A recent NPR story highlights China's covert system of "black jails": facilities located inside hotels or storefronts where local or provincial government officials imprison residents who attempt to file complaints of corruption or incompetence on the part of the local government with the national government. Although the existence of these jails is an open secret in China, their extralegal nature makes it particularly difficult--even by Chinese standards--to determine what transpires inside.

Jin Hanyan of Hubei Province traveled to Beijing to complain of corruption back home. According to NPR, "she accused her county's Communist Party secretary of corruption. For this, she says, she was sent to a 'study class' in an abandoned factory. Of course, she says, no studying actually went on in there.

'In the mornings, they'd yell to wake us up,' Jin says. '...If you didn't obey, they'd beat you to within an inch of your life and withhold medical treatment if you got sick. They said the county party secretary told them it was not illegal to beat us to death.'"  (Read more after the jump!)

 

After the interview, NPR reports that Ms. Jin was "forcibly detained" in an ankang, one of China's infamous psychiatric hospitals. Jin certainly seems to have given no sign of mental illness by Western standards, but by Chinese law, she was indeed unfit to live outside a psychiatric ward. According to police documents found throughout China and formalized in a 1990 police encyclopedia, people who must be committed to these facilities include "those commonly known as ‘political maniacs’ (zhengzhi fengzi), who shout reactionary slogans, write reactionary banners and reactionary letters, make anti-government speeches in public, and express opinions on important domestic and international affairs." (source: Dr. Robin Munro, italics my own) According to these criteria, this post alone would qualify me for admission to an ankang facility there. (I luckily do not live in the PRC.)

Elsewhere in his research linked to above, Dr. Munro proves that these ankang facilities, like their close relative the Laogai, intentionally emulated the Soviets' identical penal system. While starvation and exhaustion have traditionally been the CCP's favorite techniques to control Laogai prisoners, prisoners in ankang are controlled equally effectively by psychotropic drugs and torture. After the Soviet Union relaxed state control of public (and, to an extent, private) opinion, the government collapsed and its empire crumbled. In China, however, the existence of black jails and the continued use of ankang detainment for political prisoners, among many other disturbing trends, indicates that the CCP is becoming ever more regressively totalitarian as social media, pro-democracy movements, the Falun Gong struggle, the unpopular one-child policy, poisoned milk, ethnic minority revolts, and profound international distrust of the CCP (see here, here, here, and here) make Hu Jintao's "harmonious society" (hexie shehui) less and less possible.