By AUSTIN RAMZY
OCTOBER 27, 2014
If the extent of China’s continuing corruption crackdown isn’t enough to warn wayward officials, a city in Jiangsu Province has set up a ghoulish display of torture methods used in imperial China to combat graft.
The exhibition at Huai’an’s “clean government education base” shows life-size mockups of victims being bent, burned, cut, flayed and stretched on racks. Similar centers have opened up nationwide as President Xi Jinping’s campaign against corruption extends to levels unseen in recent Chinese history, with more than 50 high-level officials and thousands of lower-level cadres implicated over the past two years.
But such anti-corruption education centers are generally less graphic than the display in Huai’an, and the scared-straight campaign has focused on the more mundane realities of anti-corruption targets. In Beijing, for instance, officials who hold positions considered at high risk for corruption have been given tours of prisonswhere cadres are held.
The Huai’an exhibit, which opened on Saturday, was photographed by a state media outlet and has been widely republished on Chinese news websites. Some online commenters approved of the display.
“Can corrupt officials who have fled overseas enjoy such punishment?” one man from Yunnan Provincewrote on Sina Weibo.
Others condemned the cruelties on display and asked whether it was relevant to the current campaign.
Although the government has banned forced confessions, torture of suspects is not just a historical phenomenon in China. As Andrew Jacobs and Chris Buckley reported recently, the Communist Party’s system of investigating its own members excludes them from basic legal protections such as contact with a lawyer and leaves them open to severe physical abuse and forced confessions. They wrote that “the handful of government officials who have experienced the party’s internal investigation regimen and dared to speak out afterward suggest that less senior bureaucrats can face a harrowing array of cruelties that mount alongside a corruption target’s resistance to full confession, even to crimes that may not have been theirs.”
And while the Huai’an display was clearly meant to depict past eras, there are similarities with today. Oneexhibit, pictured above, shows a “tiger bench,” a chair on which victims were chained, with their legs and arms painfully torqued, sometimes to the point that joints were separated and bones broken. Last year, a prisoner released from the Masanjia labor camp in in the northeastern province of Liaoningexposed the torture of inmates there, including use of the tiger bench.
The Huai’an center says the purpose of the display is to educate visitors about history. It will undoubtedly scare many as well, but it may also serve to raise questions about the effectiveness of such techniques. The tiger bench diorama is set in the Qing dynasty, the figures of that era clearly identifiable by their hairstyles, with the distinctive queue. The later years of that dynasty were also known for extreme corruption, which contributed to its collapse in 1911.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/sinosphere/2014/10/27/chinese-anti-graft-center-displays-old-torture-techniques/
