Free of Charge

When four foreigners raised a Tibet banner in Beijing, these were the Chinese who interrogated them. A true account based on eyewitness testimony.

by Steve Cotner

A white police van passes easily through light evening traffic on Beijing’s southeast side, a dozen or so people inside shuttling from the downtown station, all of them police except for three interpreters in the back row. As it crosses the Fifth Ring Road a bump stirs one of them, a young man leaning against the window who has been nodding in and out of sleep. The others can faintly make out a song by Liang Jing Ru playing in his earbuds. His first thought on waking is China’s Olympic medal count, so he takes out a headphone and nudges the girl hunched against his right side. They have never worked together before tonight, but the two talk for a bit about gold medals, then the total count, before road noise fills up a pause and they fall back to napping. The German interpreter pressed against the right window, her glasses in her lap, has not said a word. A while longer and the van passes under a gate with a banner strung across that reads, in Chinese, “Take more responsibility to make the Olympics safer.”

Inside the detention center, the police head down a hallway as the young man stops in a bathroom and his partner lingers outside. When he comes out, she is looking around idly, studying some photos on the wall. They follow down the cement floor of the wide corridor toward the separate rooms where they will spend the night. It is already approaching ten o’clock.

Jin er wanshang guo nan ao de, he says, in Beijing dialect: “It could be a tough night.”

The girl agrees.

…

A woman from England, looking to be in her late thirties, is already in the room when the young translator enters, and two police, a middle-aged man and a young woman, are looking through her file as they wait for him.

“This is Amanda McKeown,” the man says. The British woman nods as the interpreter sits down next to the police, the three of them facing a wood grain table built into a hole in the wall that opens to the foreigner. Metal bars reach from the ceiling to the surface of the table, and on the right, built into the wall, is the door through which the police led the woman a few minutes earlier. Bare light bulbs shine down from the ceiling. Forty-one years old, they say, from the United Kingdom.

She is a healthy looking woman with a ruddy complexion and shoulder-length brown hair, but she is a funny sight in her prison-issued clothes. The police have given her a red short-sleeved shirt and red shorts with no writing on them — the same outfit given to every detainee — and they fit her like a robe. She sits in a metal chair with a bar that closes over her legs and connects underneath the seat.

“Let’s begin,” the policeman says.

They ask about her family — she has two children and a husband. She is from Bristol. When they ask what she does for work, she tells them she is a fundraiser for the International Tibet Support Network.

The interpreter pauses a moment and says, Guoji Xizang Yuanzhu Wanglu Zuzhi.

On a xeroxed form on the table, with spaces for the name and date and blank lines for notes, the police girl enters 国际西藏援助网络组织 in neat handwriting. She is the same age as the interpreter, in her mid-twenties, and everyone agrees that she is cute, though no one talks about it. She has a master’s in law from a Beijing university and she smells faintly of face cream.

The policeman asks questions for a long time about her intentions, about the nature of her organization, until the British woman asks, smiling, “Can you loosen the chair?”

Watching the young man as he translates, the policeman says hao and goes through the door in the wall. He raises the bar so the woman can stand up and, as she stretches, the girl speaks to her in English.

“Are you tired? Would you like something to eat?” Her voice is gentle and her accent, which gives her away as a Beijing native in Chinese, is both careful and a little musical in English.

The policeman gives the woman one of his cigarettes and the girl passes through the bars a yellow apple. After a minute of moving around, the woman sits down again. The bar can’t be adjusted any looser — it is either open or closed — so, without explanation, the policeman closes it over her and they resume.

In adjacent rooms, two Americans and a German are giving information about themselves, some more, some less. The girl who sat next to the young man in the van is stuck with an American with a thick mustache, who doesn’t offer anything at all. As she translates questions that go unanswered, she thinks of the melody from her partner’s headphones and imagines herself on a beach, like in the music video. After a long time of going nowhere, her room takes a breather, and she walks up and down the hallway by herself.

The British woman gets another break at about the same time. She has asked to go to the bathroom, and the young policewoman has led her down the hall to the women’s room, where she follows her inside. The policeman lights a cigarette in the interrogation room and looks over the oral statement as the young man goes out.

“How’s it going?” he asks his partner, who has caught up to him in the hallway.

“Terrible. He won’t say a thing.”

He goes back to the room and puts his head on the table for a few minutes. When the British woman returns, he sits up and, while she gets into the chair again, asks her how she feels.

“Much better.”

“What team do you support in England?”

She is tired enough that she doesn’t register any surprise at the question. “Arsenal.”

They talk for a couple minutes about the recent trades between Manchester City, Man U, and Newcastle, until the girl picks up her ballpoint pen and the policeman puts out his cigarette.

…

The interrogation of these four protestors will eventually make world headlines. After questioning, they are each held for nearly a week under what Beijing officials call administrative detention, and returned home after their respective governments issue demands. The American with the mustache, a young man named John Watterberg, will eventually tell a reporter for Vanity Fair magazine — who followed his story before and after the event — that he hallucinated from deprivation of sleep and water. “I see now that you don’t have to get roughed up to get tortured,” he will say. According to Chinese who were there, everyone received bread and water, which was as potable as any in Beijing’s suburbs. Though the detainees appear to have been kept up by other officers earlier, the Chinese at this center will stay up as long as the detainees, from 10 p.m. to 8 a.m. They refer to it as a questioning, not an interrogation, though the difference is not clear.

The German will go home and tell the (pro-Tibet) Epoch Times Deutschland, “It was a young officer who interrogated me, and gave very extensive talks about how the Chinese view Tibet in China. He offered me a lot about it, and brought me many new insights about how the Chinese in China see the matter.”

The woman will have had seven cigarettes by the end of the night. She will tell the British press that no reason was given for her arrest. Her husband will say, “I’m very relieved that Mandie is home. I wouldn’t like to say that China has listened, only time will tell if they have.” Readers will wonder if wouldn’t is a misprint.

…

The man from Germany does not say much himself to the Chinese police. Before the German interpreter speaks with him, the police quiz him in limited English, and he answers again and again, “I want to see someone from the embassy.” When the interpreter arrives, he does the same for her.

The doors to the different rooms remain open throughout the night, and very early in the morning, the young man who has been interpreting for the British woman wanders into their room. The German interpreter is a short, pretty girl in her mid-twenties, a little bookish with her glasses on. As the German makes his request again, in English, the girl turns around to her partner, who seems especially tall standing in the doorway, and gives him a helpless look.

“What’s going on?”

“He keeps doing this all night.”

The young man looks at the German through the bars and asks, “How do you know the two Americans?”

“I want to speak with the embassy.”

After considering for a moment, the young man changes the subject.

“Do you support Bayerd Munich?”

The German knows what team he meant to say and answers yes.

“Where did you come from?”

“Stuttgart.”

“Your city is very famous for cars, like Detroit.”

“Yes.”

“Mercedes and BMW are produced there.”

“Not BMW.”

No more small talk comes to mind, so he turns to his partner.

“You’re right,” he says in Chinese, “nothing,” and she laughs.

…

These foreigners are here because three of them unfurled a flag expressing a wish for Tibetan freedom — whether this meant independence or internal autonomy, the flag did not say — and one took a photograph of it. China’s constitution guarantees the right to free speech, but article 105 of the Criminal Law excepts “organizing, scheming or acting to subvert the political power of the state and overthrow the socialist system” and “incitement to subvert the political power of the state and overthrow the socialist system by spreading rumors, slander or other means.” In an age of terror, this is not especially different from provisions in most modern nations, but its reach extends into every public sphere and online forum. It goes beyond yelling fire in a crowded theater, where American speech stops, to effectively ban any speculation of what the fire would be like, and any recollection of past fires. The cow never kicked it over on a dark night.

But these laws, and the way they are enforced, are different from Chinese rule a decade or two ago. When Beijing made its first bid to be an Olympic host in the early 1990s, it chose the slogan “A More Open China Welcomes the 2000 Olympics,” even as dissidents opposing the Games were hustled into insane asylums. One of China’s veteran critics, Nicholas D. Kristof, reported the case of a mentally retarded man whom local police regarded as an eyesore for the visiting Olympic Committee. Before they arrived, he was dragged screaming from his family’s home, beaten to a pulp in a police facility, and given back dead the next day, with the implausible explanation that he had been running through the streets making a scene. A bag with 5,000 yuan in it arrived later as compensation.

Kristof did not mince words in describing the nature of such a system: “As I heard his father, Wang Shanqin, relate the full story, choking back his tears, I realized that, at its worst, the system was absolutely inhumane. It was a thugocracy.”

Similar things did happen in the bid for these Olympic Games. The New York Times reported in 2001 that “Chinese officials have placed known critics of the government and their families under more surveillance this week and warned them not to speak out while inspectors from the International Olympic Committee are visiting here.”

But that is already a slightly different story, and in the years since, China appears to be ruled more by law and less by the fiefdoms that predominated under renzhi, the several-millennia-old system of rule by individual. Kristof himself was encouraged last month as he tested the new process of applying for permission to protest during the Games, even though no one’s petitions were ever approved and some Chinese were detained for trying. “One can argue that this is a completely meaningless exercise,” he said, “but I do think that in a Chinese context, it is a measure of progress.” The government had put a new system in place, laws were set out and, for the most part, followed in good faith.

“If you compare China today to China a half dozen years ago,” Kristof said after his visit to the Public Security Bureau, “the great majority of people have far more personal space than they ever did before. Ordinary people don’t need to get permission to move to a different city, to find a new job, to marry. China does have a lot of freedom to let people live their lives the way they want to. This isn’t that the government has expanded freedom intentionally. It’s really that people have grabbed that freedom and the society has changed … You can’t mistake it for a democracy, but you also can’t mistake it for what existed five or ten years ago.”

This China calls for a new kind of writing, one that is not merely a hagiography of citizens against their government. Officials will still sometimes figure as unnamed characters in a story, but more and more this will be for their own sake as they become honest brokers of eyewitness testimony, not because they are the nameless arm of a hierarchy of thugs. That way of speaking will fade, not just because Chinese Netizens have the means to sink any operation that engages in it — as demonstrated by Jack Cafferty’s recent reversal on CNN — but because it is becoming less true.

…

Midway through the night, the police take the British woman’s interpreter into the other American’s room. He is a bit older, with hair that is starting to grey. In the questioning, the man tells them he studied psychology in college. He is tall, like the interpreter, who tells him he played center on his college basketball team.

“Do you love basketball?” he asks the man with gray hair.

“I don’t follow sports.”

“You don’t? You are a rare animal.” They both laugh. “As far as I know, in America everyone is following sports.”

The man laughs again.

“I heard your accommodation in China was taken care of by the organization.”

“Yes.”

“Do you think it was worth it, to come to China free of charge?”

“Yes,” he jokes, “everything has been nice except for the arrest.”

“Look at you,” the interpreter deadpans. “That red shirt you are wearing belongs to you?”

“No, we got changed after we were arrested.”

“Well, you can keep it,” he says. “It’s a souvenir.” ❑

…

All depictions are truthful. All firsthand sources are intended to remain anonymous.

ADDITIONAL LINKS AND SOURCES:

Nicholas D. Kristof, “China Wakes” (1994), pages 94-98.

New York Times, “Protest 101”

Halifax Today, “Tibet protestor happy to be home”

Epoch Times Deutschland, “Florian Norbu Gyanatshang im Gespräch: Kontrolle über Tibet verstärkt”

Vanity Fair, “Busted in Beijing”

Foreign Policy, “The List: The 10 Worst Chinese Laws”

New York Times, “Beijing Tries to Woo Olympics And Keep Dissidents in Check”

Liang Jing Ru, “Ning Xia”