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A deleted article detailing the torture and death of a young man in police custody in China's northwestern region of Xinjiang offered a picture of the methods typically used by police during interrogations, a former police officer and a rights lawyer told Radio Free Asia in recent interviews.
In 2018, police officers in Xinjiang's Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture detained Sun Renze, the 30-year-old son of a police officer who died on active duty, on suspicion of "picking quarrels and stirring up trouble," according to the Jan. 14 article on the news website Caixin, which cited court documents from a November 2023 trial of eight police officers in connection with Sun's treatment.
On the early morning of Sept. 27, 2018, Sun Renze fell into a coma after being interrogated and tortured for seven hours straight by officers in Ili's Kuitun city, Caixin reported, detailing a litany of torture methods including the being forced to carry an iron chair, electric shocks, mustard, hanging heavy objects from the victim's genitals and waterboarding.
While the article, which focused on the Nov. 6, 2023, trial of eight of the officers involved, was deleted within minutes of appearing on the Caixin website, copies were still available on overseas websites, including China Digital Times.
While it has been increasingly targeted for deletion and censorship under Xi Jinping's nationwide crackdown on public speech, Caixin nonetheless once made a name for itself as a cutting-edge media organization that published a number of hard-hitting reports on the suppression of press freedom and purges at the Guangzhou-based Southern media group in 2012 and early 2013.
Sun, who is Han Chinese, was taken to the ICU and transferred between "multiple hospitals" after losing consciousness, eventually dying at the age of 30 on Nov. 9, 2018, Caixin reported.
The Kuitun Municipal People's Court found eight Ili police officers, including two named as Wu Xuemin and Liu Xianyong, guilty of "intentional injury," and sentenced them to jail terms ranging from three to 13 years, it said.
‘Murderers!’
Sun's mother and police widow Ren Tingting was present at the trial, crying on a number of occasions during proceedings, and standing up and shouting at the officers: "Murderers! I will never forgive you!" at one point, the report said.
The article said Sun was initially held at the Qapqal Xibe Autonomous County Detention Center, then transferred to a basement room at the Ili traffic police headquarters because officers felt they had made little progress in extracting a confession.
According to the Caixin article, Sun was arrested during a region wide crackdown on criminal gangs, and police were hoping to extract a confession that was precisely worded, in connection with the death of a young woman, Deng Xuefei, who fell from a building during a visit by debt collectors including Sun several years earlier.
Sun was then taken to the "case-handling station" at Huocheng County police, where the officers were asked to take him away again because Sun's screams could be heard in the front-of-house offices.
Sun eventually wound up in the Huocheng County Detention Center, where the officers arranged for an interrogation room without surveillance cameras, the court heard.
The interrogations were so intense that even the officers were exhausted, and asked their bosses for a break on Sept. 26.
But they were told to intensify their efforts to "completely break Sun Renze’s spirit," Caixin reported.
Waterboarding, beatings
The court heard that the interrogation room was one used exclusively by state security police, and was equipped with two surveillance cameras. The detention center director ordered one of the members of staff, surnamed Chai, to shut down the cameras, but Chai kept one of them rolling for seven hours, for fear that the case would come back to bite him, the report said.
"The surveillance video showed that for more than seven hours between 4 p.m. and 11:30 p.m., Sun Renze was waterboarded, both directly and with a towel, more than ten times, with two of the sessions lasting more than 15 minutes at a stretch. He was also forced to carry an iron chair and dumbbells back and forth repeatedly for 40 minutes.
"In the video, when the interrogators were carrying out the waterboarding, we couldn't see Sun Renze's expression and reaction, but we saw the iron frame bed shaking violently for a long time, and we can imagine how much he was suffering," one witness told the court.
Sun's interrogators also slapped him in the face, beat his calves and heels with a white PVC pipe, and administered electric shocks with an old-fashioned telephone, while he was restrained on the bed.
While some of the police officers claimed that they wouldn't typically engage in such torture methods, a former police officer told Radio Free Asia that they were common in Chinese law enforcement.
"Some officers get emotionally involved in interrogations, and they will hit a bit harder," former Zhuzhou city cop Cheng Xiaofeng told RFA Mandarin.
"This kind of water torture can make it hard for suspects to breathe, and it can cause suffocation and death," he said. "It's a harsher method that they use in the north, but we typically don't use it in the south."
According to Cheng, officers are more likely to torture suspects when they are under pressure to crack a case from higher up.
"The higher-ups would say things like 'you have to crack this case in the next week', which would prompt the lower-ranking officers to rush their investigations and start using 'methods'," Cheng said. "This was quite common, and a primary cause [of torture]."
Guo Min, a former deputy director of a police station in Zhuzhou, Hunan, agreed that torture is commonplace in Chinese law enforcement.
"Actually, we would often use such methods when handling cases," Guo told RFA. "Using 'methods' is pretty common when suspects are uncooperative."
He said there has been more of an attempt to prevent the abuse and torture of suspects in run of the mill police work, but political cases had fewer restraints.
"The police are a bit more regulated while handling [regular] criminal cases, but in political cases, they stop at nothing," Guo said.
‘It happens in almost every case’
U.S.-based rights attorney Chen Jiangang, who once exposed the details of the torture of fellow rights lawyer and client Xie Yang, agreed.
"Based on my more than 10 years of experience in handling criminal cases, it is common for the public security to use illegal methods like torture, ill-treatment, beatings and intimidation when handling cases," Chen told RFA in a recent interview. "It happens in almost every case."
But in Chen's view, torture and ill-treatment aren't effective ways of getting a suspect to tell the truth, and will likely just generate miscarriages of justice.
He said it's extremely rare for a case such as the torture of Sun Renze to win any kind of public redress -- the vast majority have no consequences for the perpetrators.
"The law states that video cameras must be switched on during interrogations ... but obviously officers who torture won't be recording it," he said.
"Cases like [Sun's, in which perpetrators are brought to justice] only happen by accident, and the ratio is less than 1 in 10,000," he said. "It's the tip of the iceberg."
"Torture is huge [in China] -- it's a humanitarian disaster," Chen said.
Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.