cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/61090833
[…]
Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location (RSDL) is a long-established system the Communist Party of China (CCP) uses to torture prisoners into confessing to crimes imagined by the state.
At its heart, RSDL is a form of state-sanctioned disappearance.
RSDL is a form of secret detention where suspects are held in incommunicado detention for months without access to a lawyer, contact with their family, and with little to no prosecutor oversight, before formal arrest is made.
RSDL is so secretive that the disappeared are transported to the facility blindfolded or with a black bag placed over their heads.
The prisoner in RSDL is watched 24 hours a day by two or more guards. They are watched when they are sleeping and they are watched when they are awake. They are watched even when they are on the toilet, denying the prisoner the last vestiges of human dignity.
The RSDL cell is usually cut off from sunlight for the entire six months.
In RSDL, interrogations can happen at any time, day or night, and last for hours at a time.
[…]
The latest book edition of “The People’s Republic of the Disappeared” contains new evidence of foreigners disappeared into RSDL. Australian journalist Cheng Lei, Japanese former university lecturer Hideji Suzuki, Taiwanese human rights activist Lee Ming-che - with a foreword penned by Canadian former diplomat Michael Kovrig - reminds people that China is a country without rule of law and that a foreign passport is no protection.
[…]
Alongside their harrowing accounts are testimonies of Chinese RSDL prisoners, where the use of physical torture as well as psychological torture is part of their reality.
[…]
The stories in this book document the immense psychological as well as physical torture that the CCP inflicts on people in RSDL.
Cheng Lei writes:
“I couldn’t sleep. My hair fell out in bunches. I was sore from the endless sitting. I cried many times a day from missing my kids. I was anxious, frightened, lonely, humiliated, intimidated and almost going crazy from boredom.”
In the Foreword to this third edition, Michael Kovrig describes the isolation and mental torment of his RSDL—so intense it can drive prisoners to contemplate suicide. RSDL facility cells are usually suicide-proofed because of this very reason.
“Your captive body becomes an instrument through which the state security organs control your mind. Alone, powerless, humiliated and denied your intrinsic dignity, you begin to doubt your own humanity. The cells are padded because at some point nearly everyone’s mind begins to break down. The pain is too much to bear and you can see no end to it. Death would offer a yearned-for release, but even that choice is taken from you. With no way to die, you can only endure.”
[…]
Lee Ming-che often heard the sounds of gunfire in the early morning. It made him believe he was going to be executed.
“I was in a state of mental confusion, unable to distinguish whether I was thinking or dreaming. Combined with the physical weakness from my disrupted circadian rhythm, I was on the verge of a mental breakdown.”
Hideji Suzuki cried when his guard gave him a glimpse of sunlight through a window. It was the only time he saw the sky in his eight months of RSDL (the legal maximum is six).
[…]
Chinese women’s activist Li Qiaochu writes in her chapter:
“Even if the price of speaking out is losing my freedom again, I do not regret writing about my experiences, because I know that the moment I summoned the courage to tell the truth, those feelings of humiliation and fear the secret police tried to instil in me just disintegrated. If we cannot speak courageously, we cannot act freely. We must speak directly and not shy away from the difficulties. We must talk about the details, our traumas and our weaknesses. The things we avoid mentioning and keep hidden are precisely the truths they fear we might bring out into the open.”
[…]