14 October 2003

China Labour Bulletin was dismayed to learn yesterday that Yao Fuxin and Xiao Yunliang, the imprisoned leaders of the March 2002 mass worker demonstrations against corruption and unpaid benefits that rocked the city of Liaoyang in Liaoning Province, were transferred on 8 October from Jinzhou Prison to the notorious Lingyuan Prison, a huge penal colony located close to the province’s border with Inner Mongolia. Many political dissidents arrested after the 4 June 1989 nationwide crackdown on the Tiananmen pro-democracy movement were held at Lingyuan Prison, and numerous confirmed reports emerging from the prison at that time indicated that the prison was one of the most brutal in the whole of China. Political prisoners there were regularly beaten, shocked with high-voltage electric batons, and placed in tiny solitary confinement cells for long periods of time for the slightest perceived “infringement” of prison rules.

Both Yao Fuxin and Xiao Yunliang are known to be in an extremely poor state of health, and China Labour Bulletin fears that their recent transferral to Lingyuan, if not part of a deliberate official policy of punishing them still further for their role in leading the March 2002 protests in Liaoyang, will almost certainly further exacerbate their already severe medical problems. Yao and Xiao were tried in January 2003 on wholly unsubstantiated charges of “subverting state power,” and on 9 May they were handed down prison sentences of seven and four years respectively. Their appeals were subsequently rejected by a higher court.

The families of both men are now extremely worried about their fate. Guo Xiujing and Su Anhua, the wives of Yao and Xiao respectively, and another Liaoyang workers’ leader named Wang Zhaoming (he was imprisoned for nine months after the Liaoyang protest of last year and then released without trial), traveled to Beijing on 11 October in an effort to appeal to the State Council’s Visits and Petitions Office on the two prisoners’ behalf. But they were intercepted on arrival in Beijing by locally based representatives of the Liaoyang city government and prevented from carrying out their mission. Mrs. Su is particularly anxious because her monthly prison visit to see her husband was cancelled by the Jinzhou Prison authorities last month, ostensibly because Xiao had “violated prison regulations.”

Prisoners’ Health Rapidly Deteriorating

Yao Fuxin: According to the latest reliable reports, Yao Fuxin's health is much worse than was previously believed. His family visited him at Jinzhou Prison on 24 September, and found him in the hospital ward. He had been suffering intermittent heart failure for several months (possibly of the kind known as "transient ischemic attacks", or TIAs), and he collapsed while in the shower last month and only revived after prolonged emergency resuscitation by the prison staff. He was then transferred to the prison hospital and was placed on several different medications (names of drugs not known.)

Since he and Xiao Yunliang were moved to Jinzhou Prison on around 16 August, Yao has also had extremely high blood pressure (190 / 130), and prior to his 8 October transfer to Lingyuan Prison he was having his blood pressure checked twice daily by prison medical staff. Yao also has great difficulty walking, due to an old injury he sustained in 2000 (his foot was scalded by hot bitumen, and he had to have skin-graft surgery for it at that time.) As a result of all his enforced inactivity in prison over the past 18 months, the sole of his foot has atrophied and he can only walk by balancing on his heel and toe; it is apparently too painful for him to put any weight on the sole of his foot. Finally, Yao's right eardrum has collapsed (in Chinese: "ermo taxian"), and he can only hear with great difficulty. All of the above information was given to Yao’s family by Jinzhou prison medical staff, who added that they were “very worried” about his state of health.

Xiao Yunliang: Reports from January 2003 onwards indicated that Xiao had been coughing violently in the detention centre where he had been held prior to his and Yao’s trial, but the family have now learned that in April he was put on intravenous drip of some kind for two weeks. After his removal to Jinzhou Prison prison doctors diagnosed this condition as full-blown pleurisy (an infection of the membrane lining of the lungs.) Xiao has great difficulty in speaking and he suffers from frequent stabbing chest pains.

Xiao Yunliang’s eyes are also in extremely bad condition. On April 17 he was diagnosed by police doctors as being virtually blind in both eyes. He now has severe conjunctivitis in one eye, and the vitreous matter in the other eye has become completely clouded. Nonetheless, the Jinzhou Prison authorities informed his family that if they wanted Xiao to have the necessary eye surgery, all medical costs would have to be paid for by the family.

Nonetheless, the families of both prisoners were relatively satisfied with the medical treatment that Yao and Xiao had been receiving at Jinzhou Prison, and with the general conditions of life in the prison. They are therefore justifiably concerned that the authorities’ recent decision to transfer the two men to Lingyuan Prison may have a further punitive intent, and that their wide range of serious medical problems will no longer be properly looked after as a result of this move. In addition, Lingyuan is almost twice as far from Liaoyang – a 12-hour journey by road – as the prisoners’ previous place of confinement, making it much harder for the families to visit the two men.

China Labour Bulletin is especially concerned that Yao Fuxin and Xiao Yunliang, despite their frail state of health, may be forced to perform arduous manual labour at the Lingyuan Prison. (As the men’s families were told by the director of Yingkou Prison, where they were briefly held prior to their transfer to Jinzhou Prison in August this year: “If a prisoner can move, then he can work.”)

In view of Lingyuan Prison’s appalling previous reputation for brutality (see “Background” section below), and given the fast deteriorating health situation of Yao Fuxin and Xiao Yunliang, China Labour Bulletin calls upon the international labour movement to urge the Chinese government to release both men immediately on compassionate medical grounds; and failing that, to arrange for their transfer back to Jinzhou Prison at the earliest possible date so that they can at least continue to receive basic and urgently-needed medical care.

Background Information on Lingyuan Prison

Lingyuan Prison is a large penal colony situated on the banks of the Linghe River in a remote and inaccessible corner of Liaoning Province. It was built in 1958 by a group of 45,000 prisoners working under the command of 4,000 prison officers, and it was developed over subsequent decades into one of China’s largest automotive manufacturing bases – “staffed” entirely by unpaid prison labourers.

According to an article in an “internal distribution only” journal for prison officers that was published in 1992:

Today, after thirty years of continuous building, the Lingyuan Labour Reform Sub-Bureau is emerging as a fairly large-scale site for labour reform. It has six labour reform detachments [i.e. units of several thousand prisoners] spread over an area of 3.3 million square meters and extending more than 30 li. It has a total space of over 600,000 square meters, including 160,000 square meters of factory floor space. Its total fixed assets amount to 147,070,000 yuan, including 1,823 pieces of equipment of various descriptions, 29 special-purpose production lines, 6.8 kilometres of rail lines, two steam engines, a power plant and an asbestos mine…
[NOTE 1]

The Lingyuan Labour Reform Sub-Bureau is known to the outside world as an enterprise bearing the name "Lingyuan Motor Vehicle Industrial Corporation of Liaoning Province." It has been producing "Linghe" buses since 1964. In 1967, it started producing refrigerator wagons for the military. By 1969, it had successfully trial-produced a 4-ton truck, the "Liaoning No.1," which, in a few years, became well known both within and outside of Liaoning Province. It was modified in 1977 and is now being marketed under a new label, the "Linghe." It enjoys an even better reputation than the "Liaoning No.1" and on many occasions has been awarded the title of "quality product" at the provincial level. It 1985, it was the sole winner of "first prize" among medium-sized trucks at a ministry-wide quality inspection event. The enterprise has grown into a multiple production factory, turning out many types of motor vehicles and components and parts…

As regards the reform of prisoners, the control and supervision facilities have gone from simple and crude to sophisticated. Education has become more penetrating. Tall prison buildings have replaced the tents and single-storied buildings. High walls, live wire entanglements, watch towers and electrically-operated iron gates have replaced the straw ropes and barbed wires. The various detachments have acquired prison vans, police cars, motorcycles, walkie talkies and alarm systems.

Some detachments have installed monitoring devises. The procedures and measures of control and supervision have been perfected all the way from detention to release. In the past thirty years or so, the sub-bureau successfully reformed historical counterrevolutionaries, Kuomintang war criminals, secret agents sent by the United States and the Jiang clique, female prisoners, those sentenced to be re-educated through labour, and large numbers of common criminals of all categories.

While few first-hand prisoner accounts have emerged from the remote Lingyuan penal colony in recent years, it is unlikely that conditions there have changed dramatically since the aftermath of the military suppression of the 1989 pro-democracy movement, when dozens of leading activists – both students and workers – from that movement were incarcerated there on trumped-up political charges. (The best-known internationally were: Liu Gang, one of the “21 most wanted” student leaders, who served a six-year sentence at Lingyuan; Tang Yuanjun, an automotive engineer who received a 20-year sentence; Leng Wanbao, a tooling worker at the Changchun No. 1 Motor Works, sentenced to eight years; Kong Xianfeng, a worker sentenced to three years’ imprisonment; and Li Wei, another automobile worker who received a 13-year sentence.)

The following excerpt from a political prisoner’s letter that was smuggled out of Lingyuan Prison at the time recounts just one episode out of the almost continuous ill-treatment that the “June 4th” political prisoners at Lingyuan were subjected to during most of their period of confinement at the prison:

From April 22 to May 29, the prison authorities gave the political prisoners a "prison orientation course." Each and every one of them was required to recite from memory the "standards of conduct for criminals undergoing reform." That was, in essence, a way to instil "criminal consciousness" into them. Liu Gang and the other political prisoners were disgusted with the course. On May 29, the No.2 Detachment gave those of the training brigade a third test on the "standards of conduct for criminals undergoing reform." Liu Gang and ten other newly arrived political prisoners refused to take the test, as a protest against the prison authorities for trying to instil into them "criminal consciousness" against their will.
[NOTE 2]/>

Policemen and members of a unit directly under the labour reform detachment (consisting of those criminals who were willing to serve the government as hatchet men and cell bosses, and thus were allowed much greater freedom than the others) who were alerted beforehand, pounced on the political prisoners and beat them up. Liu Gang and five others were shackled with leg irons and thrown either into a tiny solitary confinement cell (xiaohao) or a strict regime unit. The other five were allowed to stay in the brigade to be "corrected" there. For days, the authorities tortured them, trying to break their spirit.

Tang Yuanjuan, An Fuxing, Zhang Ming and Leng Wanbao were confined in tiny solitary confinement cells measuring two meters by a meter. It was cold and damp. They were tortured continuously, stripped naked, held down on the floor and assaulted repeatedly with several high-voltage (varying from 10,000 to 50,000 volts) electric batons simultaneously administered to their head, neck, shoulders, chest, belly, armpit, inside part of the leg, and fingers. They went on hunger strike to protest the brutality, only to make matters worse.

The baton used to torture Tang Yuanjuan ran out of power. Two of his ribs were broken as he was kicked by a guard wearing leather boots. Leng Wanbao remained silent as he was tortured. A prison guard pried his mouth open and stuck the baton into it. An Fuxing became sick and was hospitalized in a state of shock. But as soon as he was released from the hospital, he was tortured with electric batons by Yang Guoping (at the time, he was the brigade commander, later promoted to be a section chief of the prison administration) and others. Liu Gang and Kong Xianfeng, who were sent to the "strict regime" unit, were also tortured by four or five electric batons administered simultaneously. Kong Xianfeng was bleeding behind his ears, and Liu Gang's private parts were assaulted. Those who were allowed to remain in the No.1 and 2 Squads of the training brigade to "reflect" on their "mistakes," were also tortured.

NOTES/>

[1] See “Motor City at Source of Linghe River,” by Guo Ying, guest senior editor of “Researches in Crime and Reform” magazine, 1992; full translation first published in Asia Watch (Human Rights Watch) report: “China: Political Prisoners Abused in Liaoning Province as Official Whitewash of Labour Reform System Continues,” Vol. 4, No. 23, 1 September 1992.

[2] See “The Ordeal of Political Prisoners in Lingyuan Prison – Yet Another Page in China’s ‘Glorious’ Human Rights Record,” published as Appendix I of Asia Watch report cited above.