Word: blackly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...unemployment rises to the highest level in more than a quarter-century, retailers are readying for one of the country's biggest shopping days of the year - Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, which marks the official start of the Christmas shopping season - which will likely foretell the success or failure of 2009's holiday sales season...
...having citizens complain to your superiors is not good for the careers of Chinese officials. Local and regional governments arrange teams of "retrievers" who round up petitioners before they can put their complaints before higher authorities. The petitioners are held in black jails - which could be anything from a hotel to an empty school - for weeks or even months before being sent home. Human Rights Watch interviewed 38 former black-jail detainees who described beatings, sleep deprivation and lack of food and medical care. A black-jail guard went on trial in Beijing this month for allegedly raping...
...difficulty in improving the treatment of people in black jails is that the government has so far refused to acknowledge that they exist. In a periodic review before the U.N. Human Rights Council in June, the Chinese government said there were no black jails in the country. "The very sinister aspect of black jails is that they are completely off the books," says Phelim Kine, an Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch. "These are unlawful, secret detention facilities that are not under any due legal process. The detainees don't have access to lawyers. They are stripped of their mobile...
...painful irony of the black jails is that they sprang up after an earlier effort by Beijing to reform the national detention system. In 2003 a migrant worker in Guangzhou named Sun Zhigang was beaten to death while in police custody. Sun, who had been stopped for not carrying his temporary-residence certificate, was detained under a system known as "custody and repatriation." That system, a series of detention centers as well as the legal framework to hold people on administrative charges, was used to round up vagrants, beggars and petitioners...
...Following a public outcry over Sun's death, the government eliminated "custody and repatriation," or shourong in Mandarin. "But vagrancy-detention-era abuses did not end with the abolition of shourong," states the Human Rights Watch report. "Instead, such abuses have been driven underground into new extrajudicial 'black jails.' " It's an unpleasant lesson in the dangers of treating the symptoms without addressing the cause...