ON DECEMBER 19th relatives of Xing Yanjun gathered in Beijing to mourn the businessman’s death eight months earlier, allegedly by hanging himself while in police custody. At the event a document was read out. It was a statement by the police that Xing’s case had been closed “in the absence of criminal facts”. The outrage his death has caused, however, will take far longer to dissipate.
Even in coverage by China’s normally supine media, Xing’s treatment is cited as an example of abuses linked to a form of detention that has become increasingly common during the rule of Xi Jinping. It often involves holding people incommunicado for weeks on end in brutal conditions without charge. “Residential surveillance at a designated location” (RSDL), as the system is called, is used by police to extract confessions when evidence is flimsy, and to terrorise dissidents. In a country where people rarely dare to criticise human-rights violations by officials, RSDL has generated unusually outspoken debate.
It sprang from a legal provision of 1996 that allowed the police to keep suspects at a “designated” location in cases where they would normally be placed under house arrest but had no fixed abode. It was supposed to be less restrictive than being kept in jail. But police began taking advantage of this to keep any kind of suspect anywhere they wanted. A revision to the law in 2012 specified that designated locations could also be used in cases involving threats to national security, terrorism and serious corruption. The police took that as a green light to make the practice more regular, and to build special facilities.
After Mr Xi took power in 2012, use of it mushroomed. The Supreme People’s Procuratorate, a body responsible for prosecuting crimes and supervising implementation of the law, has called out abuses. Last year it noted the use of torture, including starvation and sleep deprivation, in 2019 during RSDL in Jiangsu province.
But despite persistent calls from Chinese legal scholars for the system to be scrapped or curtailed, Mr Xi’s sweeping campaigns against corruption and dissent have turbocharged its growth. In 2018 the Communist Party launched a parallel secretive system called liuzhi (retention in custody) for use in cases involving not only party members—who had always been subject to extra-legal forms of detention—but anyone in public service, including academics and hospital staff. RSDL and liuzhi can be used for up to six months.
Safeguard Defenders, an NGO based in Spain, says cases it has analysed show that fewer than 500 people were held under RSDL in 2013. In 2019 the number was over 6,000. According to research by a postgraduate student at Hunan University of Arts and Science, instances of RSDL doubled in the following year as police turned to it as a way of preventing the spread of covid-19 in jails. Last year a UN working group said the actual number of RSDL detentions could be more than three times higher than the number officially acknowledged. It called the use of RSDL or liuzhi “tantamount to an enforced disappearance”. Safeguard Defenders has published a “conservative estimate” that 64,900 people were subjected to RSDL and 78,000 to liuzhi between 2013 and mid-2023.
Even before the legal revision in 2012, targets of RSDL included those who dared to challenge the party. One was Ai Weiwei, a dissident artist who was detained in Beijing for 81 days in 2011. He later put on exhibitions abroad featuring large dioramas of his padded cell, with two guards standing over him round the clock, even in the lavatory (pictured). Such confinement, often with no cellmates and no access to a lawyer, is typical of both systems.
Angling for entrepreneurs
RSDL is sometimes used in connection with another widely resented form of police behaviour, commonly known as “deep-sea fishing”. It involves sending police from one jurisdiction to another to arrest someone, usually a businessman, in the hope that a spell of RSDL will prompt the target to confess to a financial crime. The aim is to use resulting fines and asset seizures to fill the jurisdiction’s coffers. This has become more common as local governments struggle with enormous debt.
Xing, the businessman in Beijing, was a deep-sea catch. In November 2023 he was seized in the capital by police from Inner Mongolia who took him back to that province, accusing him of running a gambling website. The local authorities refused to approve his formal arrest, however, so the police confined him under RSDL. His death last April prompted yet more calls for the system’s abolition. “RSDL: When will the tragedy end?” said a headline in a state-run newspaper. Many legal experts hope the answer is in the next round of revisions to the Criminal Procedure Law. But that may not happen before 2028—and the government is making no promises. ■
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