MCLC: inside a Beijing interrogation room

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: inside a Beijing interrogation room
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Source: NYT (7/17/14):
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/18/opinion/murong-xuecun-inside-a-beijing-in
terrogation-room.html

Inside a Beijing Interrogation Room
Contributing Op-Ed Writer
By MURONG XUECUN

BEIJING — Chinese writers like me often face difficult choices. What
should we do when friends are arrested for no good reason? Keep our mouths
closed? Should we speak out in protest and risk being dragged away to
prison? Is it fair to our families and friends to risk rotting away in
jail because we refuse to shut up?

After several months away from China for an academic residency and
vacation, I returned to my home in Beijing on July 2 prepared to be
arrested. While abroad I had announced in a blog post and in this
newspaper that I would turn myself in to the authorities for contributing
an essay to a private commemoration of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown.
Several of the participants in the Beijing gathering had been arrested.

On July 6, I posted a message online saying that I was home and ready to
be picked up. My girlfriend never said it, but I knew she was
uncomfortable with my stance. Two days later, I received a phone call from
a police officer at the Wanshou Temple station near where I live asking me
to come in to “have a chat.” I walked into the station at about 5:30 p.m.
and was ushered straight up to the second floor.

I had to wait for officers from the guobao, which is part of China’s
secret police force. The guobao is rarely mentioned in news reports, and
few people know the details of its budget and structure. It is everywhere,
it is all-powerful, and it can make people suffer at any time. For Chinese
dissidents, guobao means nightmare.

While waiting, I picked up a copy of “Readings Selected From Important
Speeches by Xi Jinping,” lying on a desk. One chapter was about building
“a China ruled by law.” I might have been encouraged by our president’s
words had I been sitting somewhere else.

After about 40 minutes, two plain-clothed guobao officers showed up and
took me into a small room. Shoe prints covered the walls, and cigarette
butts were scattered on the floor. In the middle of the room was a desk
with a computer and a printer. My chair was in front of the desk.

One officer presented his ID and the other gave me a bottle of water. They
advised me to “answer truthfully, otherwise there will be legal
consequences.”

They quickly zeroed in on the commemoration of the 1989 Tiananmen
incident. Why did you want to participate in the event? Who contacted you?
When? Where had you met? What did he say? What did you say? What did you
write in your speech?

I answered their questions truthfully. I did not see any point in hiding
anything.

Then we discussed the Tiananmen Square incident itself. I argued that
under no circumstances should the government have ordered the army to
shoot at unarmed civilians, let alone dispatch tanks to roll onto the
streets of Beijing. The officers did not agree or disagree with me; they
just kept asking questions: Do you know what the overall situation was? Do
you know what was happening in international affairs at the time? Do you
know how many soldiers were beaten or burned to death?

The conversation turned to whether I had broken the law. I told them that
I assumed they thought I did because they arrested my friends who were at
the Tiananmen commemoration. The officers didn’t like that I made the law
sound capricious. The law is not about what they “think,” one of them
said. The police, the officer said, had arrested my friends because they
broke the law.

Next we discussed whether citizens “must obey the law.” I said good laws
should be obeyed but evil laws must be challenged. They strongly
disagreed, insisting that the law must be obeyed whether it’s good or evil.

“And you’re a graduate of the China University of Political Science and
Law, eh?” the younger one asked mockingly.

I began to talk about Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience, but quickly
felt like a ridiculous pedant. What’s the point of talking about the
virtues of civil disobedience in a Beijing police station?

After their questioning, the two went into an adjoining room to make a
phone call, presumably to ask for instructions from their superiors. It
took a while.

This was the most difficult part of the night: the wait for some
mysterious force to make a decision about me. Somewhere in this city
someone was about to decide my fate, and I knew nothing about this person.
The two officers seemed to be in the dark, too. They made a second phone
call.

They returned and one asked: “If we arrest you today, will you be able to
refrain from hyping it up when you get out?” I told them I could not
promise to do that.

The officers wanted to go to my home to get the essay I had written for
the Tiananmen commemoration. I told them that I volunteered to come in for
questioning, but I had no intention of surrendering my rights, and they
would need a warrant. They finally agreed to let me go home alone to get
the essay for them. But once at home I couldn’t find it: I had written it
in an email message and my account was inaccessible because of the Great
Firewall.

I returned to the police station empty handed. The officers let me go
after making a statement about the inaccessible email, signing each page
and affixing a fingerprint. I was also required to add a statement
attesting I had read the transcript of my conversation with the officers
and that it was an accurate record.

“We appreciate you turning yourself in,” one officer said, “but the law is
the law, and while we will not let any miscreants off the hook, we will
never treat good people unjustly. Do you understand?”

This was the first time I was questioned by the police. In the course of
my seven-hour interrogation the guobao officers were never ferocious. In
fact, they were polite. In this respect, the Chinese government has
evolved to appear friendly, but in its heart of hearts it is still a
dictatorial regime that will never accommodate someone like me who
disagrees with it.

Surrendering oneself to the authorities in this manner is rare in China. I
have no idea if my action will bring any change. Maybe it was a foolish
gesture. But I was encouraged by all the support I received. While I was
being questioned by the police, and after my release, many people —
friends and strangers — voiced their support for me online. Some even
vowed to surrender to the police, too.

This reaction says something about the China of today: More and more
people are no longer afraid of being jailed for speaking their minds.
Being questioned by the police has become a badge of honor.

I still live in fear. I visited many Chinese prisons for a novel I wrote
about the legal world — I know they aren’t pleasant places. Could I cope
with a life behind bars? How would I face my devastated family and friends
if I were jailed? I still don’t know.

But I have a bigger fear: living in a China where good people are jailed,
where people are afraid to speak their minds, and where the law has little
to do with justice.

Murong Xuecun is a novelist and blogger and the author of “Leave Me Alone:
A Novel of Chengdu.” This article was translated by The New York Times.