Shanghai is China’s showcase city. In recent years, from the lockdown in Shanghai to the exposure of black jails, the human rights situation in Shanghai has attracted international attention. An elderly Shanghainese shared their own experiences with a reporter, revealing the true human rights situation in Shanghai.
Yvonne Zhong, a native of Shanghai, is 65 years old. Her family used to be a prominent one with 18 boats for transportation on the Huangpu River and a lot of land. However, starting with her great-grandfather, the family began to decline and eventually sold off their land. By the time it reached her grandfather, only a few houses were left.
In 1949, when the Communist Party came to power, her grandfather became labeled as a “poor peasant.” Yvonne’s father had to work in Puxi and became a member of the “working class.” According to the Communist Party, their family’s “class status” had improved.
“The neighbor who bought our family’s land, also from our same clan, became a landlord. So during the Cultural Revolution, we were supposed to go out and criticize landlords. However, my parents strongly opposed it and stopped us because they had first-hand experience: landlords were thrifty and responsible, while many poor peasant families were wastrels!” Yvonne said. “But it is true that my family did have a lot of houses.”
In 1978, after the resumption of the college entrance examination, Yvonne went to university and graduated with a degree in mechanical design. She worked in a state-owned enterprise in Shanghai. However, the enterprise was corrupt and rife with factional struggles. In a dispute with a leader, she was unfairly treated, leading her to injure the leader with a knife. In 1984, she was sentenced to death for attempted murder by the Shanghai Intermediate People’s Court, amidst the nationwide crackdown. It was only after petitions from colleagues and neighbors to the Shanghai High Court that her sentence was commuted to two years’ reprieve.
After serving several years in prison in Shanghai, Yvonne was transferred to Xinjiang for over a decade. She only returned to Shanghai in 2003 at the age of 43.
Yvonne noticed significant changes in Shanghai. She observed that there had been little change in Shanghai for over two decades. Upon her return, she saw many tall buildings and more fashionable attire. However, in terms of daily life, the poor remained poor.
Her family’s three large reception halls, located in Jindong Village on Jing Bridge Town, had been demolished completely in the 1990s. The old family house was very close to the city center, on the edge of the Inner Ring Road, adjacent to Pudong Avenue. It is now an area filled with residential buildings.
“At that time, houses were not considered valuable, so everyone in the village suffered losses. The government calculated the compensation for taking your house based on bricks, about 200 yuan per square meter, while the houses they sold to you were over 800 yuan per square meter, excluding land value.” As Yvonne’s family had already moved their household registration, they received no compensation.
With the demolition of the ancestral home, the family was scattered. Years later, through investigation, Yvonne discovered that they had been deceived by the government. Since it was an inherited private house, they could have exchanged it without needing the household registration. She gathered land certificates and other documents, had elderly villagers testify, and began petitioning. The Pudong New Area government quickly promised her a new home.
However, when she presented evidence of over 1,200 square meters of property ownership, the officials refused to grant her a house. This action led to a prolonged period of suppression and persecution for Yvonne.
It was revealed that in 2003, house prices in Shanghai began to soar. Initially, for a few hundred thousand yuan, one could buy a small house within the Inner Ring Road area. However, prices increased rapidly, making homeownership increasingly out of reach. Many individuals who wanted to exchange their houses ended up unable to afford new ones within months.
Upon her return to Shanghai, Yvonne started a company and worked during the day at a watch factory, a seafood company, and a mold company. In the evenings, she set up a stall by the roadside, which provided a decent income. In 2009, she married a fellow petitioner, Stone Ping, who had been seeking compensation for a demolished house for many years. In 2006, Stone Ping was sent to a labor camp for one year. Her six-year-old daughter, who was disabled (her former husband had passed away), was sent to a foster home.
During the 2014 Asia Security Summit, Stone Ping participated in a protest along with a dozen others, demanding that Xi Jinping pay attention to human rights issues. They were all sentenced to eight months in prison. After Stone Ping’s release, her health deteriorated rapidly due to abnormal blood indicators.
“In 2015, when she was released, she had red spots all over her body, initially thought to be a skin condition, but later diagnosed as a blood disease. At the hospital, they found traces of a previous stroke, which means she had a stroke while in detention. It became uncontrollable, with the size of the stroke area increasing, leading her to be bedridden for a long time. She passed away on April 28, 2022, at 5:42 am, during the lockdown in Shanghai,” Yvonne recalled.
Stone Ping’s death certificate listed severe pneumonia as the cause of death, but Yvonne suspected it was COVID (coronavirus) pneumonia.
“On April 1st, we were under lockdown. At that time, all the doctors and nurses in the hospital had contracted the virus, there were no doctors on duty, and patients were left unattended. The hospital called me in the morning, saying my wife might not make it. Ten minutes later, they said she did not survive the resuscitation. Later, I learned from the nursing staff that they were already asleep in the middle of the night when she died. It was definitely due to the COVID epidemic,” Yvonne stated.
During the Shanghai lockdown, the neighborhood committee and security forces held significant power. Security personnel could enforce laws on behalf of the government, including arbitrary arrests for quarantine. The volunteer groups in the neighborhood committee received ample food supplies daily, while many people trapped at home struggled to access food.
In her neighborhood in Jing’an district, they went a month without receiving any supplies. Eventually, two young girls from out of town arranged for a truckload of food donations for them through a cleaning friend.
Yvonne believed that the economic situation in Shanghai had worsened significantly since the city’s lockdown. “In the past two years, the economic situation has deteriorated significantly. Many foreign companies have left Shanghai, leading to the return of many non-local workers. As a result, Shanghai feels less vibrant now; I went to a large shopping center and saw very few people,” she mentioned.
Since Stone Ping’s unjust death, the task of petitioning fell solely on Yvonne.
In 2022, to avoid suspicion, Yvonne went south to Kunming and Xishuangbanna, but was pursued by petitioners and ended up being arbitrarily detained in a black jail for nearly two months.
In early 2023, shortly after the Chinese New Year, Yvonne received a call from the head of the Jing Bridge Town petition office, requesting a meeting. However, she was taken into custody. She had already arranged for her daughter to be hospitalized for medical treatment the next day, but was forcibly sent to a detention facility in Chongming District. They took her house keys, entered her home, and forcibly sent her daughter to a foster home, disappearing with twenty thousand yuan, which was meant for medical treatment.
“My biggest grief now is my child’s situation, delaying medical treatment. When my daughter was seriously ill, she cried for seven days and nights, refusing to eat or drink. After a year and a half, under the pressure of the Chairman of the Disabled Persons’ Federation of Jing’an District, she finally received medical attention and was diagnosed with gallstones as large as a thumb. She has been innocently subjected to such cruel persecution, this government is truly inhumane,” Yvonne said. Due to the delay in treatment, her daughter had to sit for long periods and now can’t even walk due to severe heart problems.
During her time at the black jail, Yvonne was guarded by eight men, sometimes even four, all hired from a security company. “Sometimes they would tie me up, sometimes they would kick me on the ground, sometimes they would strip me naked every day, all while hitting me. And it wasn’t just physical abuse; they would also record it with their phones, probably to report to their superiors. The food they provided was leftovers and mostly spoiled,” she elaborated.
In the past year, Yvonne had been to Beijing three times for petitioning. One time, she went to visit her daughter in a foster home and was arrested after just half an hour, spending a month in detention. Recently, her blood pressure soared to over 220, and she was diagnosed with suspected liver cancer. She suspects it was due to consuming the rotten food left by the security guards.
It was exposed that the complaints department had a significant interest in running black jails. They advertised the room rates at over 90 yuan online while the actual cost was only 50 yuan. They leased the rooms for 300 yuan but issued an invoice for 600 yuan, making ten times the profit. Sometimes they would rent entire buildings or courtyards, with nearly twenty rooms, costing over ten thousand yuan per day.
The security fees were also inflated; while guards received less than 200 yuan a day, the government paid the security company around seven to eight hundred yuan. Therefore, the Jing Bridge Town government spent over two million yuan per year in taxpayers’ money on running black jails, not including expenses for trips to Beijing.
Yvonne learned that there were more petitioners in Shanghai than in other provinces or cities due to the development activities and large-scale relocations in the city. To maintain its image as a model city and with zero petitioners going to Beijing, Shanghai resorted to black jails to detain petitioners without resolving their issues, making the complaints department a monstrous entity.
“Moreover, Shanghai now employs various methods; just being detained in black jails is not enough—they also beat you. Many petitioners have been beaten, with some losing teeth or suffering broken ribs,” Yvonne revealed.
Yvonne had petitioned in the north three times last year and also helped other petitioners with their rights. She expressed constant fear of losing her freedom at any moment and even losing her life unexpectedly, living in a state of terror every day. With her daughter needing treatment, should she become unreachable, there was no designated emergency contact for her daughter to receive treatment on her behalf.
“The Shanghai Jing Bridge petition office directly threatened me: ‘We work for the Communist Party, so killing someone doesn’t require taking on any responsibility. They gave an example of a person who was beaten to death in Beicai Town in Pudong New Area a few months ago, with no accountability. Another person from Pudong New Area died in a black jail; who took responsibility for that? No one, no one is held accountable for killing someone; and they said if they just beat you and there’s no major incident. So Shanghai is indeed a dark place,” she said.
Journalists attempted to contact the head of the petition office at the Jing Bridge Town government in Shanghai, Zheng Daorong, to inquire about the situation. However, after briefly answering the call, he hung up and subsequent attempts to contact him were unsuccessful.