When the political tide turned a decade later, Mao’s widow, Jiang Qing, was sent to Qincheng. Harry Wu, a U.S.-based human rights activist who recently published a book on Qincheng, said Jiang was placed in a two-room suite with a private bathroom, possibly the best Qincheng could provide.
Conditions improved. Dai, the journalist, said gradually she was given newspapers and books from the jail library — William Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” popular martial arts novels by Louis Cha and the Chinese classic “The Dream of the Red Chamber.”
Dai was allowed a two-hour break every day, though she was disappointed to find herself alone in a walled courtyard, watched over by guards. “Like caged lions and tigers, most of us walked back and forth impatiently,” she wrote.
Bao recalled the walls dividing the courtyards were so thick that guards could patrol on top of them. “They wore an ammunition belt, but I didn’t know if they were armed,” Bao said.
An egg was added to his breakfast of bread and porridge after his wife complained to Jiang Zemin, then the party’s secretary general, Bao said. His family also got him a mosquito net, and sent him books, which he received after they were checked page by page to make sure they contained no unauthorized correspondence, Bao said.
Qincheng got a remodeling in the mid-’90s to make way for a new breed of prisoners: senior officials who had grown used to lavish liftestyles and were being ostensibly purged for untrammeled graft. In 1996, when Bao returned to a Qincheng prison cell after spending time in a prison-affiliated hospital, his accommodations were much grander.
His cell had a sofa, and the plank bed propped up by wooden benches was replaced with a mattress bed. The beddings were no longer white.
