China Witness

and everything. Then there was preliminary examination, interrogation and investigation. After the detainees had arrived in prison, they were passed to a prison examiner whose job was, first, to look into the detainee's circumstances and, second, to clarify the family's circumstances. If it was a counterrevolutionary charge, they had to look at the detainee's friends too.

XINRAN: And were corporal punishment and torture part of this?

JINGGUAN: They were not permitted in the rules, but in fact to a certain degree the police did connive with prisoners punishing prisoners. Some of the prisoners really were lying, but the police were not allowed to beat them, so they would drop hints to the head prisoner: so-and-so's not telling the truth, give him a helping hand! At the beginning, we really would interrogate them in a civilised way but because prisoners would reckon it didn't matter what they said, the police would still say they were lying, they simply messed around. Sometimes, the police did extort confessions. One day, I was on duty, and I heard that a prisoner had broken a pile of bowls. That sounded strange, so I got him out and asked him: 'How did those bowls get broken?' He said: 'They fell off my head and broke.' I said: 'Why did you put them on your head?' He said nothing, so I told him I was in charge of the detention centre, and if he didn't say anything then he would be punished! So he said the police examining him had said he was lying and made him stand there with a pile of bowls on his head. His neck began to ache, he felt dizzy and the bowls fell on the floor. At this, the police got the senior prisoners to beat him up. It looked like he'd taken a heavy beating, and when they'd finished with him, they made him say he'd deliberately broken the bowls.

XINRAN: So in reality there was corporal punishment and forced confession.

JINGGUAN: Oh yes. The people running the section would rely on the chief prisoners or long-term prisoners to beat up the new ones. Another way was for four or five of the older men to form a group which tyrannised the detention centre, and mostly this mafia would be chosen by the prisoners themselves. We indicated who should be godfather, and who should be in for a bad time, and then we left it to them to choose. But these godfathers became prison bullies, and everyone knew that. When there was proof, they would be punished. But the prisoners were afraid of them and protected them.

XINRAN: But the cadres in charge needed this mafia, didn't they?

JINGGUAN: That's right. Without them, the prison would be even more unmanageable. I think it's the same in all prisons.

XINRAN: How did you feel when China began to move towards the extreme left?

JINGGUAN: The move to the left began in 1956, it was ridiculously 'left', frighteningly so. There were newspaper reports every day, saying that the slogan for agriculture was 1,000 pounds of grain and 10,000 pounds of vegetables per mu of land, but in fact this was impossible. Yet if you told the truth, you became a 'rightist', so you couldn't, and I didn't. The leaders made their speeches and no one wanted to be a rightist. Rightism was wrong, but wasn't leftism wrong too? There were people taking care of rightism, but no one was taking care of leftism. If you were honest and conscientious, then that equalled being a rightist.

In the counties on the outskirts of Zhengzhou, 1,000 pounds of grain per mu of land was quite impossible! And 10,000 pounds of vegetables was impossible too. But especially after the Anti-Rightist movement of 1957, that was the mood. The Henan Daily published the first explosive news report in 1958: the per mu yield for wheat in Henan was 7,320 pounds. By the time of the 1958 winter wheat harvest, the papers reported that the per mu yield was 200,000 pounds! In 1959, I was sent down to a village on the northern outskirts of Zhengzhou where they had an experimental field. When they reported the yield, they had to have the signature of the inspector. I was the inspector. They were getting 470 pounds per mu. I could see that the scales were accurate, but the production team leader wanted me to report 1,000 pounds per mu. I wouldn't. In the end, the commune reported that his per mu yield was 520 pounds. If you didn't make such reports, you weren't revolutionary! There was a woman production team leader who talked such a lot of rubbish. She was eighteen or nineteen and unmarried, and she challenged them to get 200,000 pounds per mu on the experimental field, or she wouldn't get married! The old men and women in the village laughed and said: 'You're going to be left on the shelf then!'

XINRAN: Generally speaking, in the counties on the outskirts of Zhengzhou, what is the per mu yield now?

JINGGUAN: Six or seven hundred pounds is normal for a wheat field. Because seeds and fertiliser are better now than they were then, that's why it's increased. Back then a lot of nonsense was talked. There was a production team leader who said he wanted to haul the 300,000 pounds of sweet potatoes grown on one mu of land to Moscow to present to Stalin. That was just rubbish, quite impossible. But no one dared contradict him.

XINRAN: The prisoners you had at the end of the fifties, what kind of people were they? Were there more criminals or more political prisoners?

JINGGUAN: In 1958, most were counter-revolutionaries, too many for the detention centre to hold. We had to commandeer warehouses and storerooms for the prisoners, not like now when there aren't any counterrevolutionaries.

XINRAN: Do you remember what kind of prisoners you interrogated?

JINGGUAN: I didn't do much interrogation because I was section head. I attended meetings with my seniors, and I managed those under me. When other officers had finished the interrogations, they reported to you, you checked everything, signed it off and passed the report up. It should have been the PSB chief who put his signature and seal on the reports, but he was busy with meetings, so he delegated it to his deputy, and when he got too busy, it got delegated to the section head, who signed it. Then it received the seal of the municipal PSB, who referred it to the procuratorate, who examined it, and referred it to the courts, who passed sentence. In fact, referring it to the judiciary was a formality; the real power was with the PSB and, in the PSB, with the policemen who did the work. The courts only knew how to deal with the big cases, like murder, arson and hold-ups. Everyone was so poor then that there was nothing to steal. Most of the work was arresting vagrants, and illegal squatting by the transient population.

Before 1980, the police had to go and interrogate a man and a woman if they'd been sitting together. And sleeping together before marriage put you in prison. If you could get someone to vouch for you, you wouldn't get a big punishment and they'd let you go. But if it was homicide, you'd get decent food, but no one would dare let you out. Not like now – if you've got support from someone senior, they get you to write a false confession, change your file and before it's sent to the procuratorate, the killing's been changed into 'self-defence'. So daring of them!

XINRAN: You have said a number of times that the police were poorly educated. To your knowledge, how many of the police in those days really had any legal or professional training?

JINGGUAN: None of them, not one! In the municipal PSB, only one or two of the section heads had finished lower middle school, most had just done primary. The PSB had a regulation, by the way, that the police had to have good political backgrounds, so many of them were from poor families, poor workers and the lowest peasants.

XINRAN: So their professional skills were very limited. Was their outlook as individuals influenced by their class background?

JINGGUAN: In those days, the political ethos, right from central government to the regions, was that in the countryside you relied on the peasants, and in the cities you relied on the working class. It could be summed up simply: rely on the poor. Particularly in the law enforcement agencies, people with learning or from a high-class background were not permitted.

XINRAN: Were there a lot of people with learning or from a high-class background in prison?

JINGGUAN: Yes, especially among the counter-revolutionary prisoners.

XINRAN: So how were cases investigated and decided if law enforcement officers were so uneducated?

JINGGUAN: Our leaders divided it up into several different stages, didn't they?

The first stage was the 1950 consolidation period, when the focus was on bandits, tyrants, key GMD counter- revolutionaries and Chiang Kaishek's spy network.

The second stage was 1956, defined as the 'army, officials, police and the law' stage. In the GMD Army there was no criminal activity: most of the senior officers hadn't committed any crime.

Here's an example of a serious crime: someone came to Anyang to arrest a suspect on the run from his village. The suspect had killed the chairman of the village council, disembowelled him, dug his heart out and eaten it. Then he had killed the Women's Federation leader, then a dozen other people, and then he had fled. The person from Anyang contacted our local police station and our household registration officers went to the home of a relative of