Women 'chained up and tortured' in labour camp

A rarely seen report by a Chinese monthly has exposed some of the dark practices of a Liaoning labour camp including torture and inhuman treatment of female prisoners at a time when the government has vowed to reform the country’s notorious, decades-old labour camp system.

The claims, reported by Lens, part of the leading SEEC Media Group, are based on accounts of provincial procurators, former camp officials and former and current prisoners.

Masanjia female labour camp, near Shenyang, houses nearly all the female forced-labour prisoners in Liaoning province and is one of over 300 labour camps in China, where police can imprison people for up to four years without trial, a practice condemned by critics as arbitrary and unconstitutional.

The Lens report revealed that women prisoners had frequently undergone torture for not obeying prison officials, according to the prisoners’ accounts.

Labour camp administration laws stipulate police officials can only employ electric rods during prison breaks or riots or if they are assaulted by prisoners. But the report claimed prison guards had used electric rods regularly to torture prisoners, leading in cases to disfigurement and nerve damage.

“It was extremely painful, causing my body to shake,” one woman recalled. Another woman who had an electric rod pressed on her tongue said, “I could not stand still when the electric current flowed through my tongue. It was like being pricked by needles.”