11/23/92
10:20
AUSTRALIAN CÜNSULATE GENERAL H.K
852 827 0075
3
figure to at least have on the record and it was given, as I say, without much prompting or with any difficulty.
When we visited Chengdu we again put the same question to the local people in the Supreme Court. They took a similar line to Beijing, but I think in trying to explain in a convoluted way their figures about crime we were able to deduce that we think about between a 100 and 110 people were executed last year in Sichuan Province and none for so- called political crimes; all to do with criminal activity. Again, we had no way of verifying those figures, but just the fact that we can get some of them, I think, is useful and the fact that some officials are willing now to in their own way discuss those figures.
We also got figures in Sichuan Province about laojiao. We asked how many laojiao detention centres there were in the province and we were told there were three, with a capacity to hold about 3,000 people and, at the moment, those three centres hold about 2,000 people. So there are about 2,000, about two-thirds capacity. Again, we never got those figures last time. You can make your own judgement on whether you think those figures are accurate. I've got to say the view of the delegation is we have no overwhelming evidence to say that the information about the number of laojiao centres in Sichuan Province is incorrect or the numbers inside.
There
Finally, we visited a laojiao centre outside Shanghai yesterday. It was clearly one of the best laojiao centres in China in the facilities, it was only under two years old in its physical structure. They admitted that themselves. Informally, their own officials admitted that this was one of the best laojiao centres in operation as far as the facilities were concerned; it was only for women. were capacity for 500, a staff of about 50 and at the moment there is about 350 inmate detainees and, when we moved around and inspected in the guided tour that you always get, one of our delegation members did count that at least 260 prisoners or detainees. We asked where the other 90 were, it was explained to us they were in another rooms that we didn't get time to visit, but we think that they would be certainly on what they would call a model, in a superior facility. It did seem to be, in their terms, a working facility for reform and it just wasn't a total token showpiece village used to impress visitors. In fact, I asked the director how many foreign visitors there have been and she said there had been three delegations over the last two years. I would have thought if it is being used as a total showpiece they would have been taken a lot more visitors by delegations like Beijing Jail No.1 which in total last year had about 12,000 visitors a year to that jail to show the wonders of the Chinese penal system, which
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