American Basketball Pro Spent Eight Months in Secretive China Detention
By James T. Areddy, 6/22/21, Wall St. Journal

When Chinese police detained American pro basketball player
Jeff Harper in Shenzhen last year, they didn’t formally
arrest him, he says, but instead kept him locked in a room
with a rancid mattress and a plastic chair for 8 months.

That form of Chinese detention, called “residential surveil-
lance in a designated location,” is used by authorities to
hold a suspect for interrogation in a secret location before
any arrest or charge. Human-rights groups describe it as a
frightening situation that sometimes features violence and
leaves the subject cut off from lawyers and family. Harper
says he wasn’t physically abused but was tormented by the
uncertainty around what authorities planned for him.

An unaffiliated basketball pro who had played in
12 countries, Harper had been in Shenzhen for 5 days for
a tournament when he was detained after an altercation he
says he was later told led to a man’s death. He was
eventually released and permitted to leave China in
Sept 2020 without ever being charged with any crime
or appearing in court.

“They do their justice system totally different than
we do ours,” says the 33-year-old from Whiteville TN.
“I’m not a fan of it.”

The residential-surveillance system has received
int'l attention because of a number of high-profile
cases involving political opponents of Beijing’s
leadership and sometimes foreigners such as Harper.

The benign term “residential surveillance” denotes the
system’s origins as a type of house arrest. But accounts
by detainees and findings by human-rights groups suggest
it may be a more systematized process that can feature
purpose-built jail-like facilities with dedicated staff,
sometimes referred to as black jails. Harper says he was
held in what appeared to be a residential building for
police officers.

Acc. to research by a team of human-rights groups led
by Madrid-based Safeguard Defenders, a nonprofit focused
on human rights in China, some 5,810 cases of residential
surveillance were recorded in open-source Chinese court
records for 2020, up 91% from the year before. The group,
which has tracked rising mentions of the practice in
9 years worth of court records, estimates the use of
residential surveillance is closer to double that or more.

“This is used at a mass level,” says Peter Dahlin,
director of Safeguard Defenders, who in the past ran a
legal-aid nonprofit in China before being detained in
2016 and deported. State media at the time accused him of
endangering state security by funding Chinese human-rights
lawyers. Safeguard Defenders, founded after he left China,
has submitted its findings to human-rights bodies at the
UN that have criticized China’s residential-surveillance
practices.

The report being released Tues follows a recent condem-
nation by Biden and other Group of Seven leaders of
arbitrary detention, amid an increased global scrutiny of
China’s human-rights record. Most people subjected to
residential surveillance are Chinese citizens.

In response to questions, a spokesman for China’s Foreign
Ministry rejected in a statement any allegations of
mistreatment of detainees as baseless and said strict
rules govern use of residential surveillance under the law.
It didn’t comment on any specific cases under the system.

Residential surveillance is legal but works outside China’s
formal judicial system; the law permits authorities to hold
an individual for up to six months, often under the rubric
of investigation. If a subject is formally charged, the
person may be placed in a traditional jail awaiting a trial.

Safeguard Defenders, which used an open-source legal
database in China to tally mentions of the practice in
court verdicts, says certain proceedings involving
residential surveillance are never made public, even when
the subject is charged, such as those involving suspected
corruption, state secrets and national-security issues.
The tally also misses those who, like Harper, are released
without ever being charged or tried.

Harper says he was detained after he came upon a violent
fight between a couple and pushed the man to protect the
woman. A few months into his detention, Harper was
informed the man had lapsed into a coma and died.

Some subjects detained under residential surveillance are
released without charge, like Harper, but for many
detainees, residential surveillance precedes a legal
process that can unfold over years. Nearly all Chinese
court cases end with a conviction.

A separate detention system for holding and interrogating
members of the Communist Party works much the same way.
In another type of detention, Uyghurs and other minorities
in China have been rounded up in internment camps that
China’s govt describes as vocational schools.

Often, the only aspect of a subject’s situation known to
the outside world is a note to a family member from
authorities stating the person is part of an investigation
in an undisclosed location.

Harper said he didn’t know where he was or even that a
pandemic was raging but was permitted occasional phone
calls to the U.S. as well as visits from a lawyer and
U.S. consular officials after his girlfriend tracked the
location of his phone. He coped by exercising, praying and
hoping he might one day be aboard one of the jetliners he
glimpsed flying overhead. “Isolation is one of the hardest
things for the human mind,” he said.

Beijing is a signatory to U.N. human-rights conventions—
with reservations. “The Chinese govt believes that the
principle of the universality of human rights must be
respected, but the specific conditions of each country
must also be taken into consideration in observing this
principle,” reads a position statement on the Foreign
Ministry website.

In 2016, China set what it termed a “human-rights action
plan” that pledged limits on the residential-surveillance
measure, including controls on conditions and duration.

Some of China’s highest-profile prisoners have endured
residential surveillance, including literary professor
Liu Xiaobo; Mr. Liu, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
in 2010 while in a Chinese prison, died in custody in 2017
at age 61. Artist Ai Weiwei was likewise confined in
residential surveillance for 81 days and once free
produced artworks mimicking his treatment.

Two Canadians now awaiting trial verdicts after being
charged with endangering Chinese national security,
Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, also spent time in
residential surveillance.

Most detainees aren’t well known, including lawyers who
challenged govt policy, members of the spiritual group
Falun Gong and Christians suspected of running underground
churches, as well as more run-of-the-mill criminal suspects.

Safeguard Defenders produced illustrations of the kind of
unit where detainees recall being held. Suspects are
sometimes kicked or otherwise abused and can be interrogated
in “tiger chairs” that shackle hands and feet, the group
says. The 6-foot-9-inch Harper says he lost 40 lbs in
detention after being fed paltry meals of sometimes
bug-infested rice.

Documents given to former detainees that they provided
to Safeguard Defenders include an English-language pamphlet
of rules for someone under residential surveillance. “Sleep
on your back and keep both arms above the blanket at all
times,” it instructs. Terms of release are spelled out in
another document, which requires a pledge from the subject
to not reveal any details of the residential-surveillance
experience to anyone, specifically media and foreign missions.

Human-rights groups such as Amnesty Int'l and Human Rights
Watch for years have documented cases of residential
surveillance. A Human Rights Watch report in 2009 found
evidence of black jails in govt-ministry buildings, hotels,
hostels, nursing homes, mental hospitals, drug-rehab centers
and residential bldgs.

A State Dept travel warning about China says, “U.S. citizens
may be subjected to prolonged interrogations and extended
detention without due process of law.”

Following the G-7 condemnation of arbitrary detention,
which it didn’t link to any one country, the Chinese
Embassy in Canada published a statement that criticized
the language as nonsense and accused Canadian PM Justin
Trudeau, a G-7 participant, of ignoring facts by using
the summit to highlight the cases of Messrs. Kovrig and Spavor.

The U.N. calls “enforced disappearance” a human-rights
crime and says the extralegal technique has been used in
85 nations, including in wartime, often “as a strategy to
spread terror within the society.”

In Jan, a U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention
published a lengthy report concluding that American Kai Li,
whose case is covered in the Safeguard Defenders report,
had been denied his due-process rights after being
detained in China.

Mr. Li was apprehended immediately after flying into
Shanghai in 2016 and spent 10 weeks under residential
surveillance before being charged with providing state
secrets to the U.S. govt. In 2018, he was sentenced to
10 years in prison. His family says the 58-year-old
Mr. Li is innocent.