Introduction

“When you come to the Olympic Games in Beijing, you will see skyscrapers, spacious streets, modern stadiums and enthusiastic people. You will see the truth, but not the whole truth…. You may not know that the flowers, smiles, harmony and prosperity are built on a base of grievances, tears, imprisonment, torture and blood.”

– Open letter by prominent Chinese rights defenders Hu Jia and Teng Biao, September 2007.

When 25,000 reporters arrive in China to cover the Olympic Games, enthusiastic youngsters, glittering venues, primly trimmed parks and state-of-the-art subways will leave a strong impression. As Hu Jia and Teng Biao note above, however, there is another side to the “New China” that the Chinese Communist Party is much less keen on showcasing to the international community.

It is a China of electric cattle prods, of 18 hour work days, of unspeakable torture and humiliation, of religious believers forced to endure endless hours of “thought reform.” It is a China of “re-education through labor” (RTL) camps.

It is this China, its daily reality to millions of Chinese, and its incongruity with Olympic ideals of human dignity, peace, and non-discrimination, that this modest booklet seeks to bring forth.

What’s in the Guide?

The focus of this guide are seven labor camps and other detention facilities located in close proximity to Olympic venues and known to be particularly egregious in their treatment of adherents of the Falun Gong spiritual practice, a religious minority that remains the single, largest persecuted group in China today.

Each of the seven detention facilities is presented with:

Background

The RTL System:
China’s “re-education through labor” (RTL) camp system has been in place since the 1950s and includes a network of dozens of camps. It is a form of administrative detention to which individuals are sentenced by police or other security agencies for up to three years without charge, trial, or possibility for judicial review.

The speed and secrecy with which individuals may be sentenced has made it a central method used by the Party for detaining “undesirables.” Those detained at RTL camps include:

According to the U.S. State Department’s 2007 report on human rights in China: “some foreign observers estimated that Falun Gong adherents constituted at least half of the 250,000 recorded inmates” in China’s vast labor camp system.

Maltreatment and torture:
Conditions within the camps are widely acknowledged to be extremely poor and abusive. Former prisoners report being fed inadequate rations, being denied sufficient time to wash, and being forced to participate in long hours of slave labor, performing a variety of manufacturing tasks.

According to Amnesty International, it “continues to receive regular reports of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment taking place in RTL facilities.”

In this context, Falun Gong detainees are particularly vulnerable to severe forms of abuse. A 2006 report by the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture stated that Falun Gong practitioners accounted for 66 percent of all alleged torture victims in China. In over 3,000 documented cases, such abuse in custody has led to the adherent’s death.

Pre-Olympic “Clean-up”

Unfortunately, this dynamic has not changed with the approach of the Olympics. On the contrary, according to Amnesty International: “In the lead-up to the 2008 Olympic Games, Beijing police have used abusive detention practices such as RTL to ‘clean up’ the city.” Among those systematically targeted for such detention have been Falun Gong practitioners.

In early July, the Falun Dafa Information Center reported that “there have been at least 8,037 arrests of Falun Gong adherents across 29 provinces, major cities and autonomous regions since December 2007.” Of these, over 208 individuals have been arrested in Beijing and at least 30 of them sentenced without trial to RTL camps for up to 2.5 years.

Their crime? Peacefully safeguarding their fundamental human and Chinese constitutional right to freedom of belief.

Conclusion

Despite pledges by Chinese leaders of complete media freedom when bidding for the 2008 Olympic Games, it is becoming clear that foreign reporters arriving en masse in Beijing will confront a security-obsessed city and significant challenges in covering stories that do not match the choreographed China the regime seeks to portray to the world.

Nevertheless, we urge you to find ways to follow the directions in this guide, cover the stories of the prisoners mentioned, and seek out the true reality in these facilities. We urge you to do so outside of official channels, because, as several show tours and one former detainee have indicated, “The CCP can stage anything.”

In conducting your investigation, however, we also highly recommend reading Human Rights Watch’s Reporters’ Guide to China Olympics, and taking great care to minimize risk to interviewees, support staff–such as translators, drivers, and guides–and of course, yourself.

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- Source:  The Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (CIPFG)