Today we open the violent page of the Uyghur Genocide and explain the concept that made its way from the Medieval ages to the 21st century – tiger chairs.
China has dealt with police violence and torture for generations. Although China has been implementing reforms such as videotaping some interrogations and erecting physical barriers to separate police from criminal suspects, these reforms have not been extreme enough to reach the detainment camps. Within the detainment camps, one brutal form of punishment is the tiger chair which is used to immobilize suspects during interrogations.
Tiger chairs are steel chairs that have affixed leg irons and handcuffs that restrain the bodies, often in painful positions. Many detainees are interrogated or punished within a tiger chair ranging from a couple of hours to a couple of days. Tiger chairs are either brought into the detainees’ cells, or detainees were brought and punished in a room with multiple tiger chairs. There could be more than 15 tiger chairs within these rooms, and between the chairs were partitions. The rooms are cold, and on some occasions, there is no food or water. Above each chair is a small white light, a camera, and a microphone to keep watch of the prisoners.
An Amnesty International report recounts experiences of detainees, one of these is the death of a cellmate, who died from the effects of the tiger Chair. The detainee, Madi, describes that his cellmate was placed in the tiger chair for three days, his hands and feet handcuffed, and he was forcibly sat straight. The man would urinate in the chair as he was not let out in those three days. Madi found out that the ma passed away from the torture when he was removed from the cell.
Although not every detainee punished through the tiger chair passes away, it is a severe and brutal form of torture used within the camps. The reasons for tiger chair punishment range from pushing a guard to speaking another language than Mandarin.
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