"No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."
Under Xi Jinping's iron-fisted rule, these words ring hollow — a cruel parody of justice trampled beneath the jackboot of a regime intoxicated with obedience and control. Since ascending to power, Xi has not only trampled Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, he has lit it on fire and paraded the ashes as patriotic virtue.
Take the case of Li Qiaochu, a young labor researcher and social activist who was punished not for what she did, but for who she loved and supported. Her "crime"? Speaking out against torture, publishing essays, and publicly supporting her partner, legal scholar Ding Jiaxi. Abducted in early 2021, she was denied medical care even as her depression deepened and her body deteriorated. Authorities kept her incommunicado for months, placed her in solitary confinement, and psychologically brutalized her in an attempt to break her will — all without trial. Her very existence became a battlefield between conscience and cruelty.
And what of Ding Jiaxi himself — one of China's most courageous legal minds? In 2019, Ding Jiaxi was disappeared for organizing a quiet gathering of thinkers — a thoughtcrime in Xi Jinping's paranoid state. After months in secret detention, he emerged visibly emaciated, psychologically ravaged, and robbed of basic dignity. Reports detail the familiar menu of authoritarian torture: 24-hour bright lights, sleep deprivation, endless interrogations, threats to his family. His trial was held behind closed doors. His sentence — a staggering 12 years — reads like a state-sponsored vendetta against thought.
Under Xi Jinping's so-called "rule of law with Chinese characteristics", torture isn't a flaw in the system — it is the system. From residential surveillance at designated locations (RSDL), where detainees are disappeared for months into legal black holes, to coerced confessions aired on state television, the system operates not as a justice mechanism but as a psychological weapon designed to degrade and dominate.
Let us not forget Sun Dawu, the outspoken billionaire and rural entrepreneur who criticized government land grabs and supported human rights lawyers. For his outspokenness, he and his family were raided in the dead of night by SWAT teams. Reports describe sleep deprivation, shackling in "tiger chairs", and extended interrogations. His company was dismembered. His voice, like countless others, was systematically erased.
This is Xi Jinping's China — a mausoleum of fear erected in the name of "stability", where the courts are rubber stamps, the police are political enforcers, and the Constitution is toilet paper soaked in the blood of those who believed in it.
The West's cautious language — "authoritarian drift", "shrinking civil society" — is cowardly euphemism. What Xi Jinping has built is not some abstract autocracy. It is a machinery of cruelty, a dictatorship that feeds on humiliation and obedience, punishing thought itself when it deviates from the CCP line.
No amount of techno-nationalist propaganda, Belt and Road bribery, or Orwellian surveillance can mask the rot: under Xi Jinping, China has become the digital-age twin of the very despotisms the world once swore to resist. Article 5 of the Universal Declaration is not merely violated — it is mocked, daily, with surgical precision and brutal intent.
