in 1988, but nothing has changed since then.

Methods of torture consist of solitary confinement in windowless cells too small to stand up in, kneeling on glass shards, electrocution with high-voltage currents, and some cultural revolution favorites like the "airplane" where one's arms are forced backwards-and-up till the shoulders pop from their sockets; and also being strung up by the wrist or thumbs for days. Older traditional methods like the bamboo splint under the fingernail, and extraction of fingernails, have made their reappearance according to the Amnesty report. Beatings with clubs and truncheons are regular and since security personnel have been trained in Chinese martial arts (wushu), they are knowledgeable as to pressure and pain points in the body.

An article in THE BOSTON GLOBE, May 10, 2001, mentions the death under torture of Zhou Jianxiong, a 30-year-old agricultural worker from Chunhua township in Hunan province, on 15 May 1998. He was tortured by officials from the township birth control office to make him reveal the whereabouts of his wife, suspected of being pregnant without permission. Zhou was hung upside down, repeatedly whipped and beaten with wooden clubs, burned with cigarette butts, branded with soldering irons, and had his genitals ripped off.

For women in particular, especially in the case of nuns in Tibet, torture routinely includes rape by security personnel. Furthermore, use of electric-batons on women's genitalia has been frequently reported from prisons in Tibet. Tibetan children, some as young as nine years old, have been detained and tortured by Chinese security personnel, according to a report entitled A GENERATION IN PERIL: THE LIVES OF TIBETAN CHILDREN UNDER CHINESE RULE, released in March 2001, by the International Committee of Lawyers for Tibet. The report documents for the first time the routine practice of torturing even children arrested for "political" offenses.  The report also states that children are detained in deplorable conditions, often without notice to their families, and held for months or even years without a trial or access to a lawyer.

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