China holds hundreds of thousands of its own officials in solitary, incommunicado detention each year, depriving them of legal representation in a practice known as “liuzhi,” according to overseas-based rights groups.
The liuzhi system, which means “retention in custody,” is run by the ruling Communist Party’s disciplinary arm, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, or CCDI.
It allows party investigators to “forcefully disappear, arbitrarily detain and torture individuals for up to six months,” the Spain-based rights group Safeguard Defenders said in a March 3 report.
“All without any judicial oversight or appeal mechanism, the system is specifically designed to force confessions from the victims,” it said.
Who can be detained in this way?
The liuzhi system is part of the Communist Party’s internal investigation system.
That means that anyone working in state or party organizations, from school administrators and hospital managers to executives at state-owned enterprises, can be disappeared in this way.
Even private business owners with close ties to government officials have been netted by the liuzhi system, according to a CNN investigation.
Disappeared former Foreign Minister Qin Gang is a possible victim of the liuzhi system, although the government has made nothing public about his sacking.
And Beijing has yet to shed any light on the fate of disappeared former Defense Minister Li Shangfu, despite a storm of media and social media speculation, since firing him from his post as defense minister on Oct. 24, 2023 with no explanation given.
Qin, 57, has been absent from public view since he met with the foreign ministers of Sri Lanka and Vietnam, and with the Russian deputy foreign minister in Beijing on June 25, 2023.
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Is liuzhi a new kind of detention?
According to Chinese Human Rights Defenders, or CHRD, the liuzhi system isn’t new, but has expanded in scale and scope under President Xi Jinping.
Some 200,000 people are believed to have been held under the system since 2018, when it replaced the “shuangliu” investigation system, according to compilations of official figures.
The liuzhi system was among reforms brought in since Xi took power, and “rapidly started moving the country even further away from the most basic human rights standards,” Safeguard Defenders said in its report this week.
First authorized under the 2018 National Supervision Law, the liuzhi system allows party investigators to forcefully disappear any person of interest for up to six months, under mandatory solitary confinement, it said.
“The vast majority of victims are kept from any type of communication with the outside world and their family members are not informed of their whereabouts (or even the retention itself),” it said, adding that people can be held anywhere from custom-built facilities to government-run hotels, guesthouses or offices.
And the system operates wholly outside the the criminal justice system, there is no way to appeal or exercise oversight, the report said.
Why are rights groups highlighting this now?
The number of people in liuzhi keeps rising every year, with the number of detainees rising from 26,000 in 2023 to 38,000 in 2024, an increase of 46%, CHRD said, describing it as “the harshest form of investigation.”
“All are victims of the CCDI’s systematic and widespread use of arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances and torture (due to the prolonged use of solitary confinement),” the group said.
CHRD said the sheer scale of arbitrary detention in China could amount to a “crime against humanity.”
“These patterns echo a concern set out since 2017 by the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention: that the scope and scale of wrongful detention by Chinese authorities may constitute crimes against humanity,” the Chinese Human Rights Defenders network said in a statement launching the report on Wednesday.
It called for independent, international investigations into the Chinese government’s use of arbitrary detention as possible crimes against humanity.
Translated with additional reporting by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.