In one of those stories one doesn't hear too often coming from the hermetic People's Republic of China, the 20-year-old student spoke softly but firmly as she described how a dispute over grades led to her rape at an unofficial jail.
She had been expelled from college because of poor exam scores, so she went to the capital city to petition the Chinese government to reinstate her. Thousands of Chinese travel to Beijing every year to air complaints ignored by local authorities, ranging from real estate scams to wrongful death cases.
But shortly after the student arrived, she was picked up by police. She was delivered to a run-down hotel and dumped in a locked room filled with other detainees. There, she said, an opportunistic guard raped her.
The student's case has put a spotlight on China's "black jails," where rights groups say growing numbers of people seeking justice from the government end up. Rights groups say these petitioners are routinely chased by provincial officials or thugs-for-hire who round them up before they can reach the central government. The officials fear the complaints may cost them a promotion or a job, or trigger investigations.
Hong Kong-based advocacy group Chinese Human Rights Defenders has documented more than a dozen black jails in Beijing, where hundreds of people are routinely held against their will, said researcher Wang Songlian. Many, like the large storeroom where the student was detained, are in shabby hotels. Another well-known one is in an abandoned factory.
"Some are fitted with bars," Ms. Wang said. "Often the conditions are very poor ... there is no limit to how long you could be held. You could also be mistreated, not fed, not able to see a doctor. You could be beaten, we have recorded cases of that."
The black jails mushroomed in the capital ahead of the 2008 Olympics last year because local officials were particularly anxious about petitioners using the high-profile event to publicize their grievances, said Ms. Wang. It has continued and apparently expanded since then, she said, amid pressure from Beijing on provinces to handle grievances themselves.
The various black jails tend to hold petitioners from specific areas of the country. While the central government does not have a direct role in managing them, it has not cracked down either, despite evidence of collusion between law enforcers and the people who run the jails.
The government denies they even exist.
Song Hansong, a representative from China's highest prosecutor's office, told the U.N. Human Rights Council earlier this year there was "no such things as black jails in our country."
Much more so than in the west, in Chinese communist society failure leads to certain and immediate indoctrination from people who are encouraged to endeavour to persevere. Yes, endeavour to percevere.
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