时间：2022-02-26 10:59:57
Tang Hui has spent six years pursuing the death penalty for the men who abducted and repeatedly raped her then 11-year-old daughter. However, Tang may now give up her battle, after having just been granted early release from a labor camp. Now, this 39-year-old mother hopes to start a new life with her child, away from their hometown of Yongzhou, Hunan Province.
Re-education through labor is an extrajudicial punishment and a relic of the Soviet justice system which allows Chinese police to send anyone to a labor camp for anywhere from one to four years at a time. Tang had petitioned her local police bureau for six years, demanding her daughter Lele’s captors be brought to trial, before she was slapped with her 18-month sentence, which a public outcry recently forced the police to overturn.
Nightmare
In early November 2006, Lele (not her real name), was raped by Zhou Junhui, a man she met at a roller skating rink. Zhou reportedly coerced Lele into prostitution for three months at a local brothel.
Over three months, Lele was forced to have sex with clients over 100 times with the income split between the brothel madam and Zhou. She was allegedly injected with unidentified drugs to allow her to see more clients in a single night, according to a report by Xinmin Weekly, a Shanghai-based magazine.
Whenever Lele refused to work or was caught attempting to call her parents, she would be cruelly beaten up by the brothel madam, Qin Xing, and her boyfriend Chen Gang. In late December 2006, the girl was gang raped by Qin Bin, the madam’s younger brother, and three other men.
Lele’s parents finally managed to locate their daughter after an anonymous tipoff. Tang, her mother, immediately called up Yang Xuejun, the police officer heading up the official search. According to Tang, Yang only “paid a cursory visit” to the brothel and“left without doing anything,” claiming he had more important business to attend to. Tang resorted to calling the emergency police line for assistance, who eventually whisked Lele back home.
The next morning, when she went to file the case to the Lingling District Public Security Bureau (PSB), which had jurisdiction over the area where the brothel was based, she discovered it was the same PSB where Yang Xuejun worked. Yang refused her request, and told her to go home.
It was only after Tang threatened to jump off the police station roof that her case was eventually filed. Police waited 19 days before raiding the brothel and arresting the madam, while the other six chief suspects, including the five gang rapists and Chen Gang, the madam’s boyfriend, was left undisturbed.
It was later discovered that an officer at the Lingling station, Wei Xiaohui, acted as a“courier,” delivering messages between Qin, the brothel’s detained owner, and other suspects, allowing them to destroy evidence and fabricate alibis. The local police chief was also revealed as a former classmate and good friend of Chen Gang.
Lu Qun, an official with the Hunan Provincial Disciplinary Inspection Commission, remarked on his microblog that any brothel could not have functioned without the “protection and connivance” of the local police force.
In desperation, Tang petitioned the Hunan Provincial Public Security Bureau that oversees the Yongzhou police department. With a rising tide of public anger surrounding the case, the bureau swiftly launched its own investigation, locating and detaining the remaining suspects, apart from Qin Bin, who remained at large.
Ongoing Battle
In June 2008, the Yongzhou local court formally charged Zhou with statutory rape and kidnapping, and Qin Xing, the brothel madam, with kidnapping. Both were sentenced to death after a brief trial. Qin Xing appealed against her death sentence, asking that it be commuted as, while in prison, she had prevented a cellmate called Zhou Lanlan from committing suicide. However, the prosecution found no evidence of this, though no secondary charges of false testimony were added to Qin’s charge, much to the dismay of Lele’s parents.
Four other suspects received sentences of 15 years to life for the rape of a minor, as well as being forced to pay compensation totaling 90,000 yuan (US$14,080) to Lele’s parents.
Yang Xuejun, the police officer who had obstructed the investigation, however, received only a “serious warning” for his misconduct. Wei Xiaohui, the police officer who had aided and abetted the perpetrators, received an even lighter punishment. Both men were not charged, and kept their jobs.
Tang was outraged, and appealed all six verdicts, demanding that all seven suspects be put to death after paying 1.84 million yuan(US$288,000) in compensation. She also called for harsher punishments for the two police officers implicated in the case.
Lele’s case bounced back and forth in the Hunan Higher People’s Court before a final verdict was issued in June 2012. Zhou and Qin received death sentences, while the four suspects of gang rape were sentenced to life imprisonment, and Chen Gang, the brothel madam’s boyfriend, was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
It was not Tang’s demands for harsher penalties for the perpetrators which led to her being sent to a labor camp. It was her continued fight to have the police officers who had both protected her daughter’s kidnappers and obstructed the investigation which led to her arrest. The court repeatedly refused to bring either officer to trial, refusals which led Tang to ever-more desperate protests.
Her removal to a labor camp, according to a statement released early August by the Yongzhou police bureau, was due to her having “severely disturbed social order, and caused extremely grave negative results.” According to eyewitnesses, Tang had blocked access for official vehicles to the Yongzhou court’s parking lot in an attempt to get court personnel to accept her petition.
Gan Yuanchun, one of Lele’s prosecution lawyers, publicized Tang’s detention on Weibo, China’s Twitter equivalent, with the post going viral in seconds after being retweeted by Phoenix Weekly’s Deng Fei, a veteran investigative journalist with 2.3 million Weibo followers.
The case soon made national headlines, effectively forcing the Yongzhou police to release Tang as well as leading the Hunan provincial government to launch a full investigation into the alleged police misconduct.
Outcry
The extreme nature of the case, and growing dissatisfaction with the perceived abuses of China’s police force, has led to widespread public anger as well as a strong show of support for Tang and her daughter.
“It was extensive media coverage which spurred the higher authorities to act,” commented Ye Tieqiao, a journalist with China Youth Daily, on his microblog. “Who knows how many others like Tang Hui are out there?”
“It is media rule. We cannot call it a victory, because we can expect the next Tang Hui to appear soon,” the post continued.
Researchers and pundits have started calling for the abolition of the “re-education through labor” system, which effectively allows police to detain and sentence citizens without even the semblance of a trial. The police do not even have to officially arrest someone in order to commit them to a labor camp, making re-education through labor a popular solution to troublemaking petitioners, whose rights to petition the government are enshrined in both China’s constitution and its legal system, but nevertheless are viewed as an embarrassing nuisance by the authorities.
Yu Jianrong, a researcher from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said on Weibo that the police are particularly liberal in sentencing the victims of forced evictions and police abuse to re-education through labor. Now, however, the media attention created by Tang Hui’s detention and subsequent release, is making the abolition of re-education through labor a cause célèbre for advocates for social justice.