Asia Watch is expected to release tomorrow a report condemning China's penal system and its brutal treatment of detainees. It is believed to contain damning evidence of human rights abuses and comes at a bad time for China as it courts US renewal of its Most Favoured Nation trade status.
LAU Shan-ching was locked in a dark, lonely cell for a decade. Qi Dafeng has been left to cough his life away in a coal mine in Anhui province. Wang Miaogen cut off four of his own fingers in protest against Chinese persecution.
Like the Buddhist nuns who braved Tibet's numbing temperatures this month to escape government torture, or the missionaries incarcerated then expelled last week, all can show scars from their experiences in the Chinese penal system.
However, thousands more languish in Chinese prison cells, out of the headlines, isolated and overlooked. For these nameless victims, the terror starts with a knock on the door and never ends. Shackled and pushed into vans, they are dumped in cold concrete cells. The beatings begin immediately. Guards use truncheons, electric prods and bare fists. Deprived of food and relentlessly interrogated, they finally confess. Criminal charges are never needed, nor trials, nor sentences.
Such is the fate that awaits thousands of inmates in China, where - despite more than a decade of impressive economic reform - the penal system remains a quagmire of misery and mistreatment for those sucked by a network of spies and informers into the draconian web of torture and tyranny. The inhumanity of China's gruesome gulag is painstakingly detailed, page after page, in an exhaustive report set for release this week by the influential human rights organisation, Asia Watch. Several hundred individual cases are documented in the 664-page report, Detained in China and Tibet.
Asia Watch has refused to divulge details of the report before its expected release tomorrow. However, several well-placed sources have told the Sunday Morning Post it includes the largest, most comprehensive listing of political prisoners in China.