“Torture and suffering take many forms. The stories in this book will help you understand that.” – Michael Kovrig
Safeguard Defenders is pleased to announce the publication of the third edition of The People’s Republic of the Disappeared. This important and timely collection of first-person testimonies exposes the inhumanity of China’s secret jails, known as Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location (RSDL). RSDL is a long-established system the Communist Party of China (CCP) uses to torture prisoners into confessing to crimes imagined by the state.
The book is being released as hardcover, paperback and kindle book, and will also be available for bookstores to order via Ingram’s catalogue. Ask your local bookstore if not stocked. For ease, you can order all three editions via Amazon worldwide.
This latest edition is updated with the stories of foreigners disappeared into RSDL—Australian journalist Cheng Lei, Japanese former university lecturer Hideji Suzuki, Taiwanese human rights activist Lee Ming-che and with a foreword penned by Canadian former diplomat Michael Kovrig. We hope their words will remind readers that China is a country without rule of law and that a foreign passport is no protection.
Alongside their harrowing accounts are testimonies of Chinese RSDL prisoners, where the use of physical torture as well as psychological torture is part of their reality.
The book is available in multiple formats from Amazon worldwide. All money made from sales goes straight into our human rights work, including helping victims of RSDL. We offer the Chinese translation of this volume as a free PDF because activists inside China have told us they find it helpful to consult in preparation for the event they too are kidnapped by security forces.
What is RSDL?
Safeguard Defenders has spent years researching RSDL.
As well as multiple editions of The People’s Republic of the Disappeared, we have also published a graphical explanation of the horrors of the RSDL cell (Locked Up), scoured official data to figure out the growing scale of RSDL use, interviewed more than a dozen former prisoners about their harrowing experiences, made submissions to the UN’s Convention Against Torture urging for RSDL’s repeal, interviewed lawyers on the legal implications of changes in law or regulations and continuously monitored and reported on stories of death in RSDL that appear in Chinese media.
This is RSDL:
RSDL is a form of secret detention where suspects are held in incommunicado detention for months without access to a lawyer, contact with their family, and with little to no prosecutor oversight, before formal arrest is made.
RSDL is so secretive that the disappeared are transported to the facility blindfolded or with a black bag placed over their heads.
The prisoner in RSDL is watched 24 hours a day by two or more guards. They are watched when they are sleeping and they are watched when they are awake. They are watched even when they are on the toilet, denying the prisoner the last vestiges of human dignity.
The RSDL cell is usually cut off from sunlight for the entire six months.
In RSDL, interrogations can happen at any time, day or night, and last for hours at a time.
At its heart, RSDL is a form of state-sanctioned disappearance.
Mental torture
The stories in this book document the immense psychological as well as physical torture that the CCP inflicts on people in RSDL.
Cheng Lei writes: “I couldn’t sleep. My hair fell out in bunches. I was sore from the endless sitting. I cried many times a day from missing my kids. I was anxious, frightened, lonely, humiliated, intimidated and almost going crazy from boredom.”
In the Foreword to this third edition, Michael Kovrig describes the isolation and mental torment of his RSDL—so intense it can drive prisoners to contemplate suicide. RSDL facility cells are usually suicide-proofed because of this very reason.
“Your captive body becomes an instrument through which the state security organs control your mind. Alone, powerless, humiliated and denied your intrinsic dignity, you begin to doubt your own humanity. The cells are padded because at some point nearly everyone’s mind begins to break down. The pain is too much to bear and you can see no end to it. Death would offer a yearned-for release, but even that choice is taken from you. With no way to die, you can only endure.”
Lee Ming-che often heard the sounds of gunfire in the early morning. It made him believe he was going to be executed.
“I was in a state of mental confusion, unable to distinguish whether I was thinking or dreaming. Combined with the physical weakness from my disrupted circadian rhythm, I was on the verge of a mental breakdown.”
Hideji Suzuki cried when his guard gave him a glimpse of sunlight through a window. It was the only time he saw the sky in his eight months of RSDL (the legal maximum is six).
Understanding leads to change
To dismantle this abusive system of repression, greater understanding is necessary and that is precisely why this book is being published now. It is a vital contribution not only to our understanding of China’s assault on human rights but also to our broader understanding of authoritarian politics and state violence.
To those who were brave enough to speak out in these pages, we are truly thankful. Because it is only in speaking out that we can ever effect change.
Chinese women’s activist Li Qiaochu writes in her chapter:
“Even if the price of speaking out is losing my freedom again, I do not regret writing about my experiences, because I know that the moment I summoned the courage to tell the truth, those feelings of humiliation and fear the secret police tried to instil in me just disintegrated. If we cannot speak courageously, we cannot act freely. We must speak directly and not shy away from the difficulties. We must talk about the details, our traumas and our weaknesses. The things we avoid mentioning and keep hidden are precisely the truths they fear we might bring out into the open.”
Safeguard Defenders is a human rights NGO working across Asia, mainly in China and Vietnam, and is a registered foundation in Spain.
This announcement first appeared on Safeguard Defenders.
Published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
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Except where noted otherwise, original writing and translations produced by the Left Renewal Blog Collective are published under a Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–ShareAlike 4.0 licence. Republished and translated material remains subject to the licence and terms of its original publication.