Ebook: The People’s Republic of the Disappeared

"你从现在开始被指定居所监视居住，你唯一的权利就是服从"。

用上面这句话，谢阳律师被告知他即将被施行的中国针对强迫失踪的扩大体系 "指定居所监视居住"。尽管在习近平主席的领导下它的使用率呈快速增长，但却极少人了解"指定居所监视居住"。本书致力于让更多人了解它。

本书由各个受害者本人执笔写作揭露他们的故事 - 王宇律师于深夜被绑架；唐志顺被从缅甸跨境绑架回国；IT工作者江孝宇被威胁说让他永远消失；而潘锦玲，唯一的罪行来自于她是一位NGO工作者的女朋友。《失踪人民共和国》将揭示中国滥用强迫失踪的现实，一旦被处于指定居所监视居住，就意味你将与世隔绝。

"You are now under residential surveillance at a designated location.Your only right is to obey."

With these words, Chinese lawyer Xie Yangwas introduced to the brutality of Residential Surveillance at aDesignated Location (RSDL), China's rapidly expanding system forenforced disappearances. Little is known of RSDL, or what happensinside. The People's Republic of the Disappeared will change that. RSDLfacilities, often secret, custom-built and unmarked prisons, are run bypolice or State Security officials. Inside, people are placed outsidethe normal legal system, left in solitary confinement, interrogatedrepeatedly, and often subjected to torture. There is no oversight of the police, and no protection for those inside. In RSDL, you simply vanish. In RSDL, the police have total control.

This book exposes what it islike to be disappeared in China. It is the first anthology written bythe victims themselves, from lawyer Wang Yu who was abducted in themiddle of the night to engineer Tang Zhishun who was taken from acrossthe border in Burma; from IT worker Jiang Xiaoyu who was beaten andthreatened with permanent disappearance to Pan Jinling whose only crimewas dating an NGO worker.

The People's Republic of the Disappearedincludes a foreword by well-known exiled human rights lawyer Teng Biao.The foreword and introduction provide the reader with an understandingof RSDL. The legal chapter at the end offers an exhaustive,authoritative analysis of the domestic law giving rise to RSDL, and theinternational legal framework that China brazenly violates. Thesechapters, along with stories by lawyers Tang Jitian and Liu Shihui trace China's obsession with disappearing dissidents from the early 2000s,through to the Jasmine Revolution movement in China in 2011, and intothe current system of RSDL.

This book is essential reading for academics and journalists, governments and nonprofit workers alike working on orinterested in China, because these stories illustrate, with narrativeclarity, the hollowness of China's rhetoric of the rule of law.Likewise, it is worthwhile reading for anyone studying authoritarianregimes and the struggle for human rights.