作者：谢文飞
编辑：gloria wang 责任编辑：罗志飞 校对：李杰 翻译：刘芳
世界人权日说说我们人权捍卫者的亲身经历吧！
2020年4月29日上午，我发表“祭林昭”，当晚抓捕我的是两个穿黑衣的彪形大汉（目测体重在90公斤左右），躲在黑暗的角落里等着我，当我想要绕过去的时候，两条壮汉二话不说，直接就把我按倒在地上，并且持续按了很久。到了办案中心，我才发现，他们的圆领T恤胸前印着“烙铁头”三个字。
有什么人权可言？
2022年5月28日，我和资兴看守所的146个人一起转移到郴州看守所。在“401”号监室里，由于我不愿蹲下，一个人渣趁我不备，抬手就是一巴掌打在我脸上。我毫不犹豫的一脚把他踹开，然后就是几个人渣对我群起殴之，我被迫奋起反抗。
没想到，一个被称为“李所”的人进来了以后，又是趁我不备一巴掌打在我脸上（我之前进过几个看守所，坐牢六年多了，没被警察打过）。在他走后，受到暗示和鼓励的一群（至少有七八个）人渣一拥而上，我再也没有了反抗的余地，直接被打倒。被打得头昏眼花，头痛欲裂，头上起了好几个包，只觉得天旋地转，摇摇欲坠。
李某辉副所长把我带到谈话室以后，我要求去治疗和检查一下伤势，被泠酷地拒绝。接着就要把我丢回“401”监室去。我说那就让他们打死算了。他说在我这里打死个人就和打死条狗一样。埋都不用埋，直接拉去焚尸炉烧掉就是了，我们这里离火化厂很近（我第一次知道我离焚尸炉这么近）。我只觉得头痛到了极点，好像马上就要炸裂一样，就和孙悟空被唐僧念紧箍咒，在地上疯狂打滚之后的情形一样。再加上急怒攻心，顿时栽倒在地。
李副所长叫人把我拖到了单间“6011”。我醒来发现被丢在水泥地板上，地上有一滩水，头挨着厕所坑，一双袜子被磨烂了。旁边有一张由水泥固定的木板单人床。
我的头连续几天头痛欲裂，头上的包很多天不见消肿。连续四天按报警，要求去医院检查身体被拒绝。绝食抗议了三天毫无成效。并且没有人承认我被打了。
有什么人权可言？！
2023年5月30日，我从资兴看守所“下队”到郴州监狱。到监狱的第一时间，就叫我们从资兴看守所送去的14个人，脱光衣服集体蹲在地上蛙跳。我不愿意，结果，在我被送达监狱的一个小时之内，我就被关进了收押中心二楼0.18平方米的铁笼子。那天室内温度35摄氏度，8个多小时，我只喝了一小汤匙水，没有吃任何东西，身上的衣服被汗浸湿透了好几次。
当晚又被关进了五楼的“高度戒备监区”，在0.7平方米的铁笼子里两个星期，每天待在铁笼子里15个小时以上。连续六天不准我洗澡；连续几天不准我喝水、上厕所。我绝食抗议了几天也无效。
姓梁的监区长当着十几个（被关铁笼子的有8人，加“绿马甲”好几个）人的面说：
“这个人（指我）给我关死一点，不要给他喝水，不要给他放水（指上厕所）。只要不让他死在这里就行了。”
于是，我愤而提出要求上“老虎凳”。不到两个小时，我的“愿望”就被满足了。上了老虎凳不到十分钟，我双手就肿起来了，头上的汗珠滚滚而下，很快就汇成了汗水的洪流。衣服也很快就湿透了。——由于老虎凳是为比我高十公分的人设计的，我是被拼命往前拉，费了很大的劲才把手铐上去的。我的状况，在围观的人看来很不妙。
几个小时后从老虎凳下来之后，连续五天，我的右手虎口麻木，大拇指不能正常活动。两个月后，大拇指还有被低电压电流连接的麻木感。
有什么人权可言？！
2023年6月8日，在一份监狱要求我填写的档案资料上，我写道：
“自从我5月30日来到郴州监狱之后，我没有被当作一个真正的人来对待。无论我作为一个自然人，还是一个被关押的犯人，或是一个政治犯，哪怕是一个罪大恶极的犯人，我都享有一个人最基本的人权。个体人格尊严是全人类整体人格尊严的一部份，人类的整体人格尊严是由每一个个体的人格尊严集合而成。监狱即使要达到某种“改造”人的目的，也不能以践踏和牺牲人类的人格尊严为代价。”
2023年6月25日，我被送往湖南省长沙监狱。我的两箱书不准带进去，就连只拿一本《唐诗三百首》和一本《四书章句集注》也被拒绝。美其名曰“零带入”——这是雷建华监狱长亲自改革的监管措施，是雷监狱长的权威的极致体现之一。和我同一天送到长沙监狱收押中心的一个42岁来自广西柳州的犯人，7月初就死了。我没有看到任何人承担相应的责任。在收押中心将近两个月，我们不准读书写字，我三次提出借阅书柜里的《史记》也遭拒绝。
2023年8月21日，我下队到了四监区以后，连续五天因为我不愿无缘无故的被命令蹲下，而被按在走廊上。为的是“杀鸡给猴看”。2023年8月27日，我因为拒绝被强制要求唱红歌，被犯人和警察先后殴打。监区最高大的谢某军警官一脚把我踢飞后说：“涉及到政治原因，打了也白打。不服你就去纪委告去检察院告，去监狱长那里去告，你去哪里告我都不怕！”
有什么人权可言？！
2023年8月29日，我由于不准上厕所，憋尿憋得太久，等到集体“放水”的时候，我一泡尿断断续续撒了20分钟才撒完。撒出来的尿像被切断成一截一截的。就在当天，我被警官口头作出惩罚：
每天上午、下午打开水的时候，只准给我打别人的1/3至1/2的份量；每天只准我上午、下午分别上一次厕所。庆幸的是，我遇到了稍有良知的“吴妈妈”，这个处罚没有被严格执行。一个星期后，让我恢复到完全按“规定”的规格打开水和放水。但每天只准打两次开水的规矩，直到我2024年10月29日回家也没有打破。我几乎每天上午和下午，都要在焦渴中等上两到三个小时才能喝上开水。哪怕前列腺炎有多严重，也得不到有效治疗。且在2023年8月21日至2023年12月30日期间，我和其他人“打报告”上厕所，总共只有8次，有5次被硬生生地挡了回来。
有什么人权可言？
简直是连动物都不如！
在长沙监狱服刑一年四个月，我只读了五本书，还没有在河源监狱一个月读的书多。因为我在长沙监狱要么是被禁止读书，要么就是根本没有时间和精力读书。我持续练了六年的书法之路被硬生生斩断，毛笔都没摸过。
正如我在写给雷监狱长的那封永远得不到回应的信里所写的，自从我的两箱书被挡在长沙监狱门外的那一刻起，我在长沙监狱里的服刑生涯就注意是一场恶梦！因为对于持续读了十几年书的我来说，如果有书可以读的话，哪怕身处地狱我也能够忍受；反之，即使是在天堂，如果禁止我读书的话，我也觉得是身在地狱之中。感谢长沙监狱教狱科，在2024年3月3日我被警察打了，投诉无门之后，3月8日给我转了一本弗朗西斯.福山先生的《政治秩序与政治衰败》，使我渐渐地活过来了。
在2024年8月份严格执行“9511”之前的一年一个月里，我们平均每周工作时间超过60个小时。
在2024年3月23日搬到长沙监狱新址以后，有一个多月，我们甚至被强制要求加中班（我本人加过一次，在170多个人的中队里，每天至少有几十个人被强制要求加中班）。一直以来，完不成任务的人，被各种各样的惩罚伺候。
在新址，为了追求所谓的“就餐秩序”，每天上午和下午收工之前，就让人把我们吃的用不锈钢盘子装的饭菜摆在不锈钢桌上，等我们吃饭的时候，饭菜基本上都是冰凉的。即使是在3月份，很多人因为身体不好，还穿着棉衣的情况下也是这样。我反映了多次，毫无改善。我记得，我们家十几年前养猪的时候，我家的猪都要吃热的猪潲，泠的根本不吃。
我做为一个人权捍卫者，却落到了连猪都不如的境地。
2020年谢文飞第二次坐牢前来杭州看望朱虞夫
有什么人权可言？
很多人会说，我们的监狱法第七条不是堂而皇之地规定了，要保障服刑人员的权利以及我们的人格尊严受到保护的吗？我相信，真正清醒的人都清楚，我们离法治社会还有（在短期内如果不是越来越远的话）很遥远的距离。
况且，我们的雷监狱长在大会上公开讲话时说，我们的身份是罪犯，是通常所说的“坏人”（关于这点我要严正抗议，并且在时机成熟之后要求雷监狱长公开承认错误）就是要接受惩罚的；而且长沙监狱已经太好了，好到了中国第一流、湖南第一的地步。再好的话，就会导致那些生活不如意的人，在狄更斯的指引下，来投奔长沙监狱了。雷监狱长在大会上还要求我们罪犯，要时时刻刻记住那墙上的“灵魂三问”——那是与“康德三问”完全悖反的东西。
因此，在雷监狱长的英明领导之下，在他的雷厉风行的淫威下，鲜有人敢去投诉的。即使投诉，就像我在被打之后，写给驻监检察官的信暨要求会见我的律师张磊律师要求申诉的信，遭到被当着我的面撕毁的下场。
在中国的监狱里，尤其是在我们长沙监狱里，不要再跟我提什么人权！
这就是长沙监狱掷地有声的宣言！
法国思想家伊佐说：
考察一国之文明程度，视其监狱管理制度可决也。
诚哉斯言！
——人权捍卫者谢文飞冒死书于2024年世界人权日
What Human Rights Can There Be? — XIE Wenfei’s Testimony from Prison
Writer: Xie, Wenfei
Editor: Wang, Gloria Chief Editor: Luo, Zhifei Proofreader: Li, Jie Translator: Liu, Fang
On World Human Rights Day, let me share the personal experiences of us, the defenders of human rights.
On the morning of April 29, 2020, I published “In Memory of LIN Zhao.” That night, two burly men in black, each weighing about 90 kilograms, ambushed me from a dark corner. When I tried to walk past, they tackled me to the ground without a word and held me down for a long time. When I was finally brought to the interrogation center, I saw that their T-shirts bore the words “Iron Head.”
On May 28, 2022, I was transferred with 146 others from Zixing Detention Center to Chenzhou Detention Center. In cell 401, because I refused to squat, one thug suddenly slapped me across the face. Without hesitation, I kicked him back, but then several others ganged up and beat me. I had no choice but to fight back.
Then a man known as “Director Li” entered and, taking advantage of my defenselessness, slapped me again (though I had spent over six years in prison before, no officer had ever struck me). After he left, a group of at least seven or eight inmates, emboldened by his signal, swarmed over me. I was knocked down, beaten until dizzy, with my head throbbing in pain and swelling in several places, the world spinning before my eyes.
Deputy Director Li Mouhui took me to the interrogation room. I requested medical treatment and examination for my injuries, but he coldly refused. He then ordered me back to cell 401. I said, “Then just let them beat me to death.” He replied, “Killing a person here is no different from killing a dog. We wouldn’t even need to bury you — we’d just throw you into the crematory nearby.” That was the first time I realized how close I was to the cremation furnace.
Deputy Director Li ordered men to drag me to isolation cell 6011. When I woke up, I was lying on the concrete floor next to a puddle of water, my head against a toilet pit, my socks torn. Beside me was a small wooden bed fixed into the cement.
For days my head throbbed with unbearable pain, the swellings showing no sign of subsiding. For four consecutive days, I pressed the emergency button requesting a hospital visit, but was denied each time. I went on a three-day hunger strike in protest, to no avail. No one acknowledged that I had been beaten.
What human rights can there be?!
On May 30, 2023, I was transferred from Zixing Detention Center to Chenzhou Prison. Upon arrival, the fourteen of us from Zixing were ordered to strip naked and squat-jump together. I refused. Within an hour of arriving, I was locked in a 0.18-square-meter iron cage on the second floor of the intake center. It was 35°C indoors. For over eight hours, I had only a spoonful of water and no food. My clothes were drenched in sweat several times.
That night, I was placed in the “high-security zone” on the fifth floor — inside a 0.7-square-meter cage for two weeks, confined there more than 15 hours a day. For six consecutive days I was denied showers; for several days, water and toilet access were also forbidden. My hunger strike changed nothing.
In front of a dozen people, Section Chief Liang said, “Lock this man (pointing at me) tighter. Don’t give him water, don’t let him use the toilet. Just make sure he doesn’t die here.”
Furious, I demanded to be put on the “tiger bench.” Within two hours, my “wish” was granted. After less than ten minutes on it, my hands were swollen, and sweat poured from my head like rain.
When I was finally released from the bench hours later, my right hand remained numb for five days; my thumb could not move normally. Even two months later, it still tingled as if connected to a weak electric current.
What human rights can there be?!
On June 8, 2023, on a form the prison required me to fill out, I wrote:
“Since arriving at Chenzhou Prison on May 30, I have not been treated as a human being. Whether as a natural person, a prisoner, or even a political prisoner—no matter how grave the alleged crime—I still possess the most basic human rights. The dignity of each individual is part of the dignity of all humankind. Humanity’s collective dignity is the sum of each person’s dignity. Even if the prison aims to ‘reform’ people, it cannot do so at the cost of trampling upon or sacrificing human dignity.”
On June 25, 2023, I was transferred to Changsha Prison in Hunan Province. I was not allowed to bring in my two boxes of books—not even a single copy of Three Hundred Tang Poems or The Four Books with Zhu Xi’s Commentary. They called it a “zero-carry-in” policy—one of Warden Lei Jianhua’s so-called “innovative reforms,” an extreme display of his authoritarian control.
A 42-year-old prisoner from Liuzhou, Guangxi, who arrived at the Changsha Prison intake center the same day I did, died in early July. No one took responsibility. For nearly two months in the intake center, we were forbidden to read or write. I requested three times to borrow a copy of Records of the Grand Historian from the bookshelf, and each time I was refused.
After being transferred to the Fourth Prison Division on August 21, 2023, I was forced to the floor in the corridor for five consecutive days because I refused to squat without cause—“to set an example for others,” as they put it. On August 27, 2023, I was beaten by both inmates and police officers after refusing to sing a propaganda “red song.” Officer Xie, the tallest in the division, kicked me hard and said: “Since this is political, hitting you doesn’t count for anything. If you’re unhappy, go report it—to the disciplinary committee, the prosecutor, or even the warden. I don’t care where you complain!”
What human rights can there be?!
On August 29, 2023, I was denied access to the toilet for so long that when the collective “release” time came, it took me 20 minutes to urinate in broken intervals, like something was being forcibly pinched off.
That same day, a police officer verbally punished me: I was to receive only one-third to one-half the amount of hot water others got during the morning and afternoon supply times, and I was allowed to use the toilet only once in the morning and once in the afternoon. Fortunately, a somewhat compassionate supervisor known as “Mother Wu” did not strictly enforce it. A week later, my water supply was restored to “standard levels,” but the rule of allowing only two servings of hot water per day remained unchanged until my release on October 29, 2024. Nearly every morning and afternoon, I had to wait in painful thirst for two or three hours before I could drink. Even though my prostatitis worsened, I received no medical treatment. Between August 21 and December 30, 2023, I formally requested permission to use the toilet eight times; five of those were flatly denied.
What human rights can there be? We were treated worse than animals!
In fourteen months at Changsha Prison, I read only five books—fewer than what I had read in a single month at Heyuan Prison. Either I was forbidden to read, or I was too exhausted and overworked to do so. My six years of calligraphy practice were completely severed—I didn’t even touch a brush once.
As I wrote in a letter to Warden Lei—a letter that never received a reply—the moment my two boxes of books were stopped at the prison gate, my entire sentence in Changsha Prison was doomed to be a nightmare. For someone who had been reading for over a decade, if I could have books, I could endure even in hell; but if reading were forbidden, even paradise would feel like hell. I thank the prison’s education office: after being beaten by the police on March 3, 2024, and finding no place to complain, they handed me Francis Fukuyama’s Political Order and Political Decay on March 8. That book gradually brought me back to life.
In the thirteen months before the strict enforcement of the “9511” work regulation in August 2024, we averaged more than 60 hours of labor per week.
After the prison relocated to its new site on March 23, 2024, for more than a month we were forced to work extra shifts—I did once myself. In a team of over 170 people, dozens were compelled to do so daily. Those who failed to meet quotas were punished in various ways.
At the new site, in the name of maintaining “dining order,” meals were placed on stainless steel trays long before we were allowed to eat. By the time we sat down, the food was always cold. Even in March, when many sick inmates still wore winter coats, this practice continued. I complained multiple times—to no effect.
I remember when my family raised pigs years ago—even the pigs refused to eat cold swill; they were always fed warm food. And yet, as a human rights defender, I was reduced to a condition worse than that of pigs.
In 2020, before his second imprisonment, Xie Wenfei came to Hangzhou to visit Zhu Yufu
What human rights can there be?
Many people might say, “Doesn’t Article 7 of our Prison Law clearly stipulate that the rights of prisoners and their human dignity must be protected?” But I believe that anyone truly awake knows how far we still are from a rule-of-law society—if we are not, in fact, drifting farther away from it. Moreover, our warden, Lei, once declared publicly at a general meeting that we were “criminals,” the so-called “bad people” (on this point I solemnly protest, and I will demand that Warden Lei publicly admit his mistake when the time comes). He said we are here to be punished—and that Changsha Prison is already “too good,” the best in China and the finest in Hunan.He even joked that if the prison got any “better,” the less fortunate in society would, under Dickens’s inspiration, voluntarily come seek refuge in Changsha Prison. At that same meeting, Warden Lei instructed us, the prisoners, to always remember the “Three Questions of the Soul” written on the wall—questions that are the complete opposite of Kant’s three philosophical questions.
Thus, under Warden Lei’s so-called “brilliant leadership” and his ruthless intimidation, few dared to file complaints. Even if one tried, the result would be the same as mine: after being beaten, I wrote a letter to the prison’s resident prosecutor and another to request a meeting with my lawyer, Zhang Lei, to file a complaint—both letters were torn up right in front of me.
In China’s prisons—especially in our Changsha Prison—don’t speak to me of human rights!
This is the thunderous declaration of Changsha Prison itself!
As the French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville once said: “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” How true these words are!
— Written by human rights defender XIE, Wenfei, at the risk of his life, on World Human Rights Day, 2024.
