Two years inside a Chinese prison
In 2013, Peter Humphrey, a British risk adviser, was investigating allegations of bribery that had been made against Glaxosmithkline in China when he himself was arrested. This is his account of the 23 months he spent in captivity
I sat on the rough wooden floorboards of a spartan cell in the Shanghai Detention Centre, shivering as winter approached. In 2013, this floor – shared by 12 prisoners – was my breakfast, lunch and dinner table. The “detention centre” was once one of China’s notorious “reeducation-through-labour” prisons for political miscreants. Today, they pretend to be custody centres, but they are still punishment centres. Untried prisoners are condemned from day one, starting with the dire conditions they face when they arrive. The aim is to isolate, crush the spirit, break the will. Many crumble quickly.
My journey here began at the offices of my corporate investigation company in Shanghai on 10 July 2013. I had living quarters there with my wife, Ying, and we were getting ready for our day. At 7am the public security bureau (PSB) police flooded in, kicking our bedroom door into my face and injuring my neck. From that moment on, things moved ruthlessly fast: they ransacked the office, dismissed my staff, separated my Chinese-born American wife and me from each other, and both of us from our teenage son, Harvey. It would be two years before we were reunited.
Men in plain clothes drove us in unmarked black cars into the bowels of the hulking concrete headquarters of the Shanghai PSB. I was taken along underground corridors lined by dank interrogation cells, and through the gaps in doors saw prisoners slumped in metal chairs. When we reached my room, I sat in an interrogation chair with a lockable crossbar. PSB men came and went, asking questions about items found on our laptops. On a podium my mobile phone rang relentlessly, but our son’s frantic calls to us went unanswered. Fifteen hours later, we sped out of the building in the dead of night. Ying and I were again in separate black cars. There was no word on where we were going. As we drove into a slum off Hunan Road, a PSB man handcuffed me, and said: “I’m sorry, I don’t think you deserve this, but I have orders from above.”
We halted in a dark alley before a towering gatehouse with one-foot-thick iron doors rolling into the walls on either side. In a “check-in” area, our pockets were emptied. In the cell block, a warder made me strip to check I wasn’t hiding anything – anywhere. He threw me some cotton shoes half my size and a smelly red vest with a “V” torn into its neck, and “Shanghai Detention Centre” stamped on its back. At about 3am I was tossed into a sweltering cell. It was, I learnt, a ritual – new prisoners were always delivered at night. It reinforced the shock. Made them weaker. Easier to break, to extract confessions from.
The warder shut the door with a clang and uncuffed me through the bars. “What’s up?” mumbled a sleepy voice in Chinese from under a mound of pink bedclothes. “A new guy,” said another. A man in boxer shorts came to the door. “Sleep there,” he said, dumping a dirty quilt on a spot beside the toilet. A dozen or so bodies lay in rows on the rough boards, like sardines in cans.
In the morning, a low-pitched horn broke the silence. I hear it every day still. Bodies sat up. Warders on the corridor in pale-blue shirts banged on the bars. “Qilai, qilai!” “Get up!” At breakfast the gritty rice and the briny smell of pickle made me retch. Two men cleared the dishes and took them to the sink. Their actions were chores rostered to each detainee by the warder. Cleaning the floor, washing the dishes, scrubbing the toilet, stacking the boxes and quilts, emptying the hot water urn twice a day for refilling, washing and folding the cloths.
The men exercised by circling the cell for ten minutes like Tibetan pilgrims at a temple, minus the Buddhist chants. But this was no temple, just a floor, five by three metres. The toilet was a hole in the floor with a rusty flushing lever on the wall behind it. Next came “study time”. We sat cross-legged on red spots on the floor while the TV relayed “lessons” from the detention centre “propaganda department”. Inmates sat quietly. Some would try sneak-reading a book. Others plotted how to handle their case.
That was our life. A waiting game. No family visits. No letters home. Just brief messages to lawyers. No chance to orchestrate a real defence. Foreign prisoners could receive consular visits, to the envy of Chinese cellmates. Usha, the vice-consul who visited me regularly, and her assistant Susie relayed messages to and from my family, brought books and magazines, and lobbied over my health. They were my angels. In the detention centre I developed symptoms of prostate cancer, a long hernia, skin rashes, anal infections and constant diarrhoea, and endured an injury to my spine inflicted during the raid. None was treated.
There were frequent interrogations. For these I was locked in an iron chair inside a steel cage facing a podium where three PSB men questioned me and, once or twice, men from “a different department”. They tried to make it look as though Ying and I earned millions from trading in data, which we never did. Twice, the “other department” men tried to stitch me up for spying. After 13 months without trial, I finally went to court on 8 August
“Prisoners were always delivered at night. It made them weaker. Easier to break”
2014, where Ying and I were charged with “illegally acquiring citizens’ information” (which we denied). That day also had one of the most deeply distressing moments of the entire ordeal. The police had told me shortly before our trial that Ying had been informed of the recent death of her brother, Bernard. So, on the morning of our trial, when I saw her on the stairs in the courthouse, I expressed my condolences. The manner in which she broke down told me instantly that they had lied. She didn’t know. I believe they did this on purpose to destabilise us for the trial. We were predictably sent down, me for 30 months and Ying for 24.
From the Moon, Qingpu Prison would look like a peaceful walled university campus with dorms, gardens, camphor trees, a football pitch and a parade ground. But the perimeter wall bristled with razor wire and was patrolled by People’s Armed Police guards. It could hold 5,000-6,000 prisoners. Cell block eight was for foreign men, the adjacent block for Chinese. “What are your thoughts?” a bespectacled senior officer asked me when I arrived. “I don’t know what you mean,” I replied. “What will you do here?” he asked. I did not realise his questions were euphemisms for, “Will you write the acknowledgement of guilt and ‘repentance report’?” that was required of all prisoners. “I can teach some English to your staff,” I said innocently. I was led to the “training cell” for new prisoners, and given the blue and white summer prison uniform. I became prisoner #42816.
My cell held 12 prisoners. We slept on iron bunks with wooden planks and a cotton “mattress” one-and-a-half inches thick, covered with a coarse striped sheet. The barred windows were never closed. Winter was freezing. “I am the cell leader,” said a wiry young African, one of many Nigerians who were there, most convicted of drug smuggling and serving life terms. We were joined by two Chinese prisoners who held foreign citizenship: Zhang, an Austrian citizen serving a long term for people-trafficking, and Chen, a Thai citizen who was in jail for embezzlement. They were snitches who informed against everybody and who had been moved into the cell to monitor me.
In the corridors and stairs other prisoners appeared. They smiled and nodded at me. An African inmate tried to chat. “They told us all not to talk to you,” he said. “They said you are an MI6 spy. None of us believes it. We saw your trial on TV. We have been waiting for you. You are a hero. If you need anything, tell us, we will help you,” he said, ignoring Zhang and Chen, who fluttered and clucked like anxious hens. The prison officers also banned me from sending letters to family, making phone calls or using the prison shopping system. But I soon found a pile of things on my bunk – tissues, laundry powder, biscuits, coffee sachets, a small towel, two plastic rice bowls, pens and notepaper. Inmates dropped these things there as anonymous charity donations.
We awoke at 6am. One of us cleaned the toilet area before the others rose. A warder unlocked the cell and the men trooped down to the yard with thermoses to collect boiled water for hot drinks or washing. There was half an hour of exercise in the open air before breakfast in a yard the size of a basketball court. For breakfast we ate plain rice congee or a steamed bun with salt pickles and, every Sunday, a boiled egg. A standard dinner was a bowl of steamed rice, almost grit-free, stir-fry including a meat and a vegetable, and a thin soup. The Ritz! After a final roll call at 9pm, the barred door was locked and trusted Chinese prisoners stood watch to report nefarious activity or suicide bids. The prison was a business, doing manufacturing jobs for companies. Mornings, afternoons and often during the after-lunch nap, prisoners “laboured” in the common room. Our men made packaging parts. I recognised well-known brands – 3M, C&A, H&M. So much for corporate social responsibility, though the companies may have been unaware prison labour was being used.
Captain Wei, who was put in command of our cell, was notorious for persecuting inmates, and stirring up incidents that led prisoners to get a beating and to be dragged off screaming to solitary, which I witnessed over and over again. “They are sending him here because of you,” I was told. Indeed, Wei summoned me several times a week for a “talk”. He tried to provoke my anger, insulted me, ordered me to write confessions, threatened me with an extended sentence or solitary if I refused. I never yielded. Every week I cited my medical problems and demanded proper examinations and treatment for my prostate.
I continued to refuse to “confess”, and the captains continued to block my access to prostate treatment and warm clothing. Everybody was supposed to shave once or twice a week. Prisoners had their own razors, which were stored under lock and key. I applied to have my family buy me a razor, but Wei kept blocking approval. They tried to make me use a shared razor. I refused on hygiene grounds. I grew a long straggly grey beard. Hair was cut every Saturday morning by prisoners. I let mine grow. Before long, I looked like a cross between Santa Claus and the Count of Monte Cristo. This drove Wei nuts. He tried to force me to shave, and I filed complaints to the prison and my consulate. Other prisoners started winking at me as I walked along the corridor and I noticed they had started to grow beards too.
In April 2015, something shifted. Consular lobbying and my relentless complaints forced the prison to send me for a PSA blood test and an MRI at a local hospital. Within weeks, they had to admit that I had a tumour in my prostate, although they concealed the result of the blood test. The next step should have been a biopsy. Instead, they began to fake the paperwork for a sentence reduction for good behaviour. It emerged from this that the real commander of cell block eight was one Captain Shang. He, and eventually the prison governor, spent long sessions pleading with me to sign an admission of guilt so that I could leave prison with Ying, whose sentence would expire on 9 July that year. Shang and I argued over the wording of a compromise statement that I would sign to satisfy the paperwork.
I finally signed a statement expressing qualified, conditional remorse if I had done anything wrong, but not admitting that I had done anything wrong at all. Somehow they fudged it. On 4 June 2015, the prison smuggled me to Shanghai Prison Hospital. The vice-governor came to me with a Gillette Turbo razor and begged me to use it. In my final act before leaving Qingpu, I shaved. On 9 June, they released Ying and me into house arrest in the Magnotel, a small hotel that sources said belonged to the security apparatus, pending our deportation. On 17 June, the PSB men who had originally arrested and interrogated us in 2013 conveyed us to Shanghai Pudong Airport to deport us on a Virgin flight to London. Just before we climbed aboard, the PSB handed us a bill for our nine-day stay in the Magnotel. We didn’t have the cash with us, so we signed an “IOU”.
“I continued to refuse to ‘confess’, and the captains continued to block my access to prostate treatment and warm clothing”