Then in MMMM 201x, when I was actually away from my home in XXXXXX-a, a community police officer reached my family to ensure that I would not go anywhere near the XXXXXX-a Intermediate Court to gather with other people and […]
Why they were so nervous about me, I cannot tell. I was bewildered by then because I was such an average person who had no publicity at all. This bewilderment still haunted me today when the police officers in XXXXXX-b told me that my case came directly from the Ministry of Public Security.
And then in late 201x, the same community police officer, despite that I had moved to XXXXXX-b for more than X years, phoned me once again and tried to persuade me to delete another tweet, in which I used the word ‘commie’ (Chinese: 共匪) to describe the pro-Communist mobs that burnt down the Morning Post (Peking) in 1925—a historical event that happened quite a long time ago. At first, I refused to do so, arguing that I have every right to write whatever I want as that freedom of speech is a fundamental human right, but he then threatened to contact my local police officer. Considering that that might drag in or bring unnecessary trouble to our landlady, I gave in and deleted it.
Oh, it’s Twitter again! This might give anyone reading this an impression that I must be a Twitter celebrity with tens of thousands of followers and being quoted and retweeted every now and then.
But I am NOT. I am nobody. Yes, I have a Twitter account (@xxxxxxx) but with only xx followers and have only followed about the same amount of people. I created my Twitter account on D MMMM 20xx (a time node of more than ten years ago) and have been using it ever since. I use it to post my trivia thoughts and some day-to-day notes; it functioned as a place for me to soliloquise instead of interacting with others. Considering the grimmer by day situation faced by mainland Chinese in expressing opinions, I had therefore made my Twitter account private (‘protected’) in late 2019.
On D MMMM 2020 (Day 1), First Interrogation (part 2)
Yet the police officers who came to my flat did not seem to agree with this.
‘Take out your mobile phones!’ one of the officers ordered.
We did as he said. My girlfriend’s mobile was quickly returned once the police officer found that she had not posted anything at all.
Found no overtly ‘anti-CCP’ tweets, the police officers then ordered us to come with them back to the local police station for further investigation, along with my phone and my laptop.
The first-day interrogation lasted for about four hours. Inside the interrogation room, several police officers (with some new faces joining in) carefully looked through my tweets and asked me all sorts of questions like ‘what does this tweet mean’, ‘why did you write this’, etc. However, they were not sure which tweet had ‘triggered’. (Triggered what? No idea. They just used the word ‘triggered’ repeatedly in their whispers.)
During the first interrogation, the police insisted that my use of the word ‘commie’ was an insult to the CCP. I argued that that was not true because I used that word exclusively in commenting on some Western left-wing parties. And I explained to them that I would not use that word to denote the CCP because I did not reckon today’s CCP as a left-wing party. But the police did not accept my explanation. Even though they can perfectly understand from the content of my tweets that I was not referring to the CCP at all, they insisted that ‘it is not proper for a Chinese to use the word “commie”, for that in the context of the Chinese language, “commie” is “tied up” to be the pejorative term for the CCP’. ‘That’s your understanding, not mine.’ I rebutted. ‘That’s not MY understanding; that is what is commonly received by the Chinese people! Let me do a search to prove it.’ The police officer then took out his mobile and searched the word ‘commie’ in Baidu—a search engine that is used predominantly in mainland China. Awkwardly, the search engine returned with no result, and the police officer returned with a smile of embarrassment and dropped the topic.
The police also questioned my beliefs and thoughts. I told them frankly and truthfully that I considered myself a libertarian-conservative, believing that a small government, less regulation (or even ‘laissez-faire’) and free trade will do good to the people, especially to the lower classes. I then told them that at personal level, I am an individualist, abhor collectivism to the most, advocate negative liberty, and detest those left-wing narratives that are growing more popular by day among the young. And therefore, I truly am an anti-Communist and anti-Socialist by heart. ‘You can save some efforts if you’re going to lecture me on this,’ I told them bluntly, ‘my anti-Communist beliefs established at a very young age and can even be traced back to my primary school years by when I would rather come to school by jumping over the wall than to be checked with red scarf wearing at the gate.’ But I also explained to them why they should not make such a fuss about me and why I was bewildered by their action this time: I’m nobody, have no publicity, and have ceased to pay attention to or to comment on politics or current affairs of mainland China for some time. ‘I cannot become an advocate of the CCP, and yet I cannot join the stronger-by-day left-wing dissidents, either. I therefore couldn’t care less about what’s happening in mainland China nowadays. After all, it’s a personal account, private to myself and has only posted some personal and everyday life–related remarks.’
Further Explanation on My Beliefs and Thoughts
I wasn’t lying to them on the part of my anti-Communist beliefs, and I want to be very honest and clear to anyone who is reading this statement, that like all of whom that was born and grown up in totalitarian communist/socialist regimes like North Korea, Cuba, or Venezuela (or any historical regime like Russia or Ukraine under the so-called ‘Soviet Union’), I loathe to the utmost those brainwashing narratives and propaganda of socialism and collectivism. Whenever a communist/socialist regime establishes, human rights crises erupt, individual rights deprived, political horrors break out, persecutions widespread, and mass poverty and miseries followed. This has been proven repeatedly throughout history. No matter how hard the Left tries to falsify their past and embellish their thoughts, as a mainland Chinese who has families and relatives that survived the Great Famine (some even unfortunately not) and all those political movements and persecutions during the first decades of this regime, I will never forget all the miseries and humanitarian disasters they have brought to the people that I have heard and keep hearing, read and keep reading, witnessed or suffered myself and keep witnessing and suffering. And no matter what these evil thoughts will rebrand themselves into these days, or whatever new ‘clothes’ they would put on to cover up their nefarious cores, I spurn these devils firmly and wholeheartedly.
However, I was also not lying on the part of my not being an activist, either. The reason I gave them was also true—I can barely achieve anything as an individual, but as a libertarian who upholds neoliberal thoughts and advocates for capitalism, I cannot join the left-leaning dissident groups to propagate their values of the Left. One would never have imagined even a few years ago—and quite ironically, though—that those who fight most fiercely against the CCP in mainland China are now mainly Leftists. Many people on the Right in mainland China had therefore retreated to their books and personal life, including me. I believed that I could lead a quiet life as a freelance translator, to be a man of honesty and unyielding, hold up tight to the values I treasured, not making compromises nor say or do things that are against my conscience.
And yet the red terror is coming back—not in a hurry, but gradually, step by step. Policies to suppress the freedom of speech can be traced back to 2013/14. But I would argue that the mass capture of civil rights lawyers during the summer of 2015 (known as the ‘709 crackdown’) is a turning point. (How widely did this mass capture affect? I have a story to tell—an illiterate fisherman I met in the detention centre who lives by the seaside of the frontier should vaguely know this incident. He is not an activist by any means and the information about this crackdown was strictly blocked inside mainland China. But even he knew this and whispered to me one day, which I here quote in his words: ‘I know that a couple of years ago, there were many lawyers were captured throughout the country because the government did not want them to defend people like you, and yet they would not listen.’) In the very autumn, propaganda slogans printed on red cloth reappeared and were spread like a virus on the streets. (Some may even hang up in residential quarters.) Then there came Zhou Qiang, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who shamelessly claimed in early 2017 that Constitutionalism and judicial independence are the ‘evil ways’ of the West. A claim that was reinforced by Xi Jinping in the next year, preaching to the people that they should ‘flash sword to the wrong thoughts of judicial independence of the West’. In the very same year, the constitution was amended, allowing Xi to stay in power indefinitely. Activists and dissidents started to disappear even before they took action. In late 2017, there were the first cases reported that people could be given administrative penalties (detention up to 15 days or fines) for posting ‘inappropriate remarks’ on Twitter. This practice of persecution aggravated in 2019 when cases reported that these acts of tweeting started to trigger imprisonment instead of administrative detention. The situation worsened in 2020 when an estimation of over a thousand cases like mine happened throughout the nation. In 2021, this red terror has become so heated that even the slightest ‘discord’ to the mainstream propaganda would lead to imprisonment for at least six months.
D MMMM 2020 (Day 3) – D MMMM 2020 (Day 5)
Drew no distinct conclusion, I was released at about xx:xx that day (Day 1), but not with my mobile phone and laptop. The police explained that they needed a little more time to finish the investigation, and they would return them once the proper procedures had been completed.
But my mobile phone and laptop were never returned. It was me that ‘returned’, to the police station, for the second interrogation, on D MMMM 2020 (Day 3). This time, they drove a police car to fetch me, and all of them were wearing the uniform. After thoroughly scrutinising every tweet I posted, this time, they were well-prepared, with questions pre-written on a small piece of paper and screenshots of my tweets printed.
The police claimed to have found xx (a number less than 30) ‘inappropriate’ tweets out of all the x,xxx+ (a number near 10K) tweets I posted in total, in which I was accused of using Xi Jinping’s nicknames like Winnie and baozi (steamed stuffed bun), ‘inappropriately stating that Xi is dumb stupid and therefore is manipulated by Wang Huning like a muppet’. I affirmed that all those tweets were indeed posted by myself and were a true reflection of my thoughts. Although on the accusation of ‘using Xi’s nicknames’, I argued that I only used them to refer to some time nodes, and I wasn’t intended to insult or constitute libel to him. And as for the tweet claiming that the rule of law in mainland China has been seriously worsened since ‘Winnie ascended to the throne’, I told them that I could give plenty of facts and evidence to prove that that was true and the reality was far worse. The police, though, hilariously quibbled about my not being a law professional and insisted that I, therefore, cannot make remarks on such topics. (‘Are you a law student? Have you thoroughly learned about the law? If not, you cannot comment on the topic of the rule of law!’ Said the police.) There were many more ridiculous accusations made by the police, which I rebutted or explained to them one by one. ‘After all, they’re my personal opinions’. I told them that I saw no reason why I cannot post them, and I did not reckon they should make such a fuss about it.
The police officers in that station partly agreed with my last point—once the interrogation was over, they told me to wait in the antechamber, ‘We will consult our superior and then give you an administrative penalty’.
I waited for about three hours. What awaited me, however, was not an administrative penalty but another interrogation—this time in the criminal interrogation room.
Accompanied by one of his deputies, the director of the XXXXXX-b-1 District’s Public Security Branch came to the police station in person and instructed the police officers there that instead of an administrative penalty, my case must be processed as a criminal offence. ‘Because this case came from a higher level.’ He told them.
The third interrogation was more of a formality thing. The police officers just merged the records of the former two into one criminal interrogation record. I was then accused of committing the crime of ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble’ (Chinese: 寻衅滋事) for posting ‘inappropriate remarks’ of various kinds related to the Party and the political systems of China and ‘insulted’ the state leader. Even though under Article 293 of mainland China’s Criminal Law, to commit the crime of ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble’, one shall have to ‘create disturbances in a public place, thus causing serious disorder in the place.’ Apparently, the police reckoned that the xx ‘inappropriate tweets’ of the all x,xxx+ (which took up no more than 0.x%) posted in a private Twitter account with absolutely no one replied, retweeted or liked, has ‘caused serious disorder in a public place’. Even in a place like mainland China where freedom of speech is not recognised as a fundamental human right, the absurdity in this matter is too surreal to conceal. Nevertheless, once the conclusion was drawn, the rest to do was to finish the procedures.
These formalities continued with me being taken back to my flat to identify the ‘crime scene’—photos taken with me being arm-griped and handcuffed, pointing at my desk and my bed—places where the police reckoned that I would usually post tweets. (This would later form the On-Site Inspection Report.) The following day (D MMMM 2020 (Day 4)), I was taken to carry out some physical examinations and other lengthy but required procedures involving the collaboration of the local Criminal Investigation Brigade and the Digital Investigation Unit. The next morning (D MMMM 2020 (Day 5)), I was transferred to XXXXXX-b-2 Case Handling Centre (Chinese: XXXXXX-b-2 办案中心) for final pre–detention centre procedures, where I signed the Notice of Criminal Detention (Chinese: 刑事拘留通知书), Notice of Changing the Term of Criminal Custody (Chinese: 变更羁押期限通知书), and several other documents.
Under Article 91 of the Criminal Procedure Law of mainland China, only ‘a person strongly suspected of committing crimes from place to place, repeatedly, or in a gang, the time limit for filing an arrest request for examination and approval may be extended to 30 days’, but I was issued with the Notice of Changing the Term of Criminal Custody right away on the day I was criminally detained, extending my detention period (before formally arrest me) to 30 days. This has long become the typical practice in mainland China. Nearly everyone would receive an extension of the detention period (most of whom would not even be given a notice), no matter whether the case is truly that complicated or not.
I still kept the Notice of Changing the Term of Criminal Custody, as it was the first document I received that I was allowed to keep a copy of.
From the ‘Quarantine Centre’ to the Detention Centre
On D MMMM 2020 (Day 5), at about xx:xx, after x.x hours of drive, I was finally transferred to XXXXXX-b-3 Administrative Detention Centre (Chinese: XXXXXX-b-3 拘留所), which by then served as a separate ‘quarantine centre’ (Chinese: 隔离所) run by the XXXXXX-b Detention Centre (Chinese: XXXXXX-b 市看守所)—the place where I would finally be transferred to. This so-called ‘quarantine centre’ was where all the criminal detainees would be first sent to due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I was assigned to cell xxx on the ground floor, with about 20 detainees already there. The number of detainees in a cell was not fixed, with new ones that might be put in any night, and some lucky guys might get bailed out under the ‘Guaranteed Pending Trial’ system (Chinese: 取保候审). (The latter was extremely rare.)
As long as you were on the ground floor, you were nowhere near being transferred to XXXXXX-b Detention Centre. You would have to wait to be ‘ascended’ to the first floor, from where and when the cell you were in would be considered as ‘sealed’, and you may now wait for at least two weeks for the transfer. The time that one be stuck in the ground-storey cells varied, with the longest I knew was about 1.5 months, and therefore he was ‘quarantined’ for over two months before transferring to XXXXXX-b Detention Centre.
This so-called ‘quarantine’ was, however, nowhere near a real, medical quarantine, but quite the opposite. There were often over 20 people jammed into a cell designed for 15, with dirty quilts and mats being used randomly and repeatedly. Everyone shared one tiny plastic tub to scoop water out of a big basin on the ground and drink. A disposable face mask was issued to every detainee and was supposed to be worn all the time except for sleeping hours. And no matter how long you would stay there, there would be no new face masks for change. One would only get one disposable face mask, and yet you would be forced to wear it throughout this period of ‘quarantine’. After weeks of forced wearing, the mask designed for one-time usage would turn black and yellow, pill, and smell foul. Some may even get broken straps. And yet no matter what, you must make it stay on your face. You were not allowed to wash yourself in this ‘quarantine centre’, and you would have only one suit of clothes to wear before you were transferred to XXXXXX-b Detention Centre, went through another two rounds of ‘quarantines’ there, and waited for clothes to appear in the order forms.
I was ‘ascended’ to cell xxx on the first floor on D MMMM 2020 (Day 21), and was transferred to XXXXXX-b Detention Centre on D MMMM 2020 (Day 36). Arrived in XXXXXX Detention Centre, I was first assigned to cell x-xx for ‘quarantine’, and on D MMMM 2020 (Day 52), I was reassigned to cell x-xx for another round of ‘quarantine’ (from when we were allowed to order foods and necessaries in a weekly manner). I was finally assigned to cell x-xx on D MMMM 2020 (Day 73), where I stayed until the previous day of my discharge. I was transferred one last time on the previous day of my discharge to cell x-xx for some formality reason.
Struggled to Meet with Defence Counsel
Inside every cell in the Detention Centre, there was a big plate on the wall, printed with 12 articles of rights we have in the detention centre, together with 12 articles of rules that we must observe. They say that in the past, both the 12 rights and the 12 rules were required to be memorised and recited by every detainee. However, by the time I was detained, only the memorising of the 12 rules was demanded. Maybe they also had realised how sarcastic it was that those rights were precisely the ones they had taken away from us.
Take Articles 5 and 6 of the ‘Rights and Responsibilities of the Detainee’, for example.
Article 5. Materials of appeals, complaints, accusations, denunciations, and hiring of defending counsel are forwarded to the relevant authorities by the detention centre in a timely manner, without being withheld, delayed or destroyed.
Article 6. The detainee has the right to correspond and meet with relatives, counsel or other defenders according to law.
Materials are to be forwarded in a timely manner? No way. They simply won’t deliver anything on behalf of you except your petition for appeal. Therefore, you cannot even appoint defence counsel by yourself. Suppose there’s no one outside who happened to be your ‘immediate family’ (which is required by the law) to hire one on your behalf, you’re left with no defence counsel until the very end of the whole procedure, by when the prosecution will suddenly appoint a ‘legal aid’ lawyer to you right before your court hearing—that is, if your case were considered as a felony and might lead to grievous penalties.
But even if you are fortunate enough to have counsel outside, the police in the Detention Centre would try every effort to block your meetings with your counsel. Even though under current circumstances, there’s literally little to nothing the defence counsel can do in a criminal case, they are still the only channel you have to contact your family. (As for the right of corresponding via letters? Only a dream!)
Firstly, they told you that you’re ‘in quarantine’ and therefore no meetings are allowed. Secondly, after months of ‘quarantine’, you’ll be told that the detention centre was not fully prepared to let you meet with your counsels due to ‘contagion concerns’, even though the so-called ‘meeting’ was arranged by a remote voice call (you hold one end of the phone in the meeting room and your counsel holds another far away in another building in the detention centre—you cannot see your counsel at all). And finally, when they re-opened these meetings (after many brave lawyers protested fiercely outside), your counsels will have to make reservations first and wait for the notification. Sometimes they will notify your counsel the night before your meeting day, and your counsel is required to bring a PCR test report along with a document proving ‘not having travelled out of the city for the last 15 days’ with them. If your counsel cannot meet the requirements for the meeting, the meeting will be cancelled. And sometimes, even though your counsel booked the meeting, had been carefully calculating the date ever since and prepared the required documents all along just in case they suddenly called, there is a chance that your counsel will be notified at the last moment that the booked meeting was still cancelled due to ‘too many bookings’ and they are ‘very welcome to re-book for another time’.
Not being allowed to meet with my counsel was my greatest torment in this whole thing. I felt like I was in a black box, with absolutely no information from the outside passing through. And each day, every moment, you won’t know how much longer you’ll have to endure in this ‘black box’. I missed my girlfriend so much, and I worried about her […]
I finally met with my counsel on D MMMM 2020 (Day 89). I met with my counsel four times in total throughout the whole period, for about 50 minutes (D MMMM 2020 (Day 89)), 25 minutes (D MMMM 2020 (Day 115)), 15 minutes (D MMMM 2020 (Day 127)), and 10 minutes (D MMMM 2020 (Day 184)) respectively, with all my clothes taken off and searched (as well as my anus) every time I went out and came back in the cell. You are not supposed to bring any materials with you while meeting with your counsel. (Yet another deprived right!) It was so ridiculous that since I cannot even really see my counsel face to face, what materials I can pass through via these voice call meetings? (Apart from the last one, the first three were ‘met’ with the aforesaid voice call method. The last time, though, they upgraded the device; thus, we could make a video call, only the time limit was shrunk to 10 minutes.)
But 10 minutes were enough. We did not need to talk about how to defend me in court. Knowing that to do so would be nothing but an act of futility, we decided at our first meeting that I would plead guilty in exchange for a shorter sentence. I used these invaluable meetings to get information, to get out of the ‘black box’. After our first meeting, most of my worries were cleared, and the rest of the detention life turned relatively easy immediately.
On the Detention Centre’s Trampling on Human Rights
Apart from the right to meet with counsel, the other rights, most essentially, the fundamental human rights, are fundamentally abused in the detention centre.
Take medical care for example. On the wall, it reads: ‘Article 1. Detainees shall be physically examined at the time they are detained; medical care shall be provided in a timely manner if the detainee’s ill.’ And yet, in reality, the duty doctor will only patrol the cells’ corridor once in the morning on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. And when he came to the door of each cell, only a designated detainee could walk to the door to ask for pills on behalf of the whole cell. This ‘designated guy’ would often be the second-placed bully in the cell. By this medicine hand-out time, each cell can only ask for no more than four kinds of pills, of each no more than four people’s one-time dose. (But he only comes less than once a day!) The pills handed out were the cheapest ones like Oxytetracycline (for any inflammatory illnesses) or Phenobarbital (for pain-easing). And the inmates are not allowed to privately store the spare pills, even though we all did so. We have to use the dirty toilet paper sold in the detention centre to wrap up the pills and hide them somewhere in the corners or cracks. Even so, the medicine was often short of, and many of us had to endure the suffering and waited for the illness to pass off.
The true tribulation will start when you are seriously ill and in need of a doctor. You’ll probably first be thwarted by the cell bully (often the appointed ‘head of the cell’) or the second-placed bully (often the appointed ‘discipline keeper’), for that they were the ones who had the power to call for a doctor, and you’ll need to convince them that you’re genuinely severely ill. I once had a severe fever during my days there, and since I have had rhinitis all my life, my symptoms were far worse than ordinary people’s. Constant secretion of mucus and phlegm kept blocking my airway, making it impossible to lie down, let alone to sleep. I had to, therefore, stand all night long at one of the two designated stand-guard points for four consecutive days. (Note: ‘stand-guarding’ is a formality thing in the detention centre that every cell of six detainees or over shall always keep detainees in shifts as ‘stand-guardians’ standing at the cell’s two ends, they do not have any real power or duty these days, just as a ‘tradition’.) On the fifth day, my right eyeball was full of blood and had shown a clear sign of virus infection. I finally seized an opportunity to catch the eye of the duty doctor to take me out and examine (this, of course, made the cell bully outrageous, blaming me that I had forgotten myself and overstepped his authority). I was then prescribed some IV solutions (which I asked for the name many times, and yet the doctor insisted not telling me what it was), and was then taken by the policeman in charge of my cell to put on a drip in the IV room for the next three days.
But this was way better compared to the situation back in the ‘quarantine’ centre. In the ‘quarantine’ centre, we should be punished for calling the police for medical care. I remembered a detainee named ‘WXX’, who had asthma and often felt out of breath. Once the symptoms were severe, and he felt that he could not endure any more but to call for help. The police came and were very rude to him, asking him with immense impatience whether he would really die if he were not treated. WXX, then suffering from severe asphyxia, replied to the police with discontent, ‘Then let me die here, then!’ The police immediately turned furious; they took WXX out, beat him and put him in full harness for the next eight days.
Families of the detainees are typically concerned about one issue the most—food. The foods provided in the detention centre were, obviously, not good, with sands and other sorts of dirt often found in the soup. But it would not be the main problem, for that you can buy things to eat—that is if your family outside would deposit money in your account. But even if you have no money to buy extra foods, the foods provided by the XXXXXX-b Detention Centre were way much better than what were provided by the XXXXXX-b-3 Administrative Detention Centre that then served as the ‘quarantine centre’ when we were first detained. Back in XXXXXX-b-3, there were only one mantou in the morning and one in the afternoon around 4 o’clock with exact three pieces of marinated horseradish or cucumber slices (often turned sour when handed out for us to eat); at noon, there will be one bowl of rice with salty soup. In the XXXXXX-b Detention Centre, the watery broth had become much thicker soup and was served twice a day, both at noon and in the afternoon. Mantou were not limited to one per capita, and the preserved radish strips provided in the morning was an absolute delicacy that I even remember to this day. Therefore, I’d like to say that although the foods were nothing good by any means, they were fairly acceptable. The extra foods sold in the detention centre were also not good, often with food security issues and the prices were way much higher or even doubled compared to the prices outside.
As I’ve mentioned before, the police in the detention centre would deliberately appoint cell bullies in charge of the cell. A ‘privileged’ class then came into being, although there’s not much of privileges left to contend for. If you were a cell bully who was appointed as the ‘head of the cell’ or ‘discipline keeper’, or if your family have found their ways to make special ‘contact’ (often this means bribery and corruption) with the officers in charge, the only privileges you’ll get would be a wider space on the board to sleep or an exemption of night shifts of stand-guarding. And yet, as the cells are almost always heavily overloaded with inmates, a wider space means everything. A regular-sized cell (approx. 7.5 m in length and 5.5 m in width) was originally designed to accommodate 16 inmates; later, it was readjusted to 22. And yet nowadays, it usually holds up to 30 to 33 in a male’s cell and up to 45 in a female’s cell. (There were good times—I won’t deny it—when there were only 24 inmates in my cell. But times like this were very rare.) The board would be so crowded that some of us must sleep on the ground, which would be considered a ‘reward’ rather than a punishment, for that you can take up more space. If the board is jammed up to the maximum, people who sleep on it can only sleep on their sides and cannot even turn themselves for the whole night.
Another issue that might raise much concern would be about physical punishment or whether the detainees would be tortured in the detention centre. In fact, these days, the police are less likely to beat you, although this kind of thing still happens. (Most of the physical tortures are happened outside the detention centre and are done by the police during interrogation.) No, they’d rather torture you in some less-exerting ways if needed. To give details about that, I’d like to tell the story of a cellmate of mine whose name is Wang XXX.
