The Chinese communist regime is expanding its use of a system that is tantamount to “mass state-sanctioned kidnapping,” to terrorize and silence people including foreigners, according to a recent report (pHuman Rightsdf) by human rights group Safeguard Defenders.
The secretive system, a legalized form of black jails, has been running since 2013 and has targeted a minimum of 27,208 victims as of June 1, the report (pdf) stated based on China’s publicly available court data. However, the report added that the actual number of victims could be over 56,900 based on its estimates.
Officially known as “Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location” (RSDL), the system is an extra-judicial measure that allows Chinese police to make people “disappear” without a court order.
“The whole RSDL system is disturbing in every aspect. From the way victims are black-hooded and kidnapped, taken to a secret location, and kept there incommunicado for 6 months, sometimes more, to be tortured and threatened,” Dinah Gardner, author of the report, told The Epoch Times in an email.
She added: “However, some victims have said that while the entire experience is intensely traumatic, the single most terrible part of RSDL was when police threatened their family and other loved ones.”
The system is run by police officers from China’s ministries of public security and state security, and they have “the powers to act with virtually no oversight,” including to arbitrarily detain, torture, and coerce confessions from their victims, according to the report.
RSDL
The report collected accounts from people who had been subjected to RSDL to put together an in-depth insight into how the system works. Among the former victims were Peter Dahlin, director of the Madrid-based nonprofit, several Chinese human rights lawyers including Wang Yu, and American professional basketball player Jeff Harper.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) also subjects individuals to the system as part of its “hostage diplomacy” according to the report. Two well-known victims are Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, two Canadians who have been arbitrarily detained in China since December 2018.
Harper, a former Iowa Wesleyan University basketball player, was held in isolation at an apartment complex in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen for eight months before he was released in September 2020. He was detained and accused of causing a man’s death following an altercation.
He was quoted as saying that he sometimes ate rice with bugs in it and he lost 40 pounds after his solitary confinement. He stated: “I would just sit around all day and do push-ups and work out. Stare out the window and look at the airplanes go by and hoping that this day would pass.
“I had one form of entertainment. It was a big rat crawling from wire to wire between the buildings. I watched this rat every day,” Harper added.
BY FRANK FANG
