Beijing Adult Entertainment: Gao Zhisheng and China’s question
Gao Zhisheng’s true fate remains to be established. But his principled stance and refusal to be crushed has at least shone some light into one of the darkest areas of the Chinese state’s operations: its system of “black jails” – semi-legal, underground detention-centres where vexatious petitioners who have travelled to Beijing from the provinces are incarcerated by contractors and “dealt with”. The roughness of the treatment meted out in these institutions is designed to intimidate citizens in search of voice and redress, and highlight the risks of such insolence to anyone (such as their neighbours at home) with similar ideas.
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A Pew Research survey conducted in 2008 found that 86% of Chinese were satisfied with the way things are going in their country. More detailed questions based on ground-level sentiment tend to give different results. A survey of public trust by Xiaokang magazine in 2009 revealed that local-government officials were less trusted than prostitutes. True, central-government officials were rated slightly higher, but trust in them had declined in successive years.
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