AUG. 10, 2015
“Sticking cotton swabs into my ears and not letting me sleep, damaging my hearing.” Credit Courtesy of Liu Renwang
BEIJING — The hand-drawn images are bizarre and disturbing. One shows a man locked in a cage while a police officer pours boiling water on his head. Another shows him suspended from the ceiling by handcuffs as an officer jabs his side with an electric baton.
They are amateurishly drawn, with faces showing strangely neutral expressions amid scenes of severe cruelty. Yet they have captured public attention in China for their candid depiction of abuse by the police.
Although such abuse has often been reported by foreign human rights groups and occasionally by Chinese reporters as well, the Chinese news media have rarely carried any representation of the subject as graphic as the drawings, which depict the ordeal of a man wrongly convicted of murder.
The man, Liu Renwang, was accused of shooting to death a village official in Shanxi Province in 2008. He says the drawings show how the local police went about extracting a confession from him for a crime he did not commit.
A court in Shanxi sentenced Mr. Liu to death in 2010, but the sentence was suspended. Two years later, the case was reinvestigated, and he was given life imprisonment instead. The conviction was overturned on appeal in 2013, and the slaying remains unsolved.
Mr. Liu’s case would normally have attracted little attention. But The Paper, a state-run online publication based in Shanghai, reported on his case over the weekend, and included the images depicting abuse.
Mr. Liu, 53, said he had the drawings made in his effort to win compensation from the local authorities for what was done to him.
“I wanted to let people know how the police would use torture in interrogations,” he said by telephone on Monday. The abuses included pouring liquid down his nose and forcing him to go without sleep, he said.
He said the officers who tortured him were from the Zhongyang County Public Security Bureau. A woman who answered the phone at the bureau on Monday afternoon said she did not know about the case and declined to comment.
