October 12, 2009
An inmate of the jail in Beijing’s Haidian District died on September 17th after a 49-day hunger strike. A belated report on the incident appeared on the front page of today’s Beijing Times, almost a month after his death.
The deceased, a 30-year-old man identified as Qi Changjiang, was arrested on July 26th for allegedly selling counterfeit tax receipts around Beijing’s Zhongguancun high-tech neighborhood. According to Qi’s wife, Zhu Zufen, this was the second time that he had been arrested for selling fake tax receipts. For his previous offense, he had received ten months of forced labor.
Zhu told the newspaper that after her husband’s arrest, she and a lawyer went to the jail, which denied that her husband was in their custody. Zhu said that she was confused, because what the jail said contradicted information given her by the police in Haidian as well as those back in their hometown in Anhui Province.
It was only on September 17 that she received any further word about Qi, in the form of a notification about his death.
Records kept by the medical department of Haidian Jail revealed that Qi had been fasting since August 6. During that time, Qi occasionally took porridge and soybean milk but refused to talk. He was fed through a tube and was given intravenous infusion of fluids.
Qi lost consciousness on September 16 and stopped breathing the following morning. The jail transferred him to Beijing’s 261 hospital, where he was pronounced dead. The death report released by the hospital concluded that his death was directly caused by “bleeding in the upper digestive tract”.
Zhu doubts that the jail did all it could to save her husband’s life, and she is suspicious about the fact that despite her four visits to the jail, it waited until after his death to contact her.
A police spokesperson said that because Qi refused to talk following his arrest, they had no way of knowing anything about him, so he was registered without a name. It was only after comparing his file with those of previous inmates that they discovered his actual identity, over a month later.
- Beijing Times (Chinese): Hunger striking inmate dies after 49 days of fasting