The Torture Device China Says Doesn't Exist

What is torture? That question might seem plainly obvious to many, but it’s one with plenty of grey areas that countries around the world frequently exploit. We can probably all agree with most of the heinous methods that have appeared throughout history: the rack, thumbscrews, death by a thousand cuts, waterboarding, mock executions. These are the straightforward ones.

But what about restraint and interrogation? How long can you keep a detainee in a single position before restraint becomes torture? How many hours, or even days, should detainees be questioned for? These are areas where things start to get opaque. Rules vary around the world, sometimes even within national borders, and while the vast majority of nations have signed the United Nations Convention Against Torture, sadly, it remains widespread.

According to human rights groups, China still uses a catalogue of torture techniques that make the stomach churn simply thinking about them, but there is one, which we’re highlighting today, that has become terrifyingly common. This isn’t an improvised torture technique. This isn’t a thug with an iron bar or a towel and a 40-litre jug of water. This is scarily systematic and standardised across the country. They call it the tiger chair.

The Tiger Chair

The official term for it in China is, simply, “an interrogation or restraint chair” — which is both absurd and a little like trying to equate waterboarding to a shower.

Most descriptions, across witness accounts and investigative reporting, are broadly consistent, though it’s also clear that regional differences do exist. This is probably not a chair that the Chinese government produces en masse somewhere — although you never know — but rather a general design that is circulated throughout the provinces and then built by locals.

The chair is typically constructed from metal, with a rigid frame designed to prevent movement. The seat is fixed in place, usually bolted to the floor of an interrogation room, and attached to the frame are restraints for the wrists and ankles. And in some cases, there are additional bars or clamps to stabilise the legs or upper body.

Once secured, the detainee is held in an upright position. Their range of movement is minimal and even small adjustments like shifting weight, stretching legs, repositioning arms are restricted or impossible without intervention.

In official terms, devices like the tiger chair are framed as part of standard interrogation procedure and public security authorities have described interrogation chairs as safety equipment, intended to prevent disruption or harm during questioning.

The emphasis, at least on paper, is on control and stability rather than punishment. One particular Chinese government spokesperson, Beijing Public Security Ministry official Li Wensheng, took it even further when he told a UN committee on torture:

We use the interrogation chair to guarantee the safety of the detainee, to prevent the detainee from escaping, from self-harm or attacking other people. The chair is sometimes packaged with soft padding to increase a sense of comfort, a sense of safety.

And we’ll just let the ridiculousness of those two sentences linger for a moment. Those words come in complete contrast to reports given to the same committee that said: Former detainees said they were strapped to this metal chair for hours and even days, deprived of sleep, and immobilised until their legs and buttocks were swollen.

One former detainee, Lei Xinmu, gave this description:

The tiger chair is an iron chair, its iron buckles fastened around your hands and feet. I sat on the tiger chair, and had two spotlights shining on top of my head. They took turns talking to me, and they did not let me sleep. I could not stand it. I was buckled into the chair for nine days and nights.

I don’t care if a chair is padded with the finest sheep wool, forcing somebody to sit in the same position for 200+ hours can only be considered one thing — torture.

A Slow Torture

I think we can all agree on worse ways to be tortured — some of which China actually does, and we will certainly come to that later — but time in the tiger chair delivers a kind of slow-grinding hell that gradually breaks the soul. It will leave you confessing to every crime under the sun, even those before you were born, if only they’d let you out of the damn chair.

Across interviews with former detainees, lawyers, and investigators, a pattern emerges. The chair is rarely used for short periods. This isn’t the kind of chair that just happens to be sitting in the corner of a room when you go in for a quick 30-minute chat. The tiger chair is used for extended interrogation sessions, where questioning is carried out in cycles over many hours.

Officers or interrogators cycle in and out, while the detainee remains completely restrained through the entire ordeal. In many ways, this works in exactly the same way as the questionings that you see in the movies and on TV. People come and go, they ask you questions, and try to trip you up by asking you to go back and answer the same questions again. In that aspect, this is very normal, except for the restraint.

We’re not talking about a single handcuff to a table or shackles around your feet — we’re talking about detainees being locked into a single seated position for days on end. And often, interrogators are happy to play the long game.

The physical effects are what you might imagine. For the first hour, things might feel relatively normal — except for a growing sense of terror of just being dragged into the back of a police van. But slowly, things worsen. Muscles that are used to movement, even micro-stretches, begin to burn, uncomfortable at first, unbearable soon after.

The legs begin to swell after a couple of days, as do the hands and arms. The neck stings, then feels like it’s on fire, then it feels like things may never feel normal again. Buttock pain is something many highlight. It starts as a deep growing pain that some of us might have experienced if you’ve been sitting on an aeroplane for too long, but this is gradually replaced by agony.

And on top of all of this, you can’t sleep properly, sometimes for days, which in itself is its own passive-aggressive form of torture. Sleep deprivation is often referred to as a ‘clean’ or ‘non-physical’ torture, for the simple reason that it doesn’t leave any marks, but it can cause irreversible neurobiological and psychological damage. When this is coupled with stress positions, sensory overload, such as loud music or bright lights, and environmental disruption, like freezing temperatures, it becomes a vicious torture method.

Modern China

The tiger chair is a sadistic piece of furniture for sure, but it is still just a chair. To really put it into context, we need to zoom out and look at China’s current policing and surveillance system.

Firstly, something like the tiger chair isn’t being used only in some black site jail deep in the mountains and far from civilization – although it almost certainly pops up in those kinds of places too. As far as we know, the tiger chair is fairly common as an interrogation instrument and has been reported at sites across China and even in major cities like Beijing and Shanghai. It is used by regular police in regular police stations.

China’s policing system sits under the authority of the Ministry of Public Security, which itself sits directly below, and answers to, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), not an independent judiciary. Now, this might be entirely obvious to many, but it is worth highlighting. Law enforcement is not fully separated from political priorities and police actions often align with broader state goals, not just criminal investigation.

In practice, this means that when directives are handed out by the CCP, they run directly to the very core of policing all around China. And this is where China’s system becomes more complicated, because while it is highly centralised regarding where decisions are made, local public security bureaus run day-to-day operations, with the local police usually working in complete sync.

And there is a huge amount of pressure with strong incentives to “solve” cases quickly and performance can be influenced by targets, case resolution rates, and stability metrics. Because China is, of course, a wonderfully peaceful nation with next to no crime or social issues – unlike those depraved, crime-ridden cesspits in the West. Or East, I suppose, depending on which way you’re looking.

Obviously, that’s not really the case, and China, like just about everywhere, experiences its fair share of crime. It just either doesn’t report it, or downplays it. According to a report from Macro Trends Data, China Crime Rate & Statistics: Historical data from 1995 to 2020, China’s crime rate per 100,000 for 2020 was 0.50, a 3.22% decline from 2019. And in 2024, China saw 14,000 intentional homicides, down by more than 50% from a decade before.

If you look at the statistics, China is a remarkably well-adjusted society with a population nearing 1.5 billion people.

But, of course, there are huge problems that the Chinese government would rather we didn’t know about. Domestic violence is rampant, sex trafficking is widespread, corruption is far bigger than you’d ever imagine, and the drug trade is monstrous with an annual worth of around $80 billion.

At the centre of all of this is organised crime, which, again, is much bigger than the Chinese government is willing to let on. Human trafficking, counterfeiting, illegal logging, wildlife trafficking, illegal drugs in the west, knock-offs of legal drugs in the west, cyber crime – you name it, crime gangs in China are doing it.

Basically, there’s a lot going on in China that we don’t hear about, but the police response is decidedly mixed. China always seems in the midst of a ‘corruption drive’ and that’s because it has seeped deep down, with the police a particular easy target. Low-paid officers don’t require too much convincing to turn a blind eye or to operate as protective umbrellas for criminals around the country.

On the other hand, social cohesion is paramount for the CCP. When your population essentially doesn’t have any power whatsoever, it’s important that they stay in line and behave like good upstanding citizens of the glorious People’s Republic of China. To do that, the CCP has rolled out an array of methods that are, to put it lightly, intense.

Relational repression – also referred to as the Pol Pot-esque, ‘Thought Work’ – involves local officials, party workers, or even employers contacting family members, friends, or colleagues of somebody who has stepped out of line. Those people then “encourage” the individual to comply with state expectations all while the vague threat of further escalation hanging over them.

Grid management and grassroots control involve cities and towns divided into tiny zones, sometimes just a few blocks or a single building cluster. Each zone has designated personnel responsible for monitoring residents, and these “grid workers” collect data, report unusual activity, and maintain close contact with households.

Campaigns like Operation Fox Hunt focus on bringing back individuals accused of corruption or financial crimes who have fled abroad. And this essentially involves the threat of dragging your entire extended family into a reeducation camp for the next ten years unless said individual complies.

Then, of course, we’ve got China’s infamous social credit system. Now, to be fair, there has been a lot of exaggeration about this. It’s not a giant database where each person has a score, but rather a patchwork of multiple systems run by courts, regulators, and local governments. A bad score can lead to being blacklisted from financial organisations, banned from air or train travel, as well as restrictions on certain jobs and business opportunities.

China is absolutely paranoid about social unrest and dissent that steps outside what the CCP allows, and to keep track of it all, they’ve developed a complex system that ranges from community monitoring to state-of-the-art surveillance.

Sharp Eyes

The tiger chair plays its wicked medieval role, but for those who are strapped into it, they’re often there because of one of the world’s most sophisticated surveillance systems, known in China as Sharp Eyes.

Now, if you thought the NSA was a little intrusive, Sharp Eyes is on a different level. The name comes from a Mao-era slogan suggesting that “the people have sharp eyes,” meaning ordinary citizens can help observe and report – and that’s how it all got started.

In 2013, officials in Pingyi County began rolling out a large-scale surveillance network, installing tens of thousands of cameras across towns and rural areas. By 2016, that number had climbed past 28,500 and even smaller villages had at least six cameras in place.

And this is where it gets a bit, well, communist. Because these cameras were not solely for police use. Residents were brought into the process as well, with special TV boxes installed in homes allowing people to view live camera feeds, and if something seemed off, they could alert authorities at the press of a button. The same footage could also be accessed through smartphones, extending that visibility beyond the home.

If you remember during COVID-19 when people reported their neighbours for being outside too long, it’s basically that, on a massive scale.

Two years later, in 2015, the government announced plans to expand this model nationwide, with a strong push into remote and rural regions. In 2016, when China announced its latest five-year plan, part of that plan was to roll out the Sharp Eyes network to achieve 100% coverage of China’s public spaces by 2020. It’s not entirely clear whether that’s been achieved, but most assume it either has, or is very close.

But that’s just part of this rigorous surveillance system the Chinese have set up. Back in 2003, The Golden Shield Project – also known as the Great Firewall of China – went live, and has, for more than 20 years, been the cornerstone of the country’s strict internet censorship. It filters internet traffic, blocks foreign websites, and monitors users to control information flow, but also quietly gathers information on them.

It correlates data such as national ID records, household registration, criminal histories, travel records, and increasingly, biometric identifiers. Over time, it has incorporated video surveillance networks, such as Sharp Eyes, license-plate recognition, and facial recognition systems, enabling both real-time and retrospective tracking of individuals and groups.

China now has a multi-layered system where the authorities can keep track of individuals, and when your time comes, whether you’ve been a little forthright with a WeChat post, said the wrong thing in a work meeting, or been caught selling counterfeit goods, that’s when you enter an entirely different world. A world where even China’s policing laws are, shall we say, flexible.

The Interrogation System

At the centre of this structure is the role of the police. In many cases, the same authority is responsible for both investigating a crime and managing the detention of the suspect. This concentrates control at the earliest stage of a case, when the least oversight is present and when the suspect is most vulnerable.

During this initial phase, access to external scrutiny is limited. Lawyers are often not present during questioning, and in some cases, access to legal counsel is delayed or simply just never given. Families might not even be told that a loved one has been detained until weeks or months after they disappear.

Interrogations can take place repeatedly, over extended periods, with few independent checks on how they are conducted. On paper, there are safeguards, just like I’m sure Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib had safeguards, but in practice, their application is entirely up to the officers in charge.

In China, huge emphasis is placed on confessions, rather than, you know, actual evidence. In a lot of cases, a confession isn’t just part of a prosecution, but a key foundation of the case itself. In many cases, it’s literally all the police have got. A written statement, signed by the suspect, can carry significant weight in court, and as a result, the process is often geared towards securing that statement.

This creates a specific kind of pressure. The objective is not only to gather information, but to produce an admission of guilt that can be formally recorded. And, unsurprisingly, this is where the boundaries between an interview and integration begin to blur.

And the legal position doesn’t help here. While suspects are not always explicitly required to confess, they are expected to cooperate with questioning and to answer truthfully. There is no clear, consistently applied equivalent of the right to remain silent. In practical terms, refusing to engage can itself create suspicion or prolong the process. And trust me, there are worse things they can use than the tiger chair.

The major problem here is that it’s a completely closed environment where information flows almost entirely through the police. They bring a suspect, and then, five days later, hey presto, that suspect has signed a statement confirming his or her guilt. Nobody has any idea what has happened during those five days.

Medical verification presents similar difficulties. Independent examinations are not always available, and where injuries are absent or minimal, there may be little physical evidence to support claims of mistreatment. Some reported methods are designed to avoid leaving visible marks, which further complicates the process of documentation.

For investigators, there is an incentive to resolve cases efficiently and to secure statements that align with the available evidence. For suspects, well, after multiple days strapped into the tiger chair with your bones screaming at you, your limbs swelling, and your sanity teetering on the edge, you’ll say just about anything to get it all to stop.

Over time, this cruel doom loop can become self-reinforcing. High reliance on confessions contributes to high conviction rates, and high conviction rates reinforce the expectation that cases should produce clear admissions of guilt. The system, in effect, rewards outcomes that confirm its own assumptions. China’s conviction rate is often cited as above 99% in criminal cases, and this is why.

Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location

So far, we’ve covered what you can probably describe as relatively normal, if still brutally rudimentary police practice, but China has a darker layer where people can simply disappear.

Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location (RSDL) sounds almost pleasant, like the police were simply nice enough to camp outside your home and just make sure you don’t leave. In reality, it is legalised terror, where security services can essentially kidnap somebody and hold them at an undisclosed location for up to 6 months, without formal arrest.

It is most commonly used in cases involving national security, political sensitivity, or offences that fall outside standard criminal categories – which can include lawyers, journalists, academics, and activists, as well as individuals connected to them.

Surely this can’t be legal, I hear you cry – but of course it is. This is China, and the legal basis for RSDL exists within China’s Criminal Procedure Law. In official terms, it is nicely presented as a form of residential surveillance, intended to manage cases where standard detention is considered unsuitable. This might be because of the risk of evidence being destroyed or the need to prevent collusion between suspects.

Basically, China has long tried to paint RSDL as a detainee sitting around in a hotel room, probably ordering room service, while people ask them questions. In practice, it’s much, much darker.

This is essentially a forced disappearance where the people around you have absolutely no idea what’s going on, while also denying the detainee access to a lawyer. The irony of it all was that it began as a clause in the 1954 Law on Detention and Arrest put in place for those who couldn’t be formally arrested, such as the seriously ill, pregnant, or women nursing a newborn.

In the 1980s and 1990s, there were some serious RSDL abuses, sometimes linked with police corruption, which forced some major changes. And those held up until the 2010s, where its use expanded dramatically, including notable figures like artist Ai Weiwei, Nobel Peace Prize-winning poet Liu Xiaobo, Swedish bookseller Gui Minhai, and women’s tennis star Peng Shuai.

Not many people talk about their experiences when they come out of RSDL, but there have certainly been stories of “surveillance” that sounded remarkably like torture, and pieces of “furniture” that sounded remarkably like tiger chairs.

Interrogation within RSDL follows a similar pattern to the broader system, but with fewer external constraints. Questioning can be prolonged and repeated, and the absence of independent oversight means investigators have pretty much free rein. Reports from former detainees describe continuous lighting, sleep disruption, and sustained psychological pressure.

RSDL is something that China has attempted to spin to its own benefit – a malevolent stay at a local hotel that simply provides a nice environment for a quick chat. Of course, we all know it’s not like that at all. On November 2nd, 2021, tennis player Peng Shuai posted that former Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli had forced her into a sexual relationship. The post was quickly deleted, but she vanished from public life for weeks with an extended stay at a RSDL facility.

When she emerged, she retracted her statement, moved through several carefully controlled public events where she admitted her wrongs and swore allegiance to the higher powers, before joining society once more. That, is the reality of the RSDL.

Legality vs Practicality

So RSDL is legal, but what about forced restraint for multiple days? Well, yes and no. The legal position of the tiger chair is ambiguous, and that’s probably exactly the point. Torture is prohibited.

The extraction of confessions through coercion is a criminal offence, and statements obtained under such conditions are not meant to be used as evidence in court. These prohibitions stretch back to 1979, while China ratified the United Nations Convention against Torture in 1988 – the year before they killed hundreds, if not thousands, of protestors in Tiananmen Square.

But, this law is flimsy at best. According to a report by Human Rights Watch:

Out of 432 court verdicts from early 2014 in which suspects alleged torture, only 23 resulted in evidence being thrown out by the court; none led to acquittal of the defendant.

However, this is a topic that is frequently discussed in China. In May 2010, a case drew widespread attention across the country. A 57-year-old man named Zhao Zuohai had been convicted of murdering a neighbour more than a decade earlier, in 1999. Then, on 30th April, the supposed victim reappeared in the village, alive. Apparently he hadn’t been killed after all, and simply fled the area of a confrontation with Zuohai. So where did the police get their evidence? I think you can probably guess.

After extensive questioning, restraint, or torture – I’ll let you choose the word – Zuohai had confessed to the murder and spent the next 11 years in prison for a crime that hadn’t even taken place. His case drew widespread attention, but wasn’t an isolated incident. In 2009 and 2010, several similar stories began to surface, and suddenly China was talking about police conduct.

Again, from the same Human Rights Watch Report:

In a landmark case, a court acquitted Nian Bin who spent eight years on death row for the murder of two children based on his confession obtained through torture. In another case, a court in Inner Mongolia issued a posthumous exoneration of Huugjilt, an ethnic Mongolian teenager executed in 1996 for rape and murder also based on a confession obtained through torture. In both cases, the internal mechanisms responsible for police oversight—police internal supervision units, the procuratorate, and the courts— missed or ignored the use of torture to obtain convictions.

But the thing is that in China, even if a degree of liberty is granted to the people to disagree with aspects of society, it doesn’t necessarily mean anything is going to change. The CCP’s prerogative is, and always has been, maintaining control. Therefore, those that it sees as an issue, whether that’s a human rights lawyer, artist, tennis player or simply an unlucky Uyghur from the Xinjiang region, are all too easily and quietly slipped under the barrier of what most in China deem acceptable.

The crux of the argument surrounding tiger chairs is: is it considered torture or not? If we take the words from Li Wensheng at the start of the video, the chairs are merely nicely padded seating devices that actually protect detainees. I’m going to go out on a whim here and say that many watching this video would disagree, but it does create an interesting discussion.

What is torture? For some techniques – waterboarding, electrodes strapped to the genitals, having your hand demolished by a hammer – the idea of what constitutes torture is relatively clear. But is restraint torture? Is there a difference between the tiger chair and a normal chair with your hands and feet shackled separately?

It’s pretty clear that many in law enforcement in China don’t see something like the tiger chair as a form of torture. Or they do, but it’s in one of those grey areas where it becomes easy to look the other way. However, things don’t always stop at the tiger chair.

Cell Bosses & Other Torture Methods

You might think that once you are finally dragged back to your cell after several days in the tiger chair, things might improve. But that’s not a given. You’ve simply moved into a new hell, one where the cell boss is waiting to destroy your soul.

Cell bosses sound like something you’d get in a computer game, but they are the terrifying reality for many detainees in China. These are detainees who are given informal authority within shared cells. In official terms, detention centres are managed by guards and administrative staff.

However, certain prisoners may be allowed to take on supervisory roles over others, which might include maintaining order, enforcing routines, and reporting behaviour to staff. It might also include beating you to within an inch of your life, while quietly whispering that it might be a good idea to change your story during the next questioning.

The arrangement works perfectly for law enforcement as they have complete deniability. They simply questioned a detainee and then returned him to his cell where he ‘unfortunately’ ran into an unsavoury character with a complicated criminal background.

Accounts from former detainees suggest that cell bosses act as enforcers within the cell, which could be physical; fists, feet, metal bars, or it could be psychological, constant monitoring, intimidation, or the threat of escalation.

Of course, the use of such thuggery in Chinese jails is formally prohibited, but there are enough stories circulating to show its widespread use. It’s another sadistic method to break you, and this time, those in control don’t even need to lift a finger.

And from there, there are various other methods available to send you over the edge, and all of what’s coming up appeared in a report Torture Techniques in the People’s Republic of China, compiled by the International Society for Human Rights.

Sleep deprivation is one of the most frequently used and, over time, fatigue affects concentration, memory, and decision-making, reducing the ability to maintain consistent resistance. After five days in a tiger chair with no sleep, you’ll say pretty much anything.

Prolonged stress positions are another recurring theme, and this might be in the tiger chair, crouched down, or even standing. This might not seem like torture, but crouch down with your hands above your head for even an hour, and you’ll quickly rethink that.

Environmental controls are also used, with continuous lighting and controlled access to basic needs such as food or water can contribute to disorientation. Again, these might not be considered awful, but they alter the conditions under which a person is expected to respond to questioning.

And, I’m afraid, from here things quickly degenerate into the macabre. Beatings with iron rods, belt buckles, nettles, cables, and boards with nails sticking out. The stretching of limbs, including the infamous ‘bed pressing’ that involves detainees being tied up under bed legs while torturers or other inmates jump on the bed.

Then there’s hanging by the hands, hanging upside down, forced feeding, sometimes with substances saturated salt solutions, vinegar, alcohol, red pepper, urine or excrement. Burning, with cigarettes, white-hot rods, or with boiling water thrown over them. Stabs and cut wounds, suffocation, the breaking of bones, and the use of animals, such as dogs.

There have also been numerous disturbing cases of female detainees being held in the same cells as male criminals. Sometimes, the women are stripped first, then the men are told that there will be no consequences for anything that occurs in those cells. And we’ll leave that there.

If the tiger chair was a semi-sanitised ‘restraint system’, then it’s simply the first step of a horrifying process where law enforcement and trained torturers do whatever they need to do to get what they want.

China’s Secrets

China has a secret that it would rather the world not know about, but information about the Xinjiang detention camps has been leaking out for years.

Much of what we’ve talked about so far lies within the standard criminal justice system in China, but there is a separate network of detention facilities that operates under a completely different and much darker framework. These are most commonly associated with the Xinjiang region in western China, and with the Uyghur Muslim population that lives there.

The Chinese government describes these facilities as vocational education and training centres and in official statements, they are presented as part of a broader counter-extremism strategy, aimed at preventing terrorism, reducing radicalisation, and providing job skills. This sounds very much like corrective measures, rather than punitive. However, reporting from journalists, satellite imagery, leaked documents, and testimonies from former detainees paints a very different picture.

In truth, we just don’t know how many Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims have been sent to these camps since 2017, but figures could be as high as 1.5 million, according to Adrian Zenz, a German anthropologist known for his studies of the Xinjiang internment camps, and whose work is often cited at the U.N.

So why has China created the largest internment system since World War II? Well, because it sees these people as a threat. Since the 1950s, the Chinese government has been doing its best to crush Uyghur traditions, most notably by sponsoring the migration of millions of ethnic Han Chinese into the region.

But it hasn’t worked, and in recent decades, there have been several attacks and suicide bombings in Xinjiang as calls for greater autonomy grew. The attack in Ürümqi in 2014 that left 39 dead seemed to tip the Chinese government over the edge, and they initiated the ‘Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism’ that same year.

In 2015, a senior CCP official argued that:

A third (of Xinjiang’s Uyghurs) were polluted by religious extremist forces, and needed to be educated and reformed through concentrated force.

At the same time, Chinese authorities instigated a massive surveillance program in the area, and any number of 36 different ‘person types’ could lead to your arrest and incarceration in one of the camps. These included having an abnormal beard, using more electricity than usual, using your back door rather than your front door, socialising too little, or being related to anybody who exhibited these traits.

And perhaps, inevitably, considering the video’s subject matter, we have to return to torture. Many of the techniques described in the previous section were taken from various reports compiled by human rights organisations, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. And many, if not all of them, have been linked with camps in Xinjiang province.

The endless brainwashing through communist propaganda blared by speakers, the chanting of slogans in reverence to Xi Jinping – these are no doubt psychologically torturous, but there was worse to come. There have been numerous reports of tiger chairs, or similar contraptions, and some which sound significantly more painful, used to extract false confessions, or, in some cases, simply to punish detainees for being from that part of the world.

Other reports suggest detainees being injected with mysterious concoctions that made them faint while a mysterious white liquid erupted from their mouths. Widespread sexual violence, forced abortions, forced use of contraceptive devices and compulsory sterilisation. Muslims were forced to eat pork and drink alcohol. It was, and may still be, an absolute horror show that wouldn’t have been out of place in Nazi Germany.

But then, for many, it finally came time to go home. While some were sent to prison, the majority were simply required to spend time within the camp as the system slowly and systematically broke them, as their heritage was gradually ground down, and indoctrination took hold. Most have remained under constant surveillance of some kind ever since, living a life of utter fear of being sent back.

Crushing the Soul

The tiger chair is just the start. It’s something that many holding facilities, RSDL settings, and internment camps in China have. It’s what you are strapped into when those in charge want a certain kind of answer, but aren’t fussy about time. It probably won’t even leave any long-term marks, but that memory will certainly haunt you until your dying day.

Yet what comes next, or what might be used in other situations in China, is horror magnified countless times. China is a country that allows a degree of freedom these days. It has to maintain its facade and its position as a global leader, but don’t let that fool you. This is a country that is still willing to stamp out any form of dissent by means that are utterly barbaric.

Whether you’re a well-known tennis player who makes a risky accusation or a Uyghur with a suspiciously long beard, what follows might be forced detention, a medieval-style restraint, or torture dreamt up in hell itself.

Olivier Guiberteau

Key Takeaways

• The tiger chair is a systematic torture method used in China for prolonged interrogation.
• Detainees are restrained in the tiger chair for extended periods, causing severe physical and psychological harm.
• China’s policing system is highly centralized and aligned with political priorities, often exploiting legal grey areas.
• The tiger chair is part of a broader system of surveillance and repression in China, including RSDL and internment camps.
• Torture methods in China include sleep deprivation, stress positions, and various forms of physical abuse.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the tiger chair?

The tiger chair is an interrogation or restraint chair used in China. It is a metal chair with restraints for the wrists and ankles, designed to keep detainees in a fixed, upright position for extended periods.

How does the Chinese government justify the use of the tiger chair?

The Chinese government describes the tiger chair as safety equipment intended to prevent disruption or harm during questioning, emphasizing control and stability rather than punishment.

What are the physical effects of prolonged use of the tiger chair?

Prolonged use of the tiger chair can cause muscle burning, swelling of the legs, hands, and arms, neck pain, and severe buttock pain. It also leads to sleep deprivation, which can cause neurobiological and psychological damage.

How is the tiger chair used in interrogations?

The tiger chair is used for extended interrogation sessions, where detainees are restrained for many hours or even days. Interrogators cycle in and out, asking questions and trying to trip up the detainee.

What is the legal status of the tiger chair in China?

The legal status of the tiger chair is ambiguous. While torture is prohibited in China, the use of the tiger chair falls into a grey area where it is often overlooked or justified as a necessary interrogation tool.

What other torture methods are used in China besides the tiger chair?

Other torture methods in China include sleep deprivation, prolonged stress positions, environmental controls, beatings, stretching of limbs, hanging, forced feeding, burning, sexual violence, and forced sterilization.

What is Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location (RSDL)?

RSDL is a legalized form of forced disappearance in China where security services can hold individuals at an undisclosed location for up to 6 months without formal arrest, often used in cases involving national security or political sensitivity.

How does the Chinese government describe the detention camps in Xinjiang?

The Chinese government describes the detention camps in Xinjiang as vocational education and training centers aimed at preventing terrorism, reducing radicalization, and providing job skills.

What is the Sharp Eyes surveillance system in China?

Sharp Eyes is a large-scale surveillance network in China that involves tens of thousands of cameras installed across towns and rural areas, allowing residents and authorities to monitor and report unusual activity.

How does the Chinese legal system handle confessions obtained through torture?

Despite laws prohibiting the use of torture and coerced confessions, the Chinese legal system often relies heavily on confessions, and there are few independent checks on interrogation methods. Confessions obtained through torture are sometimes used as evidence in court.

Sources

• Original Into the Shadows video: The Torture Device China Says Doesn’t Exist
• Hero image source by openverse, cc0.

Related Coverage