China Still Uses Medieval Torture Methods Against Opponents

Chinese security agents continue to employ a medieval array of torture methods against government opponents, activists, lawyers and petitioners, including spiked rods, iron torture chairs and electric batons, a report claims.


The Amnesty International report, called No End in Sight: Torture and Forced Confessions in China, is based on interviews with nearly 40 Chinese human rights lawyers and contains chilling details of alleged beatings and torture sessions endured by those taken into police custody.
Patrick Poon, the report’s author, said that despite government pledges to reform, Amnesty had documented recent cases of torture in virtually every corner of the country. “From Beijing to Hunan to Heilongjiang to Guangdong – there are cases of torture in many, many places. The problem is still very widespread in different provinces. It isn’t just concentrated in a certain area of China,” he said.
Poon said most of those targeted were human rights lawyers, Communist party officials taken into custody by anti-corruption investigators, and practitioners of the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong.
One of the most shocking cases described in the report was that of Cai Ying, a 52-year-old human rights lawyer from Hunan province. Cai claimed that after being detained in 2012 he was forced to sit on a “hanging restraint chair” – a contraption that immobilises a prisoner by dangling them in the air with their hands and chest strapped to a board.
In a recent interview with Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, Cai recalled excruciating torture sessions. “I was humiliated so badly I thought of ending it all, but then I thought of my daughter,” he said. “The humiliating experience filled my heart with hatred.”
Yu Wensheng, another lawyer, said that after being detained last October for protesting outside a detention centre where a client was being held, he spent more than three months in custody suffering torture.