A human rights activist, a secret prison and a tale from Xi Jinping's new China - Xi Jinping’s unforgiving offensive against civil society
Peter Dahlin spent 23 days in a ‘black
prison’ in Beijing, where he says he was deprived of sleep and questioned with
a ‘communication enhancement’ machine. Here he tells the story of his
incarceration and expulsion from the People’s Republic
In the four years since Xi
became China’s top leader in November 2012, feminist campaigners,
journalists, academics, bloggers, publishers, human rights lawyers & even
foreign non-governmental organisation workers such as Dahlin have all been
targeted in what experts suspect is a coordinated Communist party push to
prevent the development of organised opposition to the regime. The political
situation, which some call the
most dire since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, has
deteriorated so fast under the current leadership that one scholar claims Xi
has built “the
perfect dictatorship”
“They’ve kidnapped
people several times here before,” says the 36-year-old Swedish human rights
activist, chain-smoking Marlboro cigarettes as he remembers the 23 days he
spent in secret detention in China. It has been a year
since Dahlin became one of the first foreign victims of President
Xi Jinping’s war on dissent. On 3 January 2016 Chinese security agents
encircled the activist’s Beijing home and spirited him and his Chinese
girlfriend, Pan Jinling, off to a covert interrogation centre he now calls “The
Residence”.
Months have now passed
but the memories of that spell in custody have proved hard to shake. “These
facilities are built to break you,” the campaigner says during a seven-hour
interview at a home in Chiang Mai, a city in northern Thailand where he and Pan
have lived since he was deported from China amid one
of the most severe crackdowns in decades.
The story of Peter
Dahlin, told here in unprecedented detail, offers a rare and troubling snapshot
of Xi Jinping’s China, where an unforgiving offensive against civil society is
now unfolding. In the four years
since Xi
became China’s top leader in November 2012, feminist campaigners,
journalists, academics, bloggers, publishers, human rights lawyers and even
foreign non-governmental organisation workers such as Dahlin have all been
targeted in what experts suspect is a coordinated Communist party push to
prevent the development of organised opposition to the regime. The political
situation, which some call the
most dire since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, has
deteriorated so fast under the current leadership that one scholar claims Xi
has built “the
perfect dictatorship” – an ever-more repressive system that
nevertheless avoids major international censure.
During his stint
behind bars the Swedish activist says he was given a firsthand taste of the
harshness with which that battle for control is being waged. He claims he
was blindfolded and confined to a cell with expressionless guards who refused
to engage in conversation but noted down his every move; was for days deprived
of access to his embassy, the right to exercise or even to sunlight; was forced
to endure exhausting late-night interrogation sessions conducted by hectoring
inquisitors determined to paint him as a spy; subjected to a lie-detection
machine intended to extract information about his work; and suffered periods of
sleep deprivation that he believes were intended to weaken his resolve.
Dahlin, who until his
detention had run a Beijing-based rights organisation called the Chinese Urgent
Action Working Group or China Action, said during the seven years he lived and
worked as an activist in China friends and diplomats had always considered him
an optimist about the country’s future. Those illusions have been shattered by
the things he witnessed in the lead-up to his incarceration at The Residence. “For
the first time I am not optimistic any more,” he says. “This is how China will
operate for the next 20 years. Now it’s a new hard line.”
The underground
activist
Peter Dahlin arrived
in China from his native Sweden in
the summer of 2004, a 23-year-old political science graduate keen for a taste
of the world outside a lecture theatre. “I was just there to backpack and
learn,” recalls Dahlin, whose travels took him through Beijing, Shanghai and
Xiamen, the south-eastern port where Xi served as vice-mayor in the 1980s. Three
years later he returned, throwing himself into human rights work alongside Hou
Wenzhou, a Chinese activist he had met online.
Dahlin’s first project
was a report denouncing the existence of an illegal nationwide network of
secret detention facilities called “black jails”. It identified eight such
prisons in Beijing. About the same time Dahlin met Wang
Quanzhang, a crusading civil rights lawyer known for his defence of China’s
downtrodden and outspoken criticism of the government. Together, in 2009, they
founded China Action, a
non-profit advocacy group dedicated to supporting human rights defenders in the
one-party state. Increasingly
draconian laws make it effectively impossible for such
non-governmental rights organisations to operate legally in mainland China.
Instead the pair registered their group as a company in Hong Kong and decided
they would strive to operate in the shadows so as to avoid attracting
attention.
“I decided we had a
shot at doing something quite special,” Dahlin says of the group’s creation.
The Swedish activist says he was partly driven by “middle-class guilt” but also
a conviction that people should be the masters of their own destinies. “I’ve never been particularly political,” he
says. “I’ve never paid attention to Tibet and these issues very much. “I just
believe in the idea of self-determination.
“Whether it is
Scottish people, the Catalan people, the Tibetan people or even just a village
somewhere in China; that the people there should be the ones that have an
influence, whether it is by forming an organisation, a labour union, their own
media, whatever.” Guided by those
beliefs, Dahlin set about building China Action into a small but potent force
for social change… read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/03/human-rights-activist-peter-dahlin-secret-black-prison-xi-jinpings-new-chinasee also
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