Report: ‘Common’ for Chinese Police to Use Waterboarding, Extreme Torture in Routine Questioning

Radio Free Asia (RFA) published a report Wednesday that found “graphic torture” is “standard practice” during police interrogations in China, including abuses so severe that one victim was rendered comatose and died.

The victim in question was Sun Renze, a 30-year-old resident of East Turkistan, the occupied region where the oppressed Uyghur Muslims live. Sun was not a Uyghur, but rather the son of a Han Chinese police officer who was killed in the line of duty.

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Sun was arrested during a 2018 crackdown on gang activity by Xinjiang (the Chinese colonial name for East Turkistan) police. He reportedly worked as a “debt collector.” The police scooped him up using China’s all-purpose charge of “picking quarrels and starting trouble,” which can be invoked to arrest anyone the Chinese Communist Party finds troublesome.

According to a since-deleted article on the Chinese financial news website Caixin, the police grilled Sun for information on the death of a woman named Deng Xuefei who fell out of a building during a visit by Sun and other debt collectors. The implication was that Sun and the other collectors either killed the woman or harassed her into jumping out of a window while shaking her down for cash.

The police “interrogation” of Sun grew so “intense” that they decided to drag him down to the basement of the detention center because he was screaming so loudly. One of the police officers was instructed to shut off the basement surveillance cameras, but he wanted some leverage in case he was accused of wrongdoing, so he surreptitiously kept one of the cameras rolling.

Unaware they were on video, the police officers labored to “completely break Sun Renze’s spirit” for hours on end. As Caixin reported:

The surveillance video showed that for more than seven hours between 4 p.m. and 11:30 p.m., Sun Renze was waterboarded, both directly and with a towel, more than ten times, with two of the sessions lasting more than 15 minutes at a stretch. He was also forced to carry an iron chair and dumbbells back and forth repeatedly for 40 minutes.

In the video, when the interrogators were carrying out the waterboarding, we couldn’t see Sun Renze’s expression and reaction, but we saw the iron frame bed shaking violently for a long time, and we can imagine how much he was suffering,” one witness told the court.

Sun’s interrogators also slapped him in the face, beat his calves and heels with a white PVC pipe, and administered electric shocks with an old-fashioned telephone, while he was restrained on the bed.

Sun came out of the basement in a coma, bounced between a few hospitals, and died a few weeks later. His mother screamed “Murderers! I will never forgive you!” at the November 2023 trial of the eight officers linked to the torture session. 

The offending officers were ultimately given jail sentences of between three to 13 years. One of them testified that his goal was to use the most sadistic methods available to “insult Sun Renze’s ego and destroy his psychological defenses.”

The Chinese Communist Party did not like Caixin’s report on the torture trial, so censored deleted it within a few minutes of going live.

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Several former Chinese police officers told RFA that severe physical abuse is fairly common in Chinese law enforcement, especially when senior officials have decided a case with heavy political significance must be resolved quickly.

“The higher-ups would say things like ‘you have to crack this case in the next week’, which would prompt the lower-ranking officers to rush their investigations and start using ‘methods,’” said former police officer Chang Xiaofeng. “Methods” is a common Chinese euphemism for torture.

“The police are a bit more regulated while handling criminal cases, but in political cases, they stop at nothing,” said former deputy police station director Guo Min.

“Based on my more than ten years of experience in handling criminal cases, it is common for the public security to use illegal methods like torture, ill-treatment, beatings and intimidation when handling cases. It happens in almost every case,” said U.S.-based human rights lawyer Chen Jiangang.

Chen noted that the video of Sun’s torture was a very rare bit of physical evidence because, while Chinese law stipulates that all interrogations must be recorded, the police are usually careful to shut the cameras off before they abuse a detainee.

“Torture is huge. It’s a humanitarian disaster,” Chen said.

The Chinese government has been accused of using torture against the Uyghurs, who were herded by the millions into vast concentration camps. Chinese officials generally deny these charges and impugn the credibility of the accusers, some of whom are former Chinese law enforcement officers who said they observed torture sessions.                                                                                                      

In July 2021, a Uyghur woman who survived two months in China’s concentration camps said there was “unbelievable” torture in her facility and it was frequently deployed against captive Uyghurs who refused to swear fealty to dictator Xi Jinping and accept him as a “god.”

In May 2022, a huge trove of Chinese Communist Party internal documents related to the Uyghur camps was exposed by hackers. Some of the documents referred to physically abusive practices.

China has also been accused of abuses in Tibet. In December 2022, the U.S. government imposed sanctions on two senior Chinese officials over “serious human rights abuse” against the Tibetans, including torturing and murdering prisoners.