China Tries Dancing Way Out of Prisoner's Dilemma

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By Reuters

Published: 03/05/2003

The male dancers at the Beijing Prison put on quite a show.
One minute they tiptoe like ballerinas to tinny revolutionary tunes. The next they stomp bow-legged to drum beats, their arms orbiting their heads.
But in a prison system that human rights groups rank among the world's cruelest, the dancing has a much deeper meaning.
'Before I came here, I used to walk hunched with my head bowed,' said Beijing Prison inmate Zhang Xinyu, 23, locked up since age 18 for armed robbery and rape.
'But now that I have learned how to dance, I walk upright with my head high even when I'm wearing prison clothing,' he told Reuters Television. 'I now know what beauty is.'
The Beijing Prison, home to serious offenders, says its three-year-old dance program is a model of the government's reform effort that also includes building modern jails and adding psychiatric services for the nation's 1.5 million inmates. Rights groups say it's all little more than an act. They contend the Chinese prison system's official mantra, to 'reform through labor' or 'laogai,' in many instances still amounts to brutal exploitation.
Beijing's case might soon be put to the ultimate test.
A U.S. human rights envoy said in mid-December that Chinese officials had told him they would invite U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture Theo Van Boven to visit immediately and 'unconditionally.'
If the government follows through on its offer, it would mark a policy shift. The last rapporteur, Nigel Rodley, never visited because Beijing refused him access to detention centers of his choice or private interviews with prisoners. Van Boven wants to visit sometime in 2003, U.N. rights commissioner Mary Robinson says.
Shorter Sentence
Diplomats doubt Beijing would let him roam free. He could still be limited to tours of relatively comfortable institutions such as Beijing Prison, following the footsteps of other envoys and the rare foreign television crew.
There are no chain gangs at this jail. On the dance floor, inmates wear wrist bands not manacles, leg warmers not ankle cuffs. They change out of prison-issue fatigues into Nike sweats.
Prisoner Zhang has nearly 10 more years to go on his 15-year sentence. But he has knocked 10 months off through service to the voluntary troupe, which has garnered prizes at prison dance contests.
His story contrasts sharply with reports of China's justice system from rights groups and others.
As loss-making 'laogai' factories try to squeeze more from prison workers, conditions have deteriorated and disease is on the rise, dissidents and academics report. Meals come meatless and cells buzz with flies.
Amnesty International says China executed more people than the rest of the world combined in recent years, 2,468 in 2001 alone, most with a bullet to the back of the head.
Other watchdogs accuse police of beating suspects to obtain confessions, prolonging their detentions illegally and of putting minor offenders in mental hospitals and 're-education through labor' camps without prosecuting them as criminals. Falun Gong, the banned spiritual group, says its followers have been shocked with electric batons, dunked in cesspools or forced to run barefoot in snow.
China has defended its policies and flaunts reforms in state media. Inmates in Beijing began collecting wages for their work in 2002; prisons in other big cities have set up mental health clinics, state newspapers have reported.
At one jail in Hangzhou, convicts blow off steam punching sandbags in one room before chilling out in another room with psychologists, the official Xinhua news agency reported recently. Diplomats doubt whether possible visits by Van Boven and the U.N.'s arbitrary detention working group signal a serious resolve to tackle alleged abuses.
Reform Through Stomp
China is building new prison space to accommodate a swelling inmate population, up some 100,000 in the past three years, and upgrade old cell blocks, said a Western diplomat who tracks the legal system.
The legislature and judiciary are debating new rules on evidence to protect defendants better. Some local courts have experimented with plea bargaining, even though Chinese law does not allow it, the diplomat said.
Justice officials trumpet the paired goals of 'fairness and efficiency' in speeches. However, in a system swamped but underfunded, that often translates into abusive treatment, particularly in poorer outlying areas, diplomats, released dissidents and rights groups say.
They report the widespread use of unskilled, unpaid prison labor on the assembly lines of prison enterprises to put finishing touches on cheap goods.
The Beijing Prison's promotional brochure show convicts learning to use computers in laboratories full of terminals, enjoying meals with relatives, playing in rock bands and, of course, dancing.
'In the past, reform meant simply reform through labor,' said Warden Yang Di. 'Now we want... to cultivate their abilities to return to society as human beings.' 'Dance helps them vent their abnormal thoughts and feelings,' said their professional instructor, Yuan Kaili, 58.
Offstage, Yuan's troupe folds paper boxes for hours on end, they said. She teaches them a workmanlike form combining stomp and martial arts that is called 'duanzao,' a verb for smithing metal which also can mean to change oneself by overcoming hardship.
'She tells us when we go up on stage, there's no difference between us and performers on the outside,' said inmate Zhang.
The Western diplomat had seen prisoners such as Zhang dance; he said he hoped U.N. envoys would see more. 'They need to go see a few places in the countryside.'

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