HOUSE OF LORDS
'Extensive torture carried out by a rural commune's Party Committee Secretary and a senior armed police officer during the 1983 campaign against crime was reported on May 1st 1985. From August to December 1983 they had illegally detained 72 people, 52 of whom were subject to corporal punishment. In April 1986, it was reported, the head of a police station in Baoshan, Yunnan province, and three other police officers detained 201 people in order to investigate two cases of theft they tortured more than 100 of them to obtain confessions.
The most common methods of torture described in the Chinese Press are severe beatings, usually with the victim bound or handcuffed, suspension by the arms; assaults with instruments such as electric batons; whipping or striking victims with various objects; unspecified forms of humiliating or degrading treatment; and round the clock interrogation.
In November 1986 Zhang Siqing, deputy Chief Procurator of the Supreme People's Procurate, was reported to have stated that the most common form of torture in China was to make victims stand up or crouch on the floor for hours on end.
Geshe Lobsang Wangchuk, a Lama and Buddhist scholar imprisoned on political charges in the Tibet Autonomous Region, is reported to have been held hands and feet shackled in a maximum security cell in Lhasa from September 1983 until February 1984.
In a report in March 1986 it was reported that Guards in Gongdelin 'reception centre' punished rule breakers by handcuffing one wrist pulled high behind the neck to the other for periods from 24 to 72 hours. Victims, who required assistance from other prisoners to eat or defecate, were unable to use their hands properly for several days afterwards.
A Hong Kong businessman held in Huangpu detention centre in 1986 provided testimony of recent conditions in the centre:
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