Unshackling Liberty in China : U.S. should use trade to curb torture such as described in new Amnesty report

Visualize a wooden door, laid flat and standing on four short legs. At each of its corners are manacles. Now visualize a person spread-eagled on this board, arms and legs restrained, forced to evacuate through a hole near its middle, left immobile for weeks, for months on end.

Such a device exists. It is called a shackle board. It is used, says Amnesty International in a new report, in China’s jails.

Peng Yuzhang, a retired university professor in his 70s, was arrested for participating in a peaceful demonstration in Changsha in 1989. For three months, the London-based human rights group reports, he was tied to a shackle board. Not long after he was released from this torture he was forcibly committed to a psychiatric asylum. Amnesty says it does not know if Peng is still alive. It does note that “several cases have been reported of prisoners who were left shackled to the board continuously for several months, with some becoming mentally disturbed as a result.”

Amnesty finds that torture of Chinese prisoners has increased markedly over the last decade, with the shackle board being only one of a number of barbaric instruments used to inflict extreme pain.

It links the use of brutality to the government’s anti-crime campaign and the emphasis by China’s law enforcement and judicial systems on extracting confessions from prisoners. The most frequent victims are the poor and uneducated, though some students arrested in the 1989 protests are also known to have suffered severe mistreatment.

China’s torture of prisoners of course is not unique. Amnesty regularly directs attention to dozens of countries where it is able to document grim and tragic episodes of similar outrages. But human rights abuses in China are of special interest to the United States, because there may be a chance to alleviate them.

This week Commerce Secretary Barbara Hackman Franklin will visit China “to mark the resumption of high-level economic talks” that have been suspended since mid-1989.

In a statement, Franklin repeated that the Bush Administration believes that by encouraging reforms in China and its integration into the world economic system, “economic freedom will inevitably lead to political freedom.” Maybe. But while that inevitability is awaited, prisoners in China continue to be routinely beaten, confined in tiny, foul cells, pinioned to shackle boards.

What can be done? The link is clear. The United States is a major market for China’s exports. This year Beijing’s trade surplus will likely reach a whopping $19 billion. Surely it’s time for Washington to begin seriously using its strong economic leverage to push China toward a greater respect for human rights.