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 THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC
OF THE DISAPPEARED

2nd edition

Stories from inside China’s system for enforced

disappearances

This second edition includes new harrowing testimonies and covers

the explosion of emerging and existing methods to disappear
victims, while hopes for rule of law steadily evaporate.

Edited by Michael Caster

Foreword by Teng Biao

 Copyright 2017, 2019 Safeguard Defenders

Cover illustration Copyright 2017, 2019 Badiucao

Published in the United States by Safeguard Defenders

All rights reserved.

This book may not be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in whole or in part by any means
including graphic, electronic, or mechanical without expressed written consent of the
publisher/author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and
reviews

ISBN: 978-0-9993706-1-2

Second edition.

Keywords: Enforced disappearance, China,

Human Rights, Criminal Justice, International law

First published November 1, 2017,

Second edition published November 1, 2019.

Also available as a paperback on Amazon Worldwide:

https://SafeguardDefenders.com
 REVIEWS of the 1st Edition
“…gut-wrenching stories”. “…the world has been mainly
oblivious to these gross human rights violations in China. Many
people in China don’t know what’s going on, either. The People’s
Republic of the Disappeared has an urgent message for us all.”
- Susan Blumberg-Kason, Los Angeles Review of Books
China Channel

A “noteworthy” and “deserving” book.

- Jerome A. Cohen, Professor at New York University
(School of Law)

…the most comprehensive collective portrait to date,

Disappeared compiles powerful first-person accounts.
- Terence Halliday, Co-Director of Center on Law and
Globalization, American Bar Foundation

…eye-opening and courageous. …help you better understand

the Middle Kingdom.
- June Cheng, WORLD magazine

…a very heavy [reading] session.

- Kate Whitehead, South China Morning Post

The narrators tell of physical and psychological abuse,

beatings and sleep deprivation, humiliations, isolation… rare in their
detail.
- Steven Lee Meyer, the New York Times

Direct and compelling. A rare and important collection.

- Eva Pils, Reader in Transnational Law, King’s College
London
 …this book is a necessary eye opener. …will add depth and
clarity.
- Yaxue Cao, Director of ChinaChange.org

…a profoundly important book. If you want to understand

China beneath the dollar signs and infrastructure projects, read this
book.
- Benedict Rogers, Deputy Chair of [UK] Conservative
Party Human Rights Committee, founder of Hong Kong
Watch

…essential reading for academics and journalists,

governments and nonprofit workers. …worthwhile reading for
anyone studying authoritarian regimes and the struggle for human
rights.
- Magnus Fiskesjö, Professor at Cornell University

…reading this is like taking a direct glimpse at the cruelty and

brutality that are the heart of Communist Party rule.
- Kong Tsung-gan, Medium, The Best Human Rights
Books of 2017

“…an important new book”

- Donald Clarke, Professor of Law, George Washington
University Law School

“A set of unique, insider accounts into one of the most

secretive prison systems in the world. If you've ever wondered what
the rise of China means for human rights around the world, this
book has the answer.”
- Anonymous reader (Amazon review)
 Dedicated to Wang Quanzhang

Wang Quanzhang, lawyer - father - husband - friend,

disappeared on 3 August 2015, and was held under Residential
Surveillance at a Designated Location (RSDL), but even after
exceeding the legally limited six months of secret detention
under RSDL Wang was not released. Instead, he was held for
another three and a half years in secret, solitary,
incommunicado detention, before being subjected to a show
trial in late 2018.
Throughout his lengthy and arbitrary incarceration,
credible sources report that Wang was subjected to torture,
including electrocution. For over three years, his wife Li Wenzu,
and others tirelessly campaigned for his release. She too has
become an inspiration for countless others, as she has braved
the full force of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The day after Christmas 2018 (it is a CCP tactic to mask
high profile trials around international holidays), Wang was
subjected to a one-day, closed show trial. A month later, the
court sentenced him to four and a half years on absurd
charges of state subversion. And yet still, the Party tortured
Wang and his family. Li was denied the right to see her
husband until June 2019, nearly four years after his
disappearance. When they finally met, Wang was a changed
man, destroyed by the Party. Her account of meeting him
brings tears to our eyes and as Wang languishes in prison we
remember the countless other victims of the People’s Republic
of the Disappeared.
Wang Quanzhang’s courage and devotion to human
rights in the face of adversity is an inspiration to those of us
who know him and should be a reminder that we all can and
should stand against repression.
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to extend a heartfelt thank you to everyone

who supported this project.
Most importantly, this book couldn’t have happened without
all the brave people who came forward to share their stories. In
China, merely to speak of your experiences in Residential
Surveillance at a Designated Location (RSDL) can itself pose a
threat, and many who have chosen to speak out have been detained
again after speaking with the media, foreign organizations or
researchers.
Those who have shared their stories in this book have done
so at considerable risk to themselves, but they have done so
because they agree that there is a real need to expose China’s
systematic use of Enforced Disappearances, and to help future
victims of RSDL to be better prepared for what awaits them. We
hope their stories lead to greater awareness and inspire action
against this abusive system.
Many others have wanted to share their stories, but either felt
it was too hard to revisit their painful experiences or that the threat
of reprisal was too strong to allow their stories to be published, for
now. Others have offered their time to be interviewed, so that we
can more accurately present RSDL, or given their feedback on draft
versions. To all those who volunteered their time, their knowledge,
and their experiences for this book, we would like to offer our
heartfelt thanks. We would like to especially thank Zhang Zhiming
for all his translation support, Dinah Gardner for her work editing the
text, and Taiwan-based cartoonist Stellina Chen for her help with
graphics.
 TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword | TENG BIAO
Introduction | MICHAEL CASTER

The Testimonies
A place where the law does not exist | LIU SHIHUI
It made me wish for death | ZHAI YANMIN
My endless nightmare | WANG YU
RSDL can make you go crazy | LIU SIXIN
Your only right is to obey | XIE YANG
Like a lamb protesting the wolf | SUI MUQING
Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves | CHEN ZHIXIU
Enhanced interrogation | PETER DAHLIN
Collateral damage | PAN JINLING
If you want to come back alive | JIANG XIAOYU
Kidnapped from across the border | TANG ZHISHUN

RSDL and Enforced Disappearances, a Legal View | MICHAEL CASTER*

Enforced disappearances
Enforced disappearances, other human rights violations, and crimes
Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location (RSDL)
Rights under RSDL
Exceptions in the law
Conclusion

Developments in Disappearances | DINAH GARDNER*

RSDL in practice
Hidden in detention
Non-release release
Liuzhi
Uighur concentration camps

Endnotes
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 Foreword | TENG BIAO

Atrocity in the name of the law

Enforced disappearances have long gone unchecked in China.

The Panchen Lama – who is the second highest spiritual leader for
Tibetan Buddhists, after the Dalai Lama, – was taken by Chinese
authorities as a six-year-old child in 1995. To this day, he has not
been seen again, likely the world’s youngest victim of enforced
disappearance.
The Chinese Communist Party has not hesitated to disappear
people outside China’s borders, nor to target non-Chinese citizens.
In 2015, authorities kidnapped author and publisher – and Swedish
citizen – Gui Minhai from Thailand, as well as his business associate
Lee Bo, a British citizen. In 2017, billionaire businessman and
Canadian passport holder Xiao Jianhua vanished from his hotel room
in Hong Kong.
But the Chinese government does not limit the use of
disappearance to marginalised groups or to political dissidents and
critics. In July 2018, Fan Bingbing – a world-famous Chinese actress
– suddenly went silent. For more than three months, she was
missing from public view. Even the CCP’s own are not immune: the
then President of Interpol, the international police organisation, and
a former Vice Minister of Public Security, Meng Hongwei, who
presumably should have been untouchable, disappeared in October
2018, before authorities announced they had placed him into
detention.
China has refused to ratify the UN Convention on Enforced
Disappearances, and has even gone so far as to legalise enforced
disappearances in recent amendments of its Criminal Procedure Law.
 Tyranny is not only reflected in murder, evil laws, and
crackdowns; it is reflected even more in the minor details. This book
is a collection of details, vividly reflecting China’s cruelty. Much
remains unknown about RSDL, and for that reason this book is an
invaluable look into the rarely exposed systematic tyranny behind
the euphemism of “Residential Surveillance at a Designated
Location.”
During the 2011 “Jasmine Revolution,” the authorities kidnapped
and secretly detained human rights defenders on a large scale, in a
gangland act of criminality under the banner of “National Security.”
Human rights lawyer Liu Shihui (Chapter 1) reflected on his secret
detention. “I was beaten so badly that I needed stitches. My ribs
were in extreme pain, which continued to interrupt my sleep for
days. I wished that I would be transferred to a detention center.”
Similarly, [activist] Tang Jingling was not allowed to sleep for
upwards of ten days. In the end, he felt “trembling, numbness of
hands, and a bad feeling in his heart, that his life was in great
danger, and only then did the police just allow him to sleep one or
two hours a day.”
Writer Ye Du was held in a Guangzhou Police Training Center for
96 days, like lawyer Sui Muqing (Chapter 6). Ye recalled, “[I] didn’t
see sunlight for over a month. I was subjected to 22 hours of
interrogation every day. I was given one hour for eating, one hour
for sleeping, until the seventh day when my stomach had massive
bleeding.”
RSDL is classified as a non-custodial coercive measure, but in
reality it has not only became a system for prolonged, pre-trial
detention outside a formal, legal location, but has also become a
more severe, more terrible, coercive measure than normal criminal
detention. RSDL is not limited by detention center regulations, nor
any real supervision at all. The chances of torture are greatly
increased; in fact, torture has become rampant under RSDL.
 It is little wonder that this was one of the most controversial
articles during legislative reform, leading many commentators,
myself included, to call it the “Jasmine Article.” This is because it
appeared to legalize enforced disappearances, which had become
more common during the Jasmine Revolution crackdown.
The CPL stipulates that RSDL “must not be enforced in a
detention center or special case-handling area;” but in reality, all
RSDL is enforced at special case-handling areas run by the Public or
State Security Bureaus, or it is carried out at euphemistically named
“training centers,” “prevention bases,” “anti-corruption education
bases,” or sometimes even hotels that have been specially converted
into secret detention facilities known as Black Jails.
The law permits for exceptions where family members don’t
even need to be informed, and allows the state to deny access to a
lawyer. These exceptions, which have now become the norm, have
turned RSDL into a de facto enforced disappearance, exactly what
the RSDL system seeks to achieve.
Torture during many disappearances is well documented in a
number of high profile cases. The accounts have sometimes been
too much for people to bear reading about. Many rights defenders
related to the 709 Crackdown, such as Li Heping, Li Chunfu, Xie
Yanyi, Li Shuyun, and Gou Hongguo, have explained how they were
forcibly fed unidentified medicine, leading to different painful
symptoms.
Until now, most of what we know about RSDL has come from
scattered reports or open letters from family members. This book is
the first to present a fuller picture of the suffering imposed under
RSDL.
Several individuals in this book describe with previously
undisclosed details the experiences of delivering a forced confession.
Those who have stepped onto the road of human rights defense
face enormous pressure, living with threats to their family and heavy
prison sentences. Many have been forced to confess. The authorities
have used these confession videos to broadcast propaganda on state
television, to confuse public opinion, to crack down on the will of
resistance and dehumanize those who resist, and to turn rights
defender against rights defender. It is used to split supporters. This
may be the hardest part for China’s many political prisoners.
The authorities don’t always achieve their purpose but they
more or less always have an impact. Many people have suffered the
pain of misunderstanding and have grown distant from others. Many
have quit rights defense because they were ashamed of themselves.
Secondly, those detained in secret have almost all experienced
the indescribable suffering of having their families threatened or
persecuted. In general, those who have chosen to become rights
defenders under this kind of dictatorship are already aware of the
risks and are prepared. When we are “invited for tea” [a euphemism
used to describe a police summons], placed under house arrest,
detained or tortured, nothing can stop our fighting spirit. But for the
authorities to achieve the greatest deterrence, all they need to do is
apply the threat of pain to our family members. This has become a
common tactic used by the authorities, and used with growing
expertise. As with my own experience, the hardest thing for activists
fighting for freedom is how to balance conflict between family and
social responsibilities.
People compromise, yield, fall silent, or give up after their family
has been threatened or attacked. The Chinese Communist Party
understands this clearly. I have written about the Party’s assault
against the family members of rights defenders before.
RSDL goes far beyond normal detention. Serious human rights
violations are widespread. It goes against the rule of law. It should
be abolished. But under the One Party Dictatorship, the lack of
judicial independence or freedom of expression, the state has
instead expanded its suppression of the human rights movement
and hurriedly broadened the use of RSDL in the name of “stability
maintenance.”
I myself have experienced the “atrocities in the name of the
law.” Three separate times - in 2008, 2011 and 2012- I was among
the political dissidents and human rights lawyers who were the
victims of disappearances. I was held in secret, put in a black hood
that blocked out all light, with no way of knowing where I was,
subject to physical and mental torment. My family and friends were
also victims; in the blink of an eye, I had evaporated, they didn’t
know if I was alive or dead. This caused them immense suffering.
For those who remain free, enforced disappearance still has its
consequences. It creates a climate of terror. If you know that the
state is not bound by any laws, and can disappear you anytime,
anywhere, how likely are you to speak out against that same state?
The Chinese state, which like all authoritarian regimes is
motivated by an extreme fear of its own people, has perfected this
tactic as a means of staying in power. It is more efficient than
detention, trial and imprisonment, because it relies on one simple
truth: that no one, no lawyer, celebrity, person of faith, or even
government official, is safe.
And yet, there is another simple truth that I and others working
for human rights believe: that when one of us is not free, none of us
is free. People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security
deserve neither and will lose both. The publication of this book has
great importance and meaning: to reveal the truth, record the
misery and provide evidence of guilt. It is an indispensable signpost
on the road to justice.
The international community cannot stand idly by, nor believe
that, in dealing with a high-tech totalitarian Chinese regime, they
can assume it will be business as usual. They should not forget the
lessons of appeasing the Third Reich in the twentieth century. In the
face of so many disappearances in China, the spirit of defending
freedom and the voice of resistance cannot also disappear.

---

Dr Teng Biao is a human rights lawyer, formerly a lecturer at the

China University of Politics and Law, and is a visiting scholar at the
US-Asia Law Institute, New York University. He co-founded two
human rights NGOs in Beijing—the Open Constitution Initiative and
China Against the Death Penalty in 2003 and 2010, respectively.
Because of his human rights work, he was abducted and detained by
Chinese secret police in 2008 and 2011.
 Introduction | MICHAEL CASTER

To dismantle an abusive system of repression, greater

understanding is necessary and that is precisely why this book
is a vital contribution to not only our understanding of China’s
assault on human rights but also our broader understanding of
authoritarian politics and state violence.

It was early in January 2016. I woke up to find several frantic

Telegram notifications. Checking my encrypted email, the three
messages at the top of my inbox, each with a more troublesome
subject line, grew to confirm what several of us had been fearing for
days: the disappearances had reached our network. This was the
beginning of what has turned into an international campaign to raise
awareness and put pressure on China to end its systems for arbitrary
and secret detention.
Two years ago, the launch of the first edition of The People’s
Republic of the Disappeared exposed a little-known mechanism for
coercive custody within the 2013 Criminal Procedure Law known as
Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location (RSDL). This book
has provided the first of its kind comprehensive treatment of RSDL
and a platform for some of its victims to share their stories.
While the impetus was the direct targeting of my friends and
colleagues at the Chinese Urgent Action Working Group (China
Action), the project to document and advocate against RSDL has
grown into an international coalition. But it all started with a series
of Telegram messages and a few emails in early 2016.
I was in northern England, and by the time I received the
messages, several hours had already passed since they had been
sent from Beijing. The last email, from a trusted human rights
defender, confirmed that my colleague, Swedish citizen Peter Dahlin
(Chapter 8), and his Chinese girlfriend Pan Jinling (Chapter 9) had
been disappeared. With this, years of human rights defense in China
came crashing to a head, as I was used to advocating for others but
never for those so close, those whom I had known and worked with
since 2008. We had had our close calls, impossible to evade in an
authoritarian state like China, even as an underground group, but
this would be the final blow that ended our old organization.
In early 2009, Peter and I, along with lawyer Wang
Quanzhang, had co-founded China Action, a Beijing-based human
rights organization. Over the years, we had provided legal training
for hundreds of barefoot lawyers[1] around China, operated legal aid
stations to provide pro bono support for victims of government
abuse, and produced a number of manuals on rights defense.
Nothing contentious surely, except in China where protecting
citizens’ rights is treated as an assault on state supremacy. Peter was
a foreseeable target within China’s authoritarian state logic, and we
had been preparing for the worst. That they would extend the attack
to include Jinling, his girlfriend, who had nothing to do with the
human rights community, was however a surprise, and the epitome
of arbitrariness. An increasingly widespread practice, as Teng Biao
mentions in the Foreword to this book, is the punishment of
partners, parents, children, and siblings for the supposed crimes of
their human rights defender family members.
Throughout early January 2016, more people from our
organization would be disappeared.
When someone is denied contact with family, lawyers,
diplomats, or foreign media, the world is left guessing as to whether
they are alive or dead. The rights defender who had emailed me also
said that he himself was preparing to be taken and asked me to help
his family get out of China if he disappeared. Just as he feared, he
too was later seized.
A few days after they disappeared, while I was still trying to
work behind the scenes with the diplomatic community, Peter and I
having agreed before he was taken that quiet diplomatic pressure
would be the first line of response, Jinling recounts her first few days
inside Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location (RSDL):
 I realized they were going to leave me there, strapped
into the wooden chair all night. After some time, I was feeling
exhausted but no sooner had I closed my eyes than the guard
screamed into my face. I was shocked… Again I felt myself
nodding, but as soon as my eyes were barely closed the guard
was right there in my face screaming. This was how I passed
the night, deprived of sleep. It was horrible.

Over the following weeks, quiet diplomatic pressure proved

fruitless, illustrative of China’s escalating stature in the international
community wherein quiet and behind the scenes diplomatic pressure
has arguably lost all utility. I continued to focus my attention on
coordinating international advocacy, still working behind the scenes
with representatives of foreign governments, friends in the
international human rights community, and later speaking publicly
with foreign correspondents. I was growing frustrated by what
seemed like a slow diplomatic response. Journalists did their best
but also made mistakes. What was becoming apparent was that
although by January 2016 many rights defenders had been
disappeared across China under a criminal procedure that had
existed since 2013, few people fully grasped the extent of RSDL.
This frustration remains with the second edition of this book,
nearly four years later. As China continues to perfect its mechanisms
for arbitrary and secret coercive detention, through RSDL or Liuzhi
(Chapter 13), or the widespread abduction, disappearance and
imprisonment of ethnic minorities across Xinjiang, the world fails to
grasp the severity of China’s reliance on disappearances as a
function of governance. But it is difficult to grasp the sophisticated
and interconnected structure for disappearances without first
understanding the model for these varied systems: RSDL.
RSDL didn’t come out of nowhere without concerns from the
human rights community; lawyers Teng Biao and Tang Jitian among
others had been outspoken critics. On his personal blog in February
2012, then Chinese University of Hong Kong legal scholar, Joshua
Rosenzweig, echoed such concerns when he commented that the
authorities’ habit of “operating in the blank spaces of the law and
the hidden spaces of internal police regulations” would become
entrenched if the then draft Criminal Procedure Law (CPL) went
forward with its inclusion of RSDL.[2] Writing in the New York Times,
also in February 2012, then Human Rights Watch China Researcher
Nicholas Bequelin warned that under the guise of regulation, RSDL
would “effectively legalize secret detentions and ‘disappearances’ of
people viewed as political risks by the government.”[3] Still, it has
taken a long time for people to realize the severity of RSDL. As
sociologists Sida Liu and Terence Halliday recall in Criminal Defense
in China, in 2012, while some activists reacted with alarm at the
possible legalization of a cruel practice, a number of other Chinese
lawyers and scholars dismissed the risks of RSDL, believing it would
be used with caution.[4]
Even through 2015 to 2016, as hundreds of rights defenders
were disappearing for varying periods of time, observers and family
members at first often responded with mild relief at hearing that
their colleagues and loved ones had been placed under RSDL. Many
still believed RSDL would amount to being softer than criminal
detention and, some might say naively, that because it was a formal
criminal procedure it would be less secretive and open to abuse than
had been the extralegal system of Black Jails into which so many
petitioners and human rights defenders had been disappeared over
the previous decade.[5] They couldn’t have been more wrong.
After Sui Muqing (Chapter 6) was first transferred to RSDL,
some expressed relief. When Gou Hongguo’s wife was alerted that
he had been placed under RSDL, she recounted feeling “ecstatic,”
and only started to feel otherwise after having contacted the
authorities to be told, “The case is under investigation. The
whereabouts of the person is a secret.”[6] This has become a
common refrain, such as with Wang Quanzhang’s wife, Li Wenzu,
and his lawyers having been countlessly told on their attempts to
contact Wang that no record for such a person exists.[7] In other
cases, following six months of disappearance in RSDL, police have
transferred individuals into criminal detention centers under false
names in order to prolong the secrecy of their fate and whereabouts
(these are tactics discussed in more detail in Chapter 13). When
Chen Guiqiu found out that her husband, Xie Yang (Chapter 5), had
been placed in RSDL, at first she didn’t know what to expect but as
she learned more she felt increasingly powerless. “They just took
him and there is nothing anyone can do, at all.”[8]
Much remains unknown, by definition, of this shadowy system
that allows the police to detain anyone in total secret for up to six
months, and potentially longer, without access to a lawyer or any
legal recourse to challenge their incommunicado detention, an
enforced disappearance. Torture is common. To dismantle such an
abusive system of repression, greater understanding is necessary
and that is precisely why this book is a vital contribution to not only
our understanding of China’s assault on human rights but also our
broader understanding of authoritarian politics and state violence.
What China does arguably concerns everyone. China has
proven that it is more than happy to share its repressive tactics with
its neighbors, or to simply impose its will over them. What’s more,
the victims of RSDL have not just been Chinese citizens. Think of
Taiwanese pro-democracy activist Lee Ming-che,[9] or Swedish citizen
and Hong Kong bookseller Gui Minhai. In Gui’s case, Chinese
authorities went so far as to abduct him in October 2015 from inside
Thailand before kidnapping him to mainland China, and placing him
under RSDL. Gui Minhai’s daughter, also a Swedish citizen, Angela
Gui, didn’t find out about her father for weeks.

I was expecting a call from him that never came… Three

weeks after we were supposed to speak, my dad’s colleague
Lee Bo[10] emailed me saying my dad had been missing for over
20 days, and that he feared he’d been taken by ‘Chinese
special agents for political reasons.’ He also told me that three
of their other colleagues had gone missing… Because I still
hadn’t had any direct communication from Chinese authorities
regarding my dad’s detention, I didn’t learn of the term
Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location until fairly
late.[11]
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 And although international pressure has slowly mounted since
the publication of the first edition, China has not refrained from
reliance on RSDL as a tool of repression against its own citizens or
foreigners. In December 2018, two Canadian citizens, Michael
Kovrig, a former diplomat working with the NGO International Crisis
Group, and Michael Spavor a North Korea expert were disappeared
and placed under RSDL, for all intents and purposes as nothing more
than bargaining chips as China negotiated for the release of Huawei
executive Meng Wenzhou held in Canada on extradition charges to
the United States. Not only has China wielded RSDL to silence
regime opponents but it has also relied on this system for arbitrary
and secret detention to lash out at other nations, the epitome of
arbitrary detention.
Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location is admittedly
cumbersome even for a Chinese Communist Party euphemism. It
appears in the amended Criminal Procedure Law, which was adopted
at the National People’s Congress in March 2012, and entered into
force on 1 January 2013. In a symbolic gesture of openness, a draft
version had been released in August 2011 and opened for one
month of public consultation in September. Lawyer Tang Jitian wrote
that when he first read about RSDL he feared it would be used to
legalize secret detentions, as indeed it has been. In his chapter that
was in the first of edition of this book, Tang wrote emotionally that,
“It is an evil legislation. RSDL is worse than death for most of its
victims.”
But it wasn’t really until 2015 that RSDL first came into
widespread use, or that it was first subjected to nationwide testing
as a tool of exercising total Party control.
Beginning in the pre-dawn hours of 9 July 2015, China
launched a coordinated strike against hundreds of Chinese human
rights lawyers, legal assistants, activists, and family members in
what has come to be known as the 709 Crackdown. It was the worst
assault on civil society since the bloody suppression of the 1989
Democracy Movement. The initial targets included human rights
lawyer Wang Yu (Chapter 3), her husband, Bao Longjun, and
partners at Beijing’s Fengrui Law Firm, including Wang Quanzhang.
Wang Yu recalls the night they came for her:

Without warning, the lights in my house were cut…

…I tried to phone for help, but before anyone could

answer, someone had already broken through the door, and
was instantly upon me. The light from his headlamp flashed
into my face as he spoke, ‘Don’t move! We’re from Beijing
Public Security Bureau.’

Within days, the disappearances had spread around China,

and later even crossed its borders. In October 2015, a few months
after the abduction of his parents Wang Yu and Bao Longjun, the
then 16-year-old Bao Zhuoxuan made a brave attempt to flee from
persecution in China, accompanied by barefoot lawyer Xing Qingxian
and rights defender Tang Zhishun (Chapter 11). But, soon after
having crossed the border into Myanmar from China’s Yunnan
Province, they were apprehended by Chinese police in the tiny
mountain town of Mongla. They were forced back into China and
placed under RSDL.
I remember closely reading about this unfolding at the time
because my organization, China Action, a year earlier had been
supporting Xing Qingxian run a legal aid center in Sichuan. He had
provided pro-bono legal support for victims of government abuse.
And it was because of this past partnership that the police had
accused Peter during his own period of RSDL of masterminding the
attempt to smuggle Bao Zhuoxuan out of the country.
Tang Zhishun recalls with some irony the charges he was
accused of soon after having been forced back from Myanmar and
placed under RSDL:

They informed me that the charge against me had been

changed from illegally crossing a national border to inciting
subversion of state power. What a threat! They really
overestimated me.
 Disappearances under RSDL have been a common feature
employed against those accused of subversion, lumping human
rights defenders together with terror suspects. This much is known.
But RSDL has also been used as a threat to coerce confessions or
the denouncement of colleagues, proving the state employs it more
as a tool of repression than by any stretch of the imagination as a
legal procedure. China’s increasing use of forced confessions, and
especially the manipulation of state media and broadcasting forced
confessions as part of its foreign policy are issues that Safeguard
Defenders has also campaigned on since the release of the first
edition of this book. Jiang Xiaoyu (Chapter 10) tells how he was
abducted, held in secret, tortured, and threatened with
disappearance for years if he didn’t cooperate.
Not everyone knows how to prepare for being disappeared,
and only more recently have human rights defenders in China begun
making preemptive plans with family and lawyers in the event they
lose their freedom. But even for those who know what to expect, it
is no less traumatic. Chen Zhixiu (Chapter 7) recalls the mounting
anxiety of preparing and expecting to be disappeared, so much so
that he almost welcomed it when they finally came to take him:

Somehow, I felt relaxed when they arrived, standing

there in my small rented apartment. I was surrounded by
threatening security agents and yet I was kind of happy. I had
been so nervous over the previous days, unable to really
concentrate on anything other than remembering to always
look over my shoulder... At least, when they burst into my
apartment, I didn’t have to be nervous about it anymore.

I remember at one point in 2016, receiving a worried email

from a rights defender who knew he was being monitored and
feared the police would come for him. We agreed that I would
periodically check on him over WhatsApp since I wasn’t living in
China anymore. One Friday, I messaged him. He was at work and
leaving soon. He would be home in an hour. I messaged again. He
was on the subway, this time he said he would be home in 40
minutes. I messaged again. He was about to get off the subway, and
said he would be home in 20 minutes. I messaged again 20 minutes
later, no reply. And again 30 minutes later, still no reply. An hour
later, the silence had become excruciating. I knew he had been
taken.
A few days later, I received a distraught and tearful voice
message, followed by an email:

I am so scared. I am writing this email with my tears. I

was beaten and questioned by State Security. They put a black
bag over my head. They threatened to destroy my life, my
family, my parents, everything. I know they can. Sorry, I can't
hold myself together. I can't sleep. I can't eat. I am totally
crushed. I could be taken again anytime. I don't know what to
do. Please find a way to try and save other people. I don't
know if I dare to write to you again.[12]

Of course, even when you are expecting it, the act itself is
violent and abrupt, whether you are disappeared for two nights, two
months, or as in the case of Wang Quanzhang over three and a half
years. At the time of writing, many others remain in secret prisons
across the country, disappeared but never forgotten, from lawyers
Yu Wensheng and Gao Zhisheng to the more than one million
Uyghur and Kazakhs, although not directly victims of RSDL, who
have likewise been taken from their families and placed in secret
locations and held incommunicado across the People’s Republic of
the Disappeared.
For everyone, an enforced disappearance is ongoing until the
person’s fate or whereabouts are known, and there is no minimum
time period for an enforced disappearance.
During an enforced disappearance, the risk of torture is
heightened, and indeed nearly every story in this book recounts
some form of ill-treatment, from sleep deprivation and psychological
trauma to threats against family and a range of physical torture.
 As Teng Biao writes in the Foreword, the torture of many of
the disappeared victims of the 709 Crackdown is now well
documented. Even for those accustomed to the depravities of
China’s repression, the accounts of torture of human rights
defenders, from Li Chunfu to Xie Yang (Chapter 5) are shocking.
Such brutal accounts of RSDL led a group of 11 countries in
early 2017 (conspicuously absent were the United States and the
European Union) to issue a joint statement demanding China
investigate reports of torture and end the RSDL system.[13] And in
2018, following a May letter from Safeguard Defenders and a group
of other Human Rights NGOs,[14] 18 United Nations Special
Procedures issued a firm communication to the Government of China
expressing their deepest concerns over the ongoing existence of
RSDL.[15]
China, however, has responded to such condemnation by
doubling down on the systematization of RSDL, and enforced
disappearances. In its National Human Rights Action Plan (2016-
2020), China stated: “Places of surveillance shall be regularized” and
promised to “seriously [implement] the system of Residential
Surveillance at a Designated Location.”[16] Such vocabulary points to
China’s intention to expand RSDL. At the same time, cases such as
Jiang Xiaoyu (Chapter 10), where RSDL was used purely as a
coercive threat, are increasingly employed alongside its use beyond
even the vaguely written parameters in the law, with the police even
abandoning superficial accusations of national security crimes. This
can lead to only one conclusion: We have only seen the beginning of
RSDL and just as China has characteristically tested some policies
and practices in select provinces before taking them nationwide,
RSDL is arguably merely one test case in a growing system for
secret detention, such as we have seen with several new measures
being formalized since the release of the first edition (see Chapter
13).
This trajectory of repression is what makes the timing of this
book so important. It not only seeks to unmask the systematic
abuses of RSDL, it is also the first detailed depiction of RSDL as
Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:
Doug. So spacecraft merely turn aside for anything that even looks
close. They don't take any chances at all," said Don Channing. "They
can't afford to."
"Suppose that the ship ducked a big shower and it went so far out of
course that they missed Mars?"
"That's out, too," laughed Channing.
"Why?"
"A standard ship of space is capable of hitting it up at about four G
all the way from Terra to Mars at major opposition and end up with
enough power and spare cathodes to continue to Venus in
quadrature. Now the velocity of the planets in their orbits is a stinking
matter of miles per second, while the top speed of a ship in even the
shortest passage runs up into four figures per second. You'd be
surprised at what velocity you can attain at one G for ten hours."
"Yes?"
"It runs to slightly less than two hundred and fifty miles per second,
during which you've covered only four million miles. In the shortest
average run from Venus to Terra at conjunction, a skimpy twenty-five
million miles, your time of travel is a matter of twenty-five hours odd,
running at the standard two G. Your velocity at turnover—or the
halfway point where the ship stops going up from Terra and starts to
go down to Venus—is a cool five hundred miles per second. So
under no condition would the ship miss its objective badly enough to
cause its complete loss. Why, this business is run so quickly that
were it not for the saving in time and money that amounts to a small
percentage at the end of each flight, the pilot could head for his
planet and approach the planet asymptotically."
"You know what you're doing, don't you?" asked the reporter.
"I think so."
"You're forcing my mind into accepting something that has never
happened before, and something that has no basis for its—"
"You mean piracy? I wonder. We've all read tales of the Jolly Roger
being painted on the side of a sleek ship of space while the pirate,
who is a fine fellow at heart though uninhibited, hails down the
cruiser carrying radium. He swipes the stuff and kisses all the
women whilst menacing the men with a gun-hand full of searing,
coruscating, violently lethal ray pistol. But that sounds fine in stories.
The trick is tougher than it sounds, Douglas. You've got to catch your
rabbit first."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning that finding a ship in space to prey upon is somewhat less
difficult than juggling ten billiard balls whilst riding a horse
blindfolded. Suppose you were to turn pirate. This is what would
happen:
"You'd get the course of the treasure ship from the spaceport, fine
and good, by resorting to spies and such. You'd lie in wait out there
in the blackness of space, fixing your position by the stars and
hoping that your error in fix was less than a couple of hundred
thousand miles. The time comes. You look to your musket, sharpen
your cutlass, and see to the priming of your derringers that are thrust
into the red sash at your waist. You are right on the course, due to
your brilliant though lawless navigator who was tossed out of
astrogator's school for filching the teacher's whiskey. Then the
treasure ship zoops past at a healthy hundred miles per second and
you decide that since she is hitting it up at two G, you'd have had to
start from scratch at a heck of a lot better to catch her within the next
couple of light years."
"But suppose you took the course as laid and applied the same
acceleration? Suppose you followed on the heels of your quarry until
you were both in space? You could do it then, couldn't you?"
"Gosh," said Channing, "I never thought of that. That's the only way
a guy could pirate a ship—unless he planted his men on board and
they mutinied."
"Then it might be pirates?"
"It might be," admitted Channing. "It'd have to occur near beginning
or end, of course, though. I can't think of anything safer than being
shot at out of a gun of any kind while both crates are hitting it up at a
couple of hundred miles per second and at a distance of a few miles
apart. It would be all right if you were both running free, but at two G
acceleration, you'd have to do quite a bit of ballistic gymnastics to
score a hit."
"Or run in front of your quarry and sow a bouquet of mines."
"Except that the meteor detector would show the position of the
pirate craft in the celestial globe and the interconnecting circuits
would cause the treasure ship to veer off at a sharp angle. Shucks,
Doug, this thing has got too many angles to it. I can't begin to run it
off either way. No matter how difficult it may sound, there are still
ways and means to do it. The one thing that stands out like a sore
thumb is the fact that the Solar Queen has turned up missing. Since
no inanimate agency could cause failure, piracy is the answer."
"You're sure of that?"
"Not positive. There are things that might cause the ship to founder.
But what they are depends on too many coincidences. It's like hitting
a royal flush on the deal, or filling a full house from two pairs."
"Well, thanks, Channing. I'm heading back to Canalopsis right now.
Want to come along?"
Channing looked at Arden, who was coming from the dressing room
carrying her coat and he nodded. "The gal says yes," he grinned.
"Annoy her until I find my shoes, will you?"
Arden wrinkled her nose at Don. "I'll like that," she said to Doug.

The trip from Lincoln Head to Canalopsis was a fast one. Doug
drove the little flier through the thin air of Mars at a breakneck speed
and covered the twelve hundred miles in just shy of an hour. At the
spaceport, Channing found that he was not denied the entrance as
the reporter had been. He was ushered into the office of Keg
Johnson, and he and the manager of the Canalopsis Spaceport
greeted Don with a worried expression on his face.
"Still gone," said Johnson cryptically. "Like the job of locating her?"
Don shook his head with a sympathetic smile. "Like trying to find a
grain of sand on a beach—a specified grain, I mean. Wouldn't know
how to go about it."
Keg nodded. "I thought as much. That leaves her out of the picture.
Well, up to now space travel has been about as safe as spending the
evening in your easy-chair. Hello, Arden, how's married life?"
"Can't tell yet," she said with a twinkle. "I've got to find out whether I
can break him of a dozen bad habits before I'll commit myself."
"I wish you luck, Arden, although from that statement, it's Don that
needs the luck."
"We came to see if there was anything we could do about the Solar
Queen," offered Channing.
"What can anybody do?" asked Keg with spread hands. "About all
we can do is to put it down in our remembrances and turn to
tomorrow. Life goes on, you know," said Keg in a resigned tone, "and
either we keep up or we begin to live in the past. Are you going to
stay here for a day or two?"
"Was thinking about it," said Don.
"Well, suppose you register at the Terraland and meet me back here
for lunch. If anything occurs, I'll shoot you a quickie." Keg looked at
his watch and whistled. "Lordy," he said ruefully. "I didn't know how
late it was. Look, kids, I'll run you downtown myself, and we'll all
have lunch at the Terraland. How's that?"
"Sounds better," admitted Channing. "My appetite, you know."
"I know," laughed Arden. "Come on, meat-eater, and we'll peel a
calf."
It was during lunch that a messenger raced into the dining room and
handed Keg a letter. Keg read, and then swore roundly. He tossed
the letter across the table to Don and Arden.
TO THE OPERATORS OF ALL SPACELINES:
 IT HAS COME TO MY ATTENTION THAT YOUR SHIPS
NEED PROTECTION. THE ABSENCE OF THE SOLAR
QUEEN IS PROOF ENOUGH THAT YOUR EFFORTS
ARE INSUFFICIENT TO INSURE THE ARRIVAL OF A
SPACESHIP AT ITS DESTINATION.
I AM CAPABLE OF OFFERING PROTECTION AT THE
REASONABLE RATE OF ONE DOLLAR SOLARIAN FOR
EVERY GROSS TON, WITH THE RETURN OF TEN
DOLLARS SOLARIAN IF ANY SHIP FAILS TO COME
THROUGH SAFELY. I THINK THAT YOU MAY FIND IT
NECESSARY TO SUBSCRIBE TO MY INSURANCE,
SINCE WITHOUT MY PROTECTION I CANNOT BE
RESPONSIBLE FOR FAILURES.
ALLISON (HELLION) MURDOCH.
"Why the dirty racketeer," stormed Arden. "Who is he, anyway?"
"Hellion Murdoch is a man of considerable ability as a surgeon and a
theoretical physicist," explained Don. "He was sentenced to the gas
chamber ten years ago for trying some of his theories out on human
beings without their consent. He escaped with the aid of fifteen or
twenty of his cohorts who had stolen the Hippocrates right out of the
private spaceport of the Solarian Medical Research Institute."
"And they headed for the unknown," offered Keg. "Wonder where
they've been for the last ten years?"
"I'll bet a hat that they've been in the Melapalan Jungle, using the
machine shop of the Hippocrates to fashion guns. That machine
shop was a dilly, if I remember correctly."
"It was. The whole ship was just made to be as self-sustaining as it
could be. They used to run all over the System in it, you know,
chasing bugs. But look, Don, if I were you, I'd begin worrying about
Venus Equilateral. That's where he'll hit next."
"You're right. But what are you going to do?"
"Something that will drive him right out to the relay station," said Keg
in a sorrowful tone. "Sorry, Don, but when I put an end to all space
shipping for a period of six weeks, Hellion Murdoch will be sitting in
your lap."
"He sure will," said Channing nervously. "Arden, are you willing to
run a gantlet?"
"Sure," she answered quickly. "Are you sure that there will be no
danger?"
"Reasonably sure, or I wouldn't take you with me. Unless Murdoch
has managed to build himself a couple of extra ships, we've got a
chance in three that he'll be near one of the other two big
spaceports. So we'll slide out of here unannounced and at a peculiar
time of day. We'll load up with gravanol and take it all the way to the
station at six G."
"He may have two or three ships," said Keg. "A man could cover all
the standard space shipping in three, and he might not have too bad
a time with two, especially if he were only out looking for those which
weren't paid for. But, look, I wouldn't check out of the Terraland if I
were you. Keep this under cover. Your heap is all ready to take sky
from Canalopsis Spaceport and you can leave directly."
"Hold off on your announcement as long as possible," Don asked
Keg.
Johnson smiled and nodded. "I'll give you time to get there anyway.
But I've no control over what will be done at Northern Landing or
Mojave. They may kick over the traces."
"Arden, we're moving again," laughed Don. "Keg, ship us our duds
as soon as this affair clears up." Channing scribbled a message on
the back of Murdoch's letter. "Shoot this off to Walt Franks, will you?
I won't wait for an answer, that'll take about fifty minutes, and by that
time I'll have been in space for twenty."
They paused long enough to stop at the nurse's office at the
spaceport for a heavy shot of gravanol and a thorough bracing with
wide adhesive tape. Then they made their way to the storage space
of the spaceport where they entered their small ship. Channing was
about to send the power lever home when the figure of Keg Johnson
waved him to stop.
Keg ran up to the space lock and handed in a paper.
"You're it," he said. "Good luck, Channings."
It was another message from Hellion Murdoch. It said, bluntly:
TO DONALD A. CHANNING, PH.D.:
DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS:
CONSIDERABLE DIFFICULTY HAS BEEN
EXPERIENCED IN TRANSMITTING MESSAGES TO
THE INTERESTED PARTIES. I DESIRE A FREE HAND
IN TELLING ALL WHO CARE THE PARTICULARS OF
MY INSURANCE.
SINCE YOUR RELAY STATION IS IN A POSITION TO
CONTROL ALL COMMUNICATIONS BETWEEN THE
WORLDS, I AM OFFERING YOU THE OPTION OF
EITHER SURRENDERING THE STATION TO ME, OR OF
FIGHTING ME FOR ITS POSSESSION. I AM
CONFIDENT THAT YOU WILL SEE THE INTELLIGENT
COURSE; AN UNARMED STATION IN SPACE IS NO
MATCH FOR A FULLY ARMED AND EXCELLENTLY
MANNED CRUISER.
YOUR ANSWER WILL BE EXPECTED IN FIVE DAYS.
ALLISON (HELLION) MURDOCH.
Channing snarled and thrust the power lever down to the last notch.
The little ship leaped upward at five G, and was gone from sight in
less than a minute.
Arden shook her head. "What was that message you sent to
Franks?" she asked.
"I told him that there was a wild-eyed pirate on the loose, and that he
might take a stab at the station. We are coming in as soon as we can
get there and to be on the lookout for us on the landing
communications radio, and also for anything untoward in the nature
of space vessels."
"Then this is not exactly a shock," said Arden, waving the message
from Murdoch.
"Not exactly," said Channing dryly. "Now look, Arden, you go to
sleep. This'll take hours and hours, and gabbing about it will only lay
you out cold."
"I feel fine," objected Arden.
"I know, but that's the gravanol, not you. The tape will keep you
intact, and the gravanol will keep you awake without nausea. But you
can't get something for nothing, Arden, and when that gravanol
wears off, you'll spend ten times as long with one-tenth of the trouble
you might have had. So take it easy for yourself now and later you'll
be glad that you aren't worse."
The sky blackened, and Channing knew that they were free in
space. Give them another fifteen minutes and the devil himself
couldn't find them. With no flight plan scheduled and no course
posted, they might as well have been in the seventeenth dimension.
As they emerged from the thin atmosphere, there was a fleeting
flash of fire from several miles to the east, but Channing did not pay
particular attention to it. Arden looked through a telescope and
thought she saw a spaceship circling, but she could not be sure.
Whatever it was, nothing came of it.
The trip out to the station was a monotonous series of uneventful
hours, proceeding along one after the other. They dozed and slept
most of the time, eating sparingly and doing nothing that was not
absolutely necessary.
Turnabout was accomplished and then the deceleration began,
equally long and equally monotonous. It was equally inactive.
Channing tried to plan, but it failed because he could not plan
without talking and discussing the affair with his men. Too much
depended upon their co-operation. He fell into a morose, futile
feeling that made itself evident in grousing; Arden tried to cheer him,
but Don's usually bubbling spirit was doused too deep. Also, Arden
herself was none too happy, which is necessary before one can
cheer another.
Then they sighted the station and Channing's ill spirit left. A man of
action, what he hated most was the no-action business of just sitting
in a little capsule waiting for the relay station to come up out of the
sky below. Once it was sighted, Channing foresaw action, and his
grousing stopped.
They zipped past the station at a distance of ten miles, and
Channing opened the radio.
"Walt Franks! Wake up, you slumberhead."
The answer came inside of half a minute. "Hello, Don. Who's
asleep?"
"Where are you? In Joe's?"
"Joe has declared a drought for the duration," said Franks with a
laugh. "He thinks we can't think on Scotch."
"We can't. Have you seen the boys?"
"Murdoch's crew? Sure, they're circling at about five miles, running
around in the plane of the ecliptic. Keep running on the colure and
the chances are that you won't even see 'em. But, Don, they can
hear us!"
"How about the landing stage at the south end?"
"There are two of them running around the station at different heights
from north to south. The third is circling in a four-mile circle on a
plane five miles south of the station. We've picked up a few HE
shells, and I guess that, if you try to make a landing there, you'll be
shot to bits. That devil is using the meteor detector for a gun pointer."
"Walt, remember the visual loran?"
"Y'mean the one we used to find the Empress?"
"Uh-huh. Rig it without the mirrors? Get me? D'you know what I want
to do?"
"Yop. All we have to do is clear away some of the saw grass again.
Not too much, though, because it hasn't been too long since we cut it
before. I get you all right."
"Fine. How soon?"
"I'm in the beam control north, I've got a portable mike, and I walk
over to the mirror and begin to tinker with the screws. Ouch! I've
skun me a knuckle. Now look, Don, I'm going inside and crack the
passage end. I've broadcast throughout the station that it is to be
cracked, and the men are swarming all over the axis of the station
doing just that. Come—a-running!"
Channing circled the little ship high to the north and came down
toward the axis of the station. He accelerated fiercely for a portion of
the time, and then made a slambang turnabout. A pilot light on the
instrument panel gleamed, indicating that some of the plates were
strained and that the ship was leaking air. Another light lit, indicating
that the automatic pressure control was functioning, and that the
pressure was maintained, though it might not long be.
Then in deceleration, Channing fought the ship on to a die-straight
line with the open door at the north end. He fixed the long, long
passageway in the center of his sights, and prayed.
The ship hit the opening squarely, and only then did their terrific
speed become apparent. Past bulkhead after bulkhead they drove,
and a thin scream came to their ears as the atmosphere down in the
bowels of the station was compressed by the tiny ship's passage.
Doors slammed behind the ship as it passed, and air locks were
opened, permitting the station's center to fill to its normal pressure
once more.
Then the rocketing ship slowed. Channing saw a flash of green and
knew that the Martian saw grass was halfway down the three-mile
length of the station. He zipped past storerooms and rooms filled
with machinery, and then the ship scraped lightly against one of the
bulkheads.
It caromed from this bulkhead against the next, hitting it in a
quartering slice. From side to side the ship bounced, crushing the
bulkheads and tearing great slices from the flanks of the ship.
It slowed, and came to rest against a large room full of packing
cases, and was immediately swarmed over by the men of Venus
Equilateral.
They found Channing partly conscious. His nose was bleeding but
otherwise he seemed all right. Arden was completely out, though a
quick check by the station's medical staff assured Don that she
would be all right as soon as they gave her a workout. He was
leaving the center of the station when Franks came puffing up the
stairway from the next lowest level.
"Gosh," he said. "It's a real job trying to guess where you stopped.
I've been hitting every hundred feet and asking. Well, that was one
for the book."
"Yeah," groaned Don. "Come along, Walt. I want a shower. You can
give the resumé of the activities while I'm showering and trying to
soak this adhesive off. Arden, lucky girl, will be unconscious when
Doc rips it off; I never liked the way they remove tape."
"There isn't much to tell," said Franks. "But what there is, I'll tell you."

Channing was finishing the shower when Walt mentioned that it was
too bad that they hadn't started his electron gun a few weeks sooner.
Don shut off the water, fumbled for a towel, and said: "What?"
Franks repeated.
Again Channing said: "What? Are you nuts?"
"No. I've been tinkering with an idea of mine. If we had another
month to work on it, I think we might be able to clip Murdoch's ears."
"Just what are you using in this super weapon, chum?"
Franks explained.
"Mind if I put in an oar?" asked Channing.
"Not at all. So far we might be able to fry a smelt at twenty feet, or
we could cook us a steak. But I haven't been able to do a thing yet.
We had it working once, and I think we heated a meteor somewhat,
but the whole thing went blooey before we finished the test. I've
spent the last week and a half fixing the thing up again, and would
have tried it out on the next meteor, but your message brought a halt
to everything but cleaning up the mess and making ready just in
case we might think of something practical."
"I'll put in my first oar by seeing the gadget. Wait till I find my pants,
and I'll go right along."
Don inspected the installation and whistled. "Not half bad, sonny, not
half bad."
"Except that we haven't been able to make it work."
"Well, for one thing, you've been running on the wrong track. You
need more power."
"Sure," grinned Walt. "More power, he says. I don't see how we can
cram any more soup into this can. She'll melt."
"Walt, what happens in a big gun?"
"Powder burns; expanding products of combustion push—"
"Functionally, what are you trying to accomplish? Take it on the basis
of a solid shot, like they used to use back in the sailing ship days."
"Well," said Walt thoughtfully, "I'd say they were trying to heave
something large enough to do damage."
"Precisely. Qualifying that statement a little, you might say that the
projectile transmits the energy of the powder charge to its objective."
"Right," agreed Walt.
"And it is possible to transmit that energy mechanically. I think if we
reason this idea out in analogy, we might be able to do it electrically.
First, there is the method. There is nothing wrong with your idea,
functionally. Electron guns are as old as radio. They—"
The door opened and Arden entered. "Hi, fellows," she said, "What's
cooking?"
"Hi, Arden. Like marriage?" Walt asked.
"How long do people have to be married before people stop asking
that darn fool question?" asked Arden.
"O.K., how about your question?"
"I meant that. I ran into Warren, who told me that the brains were
down here tinkering on something that was either a brilliant idea or
an equally brilliant flop—he didn't know which. What goes?"
"Walt has turned Buck Rogers and is now about to invent a ray gun."
"No!"
"Yes!"
"Here's where we open a psychopathic ward," said Arden sadly. "So
far, Venus Equilateral is the only community that hasn't had a village
idiot. But no longer are we unique. Seriously, Walt?"
"Sure enough," said Channing. "He's got an idea here that may work
with a little tinkering."
"Brother Edison, we salute you," said Arden. "How does it work?"
"Poorly. Punk. Lousy."
"Well, sound recording has come a long way from the tinfoil cylinder
that scratched out: 'Mary had a little lamb!' And transportation has
come along swell from the days of sliding sledges. You may have the
nucleus of an idea, Walt. But I meant its operation instead of its
efficiency."
"We have an electron gun of super size," explained Walt. "The
cathode is a big affair six feet in diameter and capable of emitting a
veritable storm of electrons. We accelerate them by means of
properly spaced anodes of the proper voltage level, and we focus
them into a nice bundle by means of electrostatic lenses—"
"Whoah, Tillie, you're talking like the venerable Buck Rogers himself.
Say that in words of one cylinder, please," chuckled Arden.
"Well, any voltage gradient between electrodes of different voltage
acts as a prism, sort of. When you have annular electrodes of the
proper size, shape, and voltage difference, they act as a lens."
"In other words, the ring-shaped electrodes are electrostatic lenses?"
"Nope. It is the space between them. With light or electrons a convex
lens will converge the light no matter which direction the light is
coming from."
"Uh-huh. I see in a sort of vague manner. Now, fellows, go on from
there. What's necessary to make this dingbat tick?"
"I want to think out loud," said Channing.
"That's nothing unusual," said Arden. "Can't we go into Joe's? You
can't think without a tablecloth, either."
"What I'm thinking is this, Walt. You've been trying to squirt electrons
like a fireman runs a hose. Walt, how long do you suppose a sixteen-
inch rifle would last if the explosives were constantly replaced and
the fire burned constantly?"
"Not long," admitted Walt.
"A gun is an overloaded machine," said Don. "Even a little one. The
life of a gun barrel is measured in seconds; totalling up the time of
transit of all the rounds from new gun to worn barrel gives a figure
expressed in seconds. Your electron gun, Walt, whether it be fish,
flesh, or fowl, must be overloaded for an instant."
"Is overload a necessary requirement?" asked Arden. "It seems to
me that you might be able to bore a sixteen-inch gun for a twenty-
two. What now, little man?"
"By the time we get something big enough to do more than knock
paint off, we'll have something bigger than a twenty-two," grinned
Channing. "I was speaking in terms of available strength versus
required punch. In the way that a girder will hold tremendous
overloads for brief instants, a gun is overloaded for milliseconds.
We'll have a problem—"
"O.K., aside from that, have you figured out why I haven't been able
to do more than warm anything larger than a house brick?"
"Sure," laughed Channing. "What happens in a multi-grid radio tube
when the suppressor grid is hanging free?"
"Charges negative and blocks the electron stream ... hey! That's it!"
"What?" asked Arden.
"Sure," said Walt. "We fire off a batch of electrons, and the first
contingent that arrives charges the affair so that the rest of the beam
sort of wriggles out of line."
"Your meteor is going to take on a charge of phenomenal negative
value, and the rest of your beam is going to be deflected away, just
as your electron lenses deflect the original beam," said Channing.
"And now another thing, old turnip. You're squirting out a lot of
electrons. That's much amperage. Your voltage—velocity—is nothing
to rave about even though it sounds high. Watts is what you want, to
corn a phrase."
"Phew," said Walt. "Corn, he says. Go on, prodigy, and make with
the explanations. I agree, we should have more voltage and less
quantity. But we're running the stuff at plenty of voltage now. Nothing
short of a Van Der Graf generator would work—and while we've got
one up on the forty-ninth level, we couldn't run a supply line down
here without reaming a fifty-foot hole through the station, and then I
don't know how we'd get that kind of voltage down here without ...
that kind of stuff staggers the imagination. You can't juggle a
hundred million volts on a wire. She'd squirt off in all directions."
"Another thing, whilst I hold it in my mind," said Channing,
thoughtfully. "You go flinging electrons off the station in basketful
after basketful, and the next bird that drops a ship on the landing
stage is going to spot-weld himself right to the south end of Venus
Equilateral. It wouldn't be long before the station would find itself
being pulled into Sol because of the electrostatic stress—if we didn't
run out of electrons first!"
"I hardly think that we'd run out—but we might have a tough time
flinging them away after a bit. Could it be that we should blow out a
fist full of protons at the same time?"
"Might make up a concentric beam and wave positive ions at the
target," said Channing. "Might help."
"But this space-charge effect. How do we get around that?"
"Same way we make the electron gun work. Fire it off at a devilish
voltage. Run your electron velocity up near the speed of light; the
electrons at that speed will acquire considerable mass, in
accordance with Lorenz's equation which shows that as the velocity
of a mass reaches the speed of light, its mass becomes infinite. With
a healthy mass built up by near-light velocities, the electrons will not
be as easy to deflect. Then, too, we can do the damage we want
before the charge can be built up that will deflect the stream. We ram
'em with a bundle of electrons moving so fast that the charging effect
can not work; before the space charge can build up to the level
required for self-nullification of our beam, the damage is done."
"And all we need is a couple of trillion volts. Two times ten to the
twelfth power. Grrr."
"I can see that you'll need a tablecloth," said Arden. "You birds can
think better over at Joe's. Come along and feed the missus, Don."
Channing surveyed the instrument again, and then said: "Might as
well, Walt. The inner man must be fed, and we can wrangle at the
same time. Argument assists the digestion—and vice versa."

"Now," said Channing as the dishes were pushed aside, clearing a

space on the table. "What are we going to do?"
"That's what I've been worrying about," said Walt. "Let's list the
things that make our gun ineffective."
"That's easy. It can't dish out enough. It's too dependent upon
mobility. It's fundamentally inefficient because it runs out of
ammunition too quick, by which I mean that it is a sort of gun with
antiseptic bullets. It cures its own damage."
"Prevents," said Arden.
"All right, it acts as its own shield, electrostatically."
"About this mobility," said Walt, "I do not quite agree with that."
"You can't whirl a hunk of tube the size and weight of a good-sized
telescope around fast enough to shoot holes in a racing spaceship,"
said Channing. "Especially one that is trying to dodge. We've got to
rely upon something that can do the trick better. Your tube did all
right following a meteor that rung in a course that can be predicted,
because you can set up your meteor spotter to correct for the
mechanical lag. But in a spaceship that is trying to duck your shot,
you'll need something that works with the speed of light. And, since
we're going to be forced into something heavy and hard hitting, its
inertia will be even more so."
"Heavy and hard hitting means exactly what?"
"Cyclotron, betatron or synchrotron. One of those dinguses that
whirls nucleons around like a stone on a string until the string breaks
and sends the stone out at terrific speed. We need a velocity that
sounds like a congressional figure."
"We've got a cyclotron."
"Yeah," drawled Channing, "A wheezy old heap that cries out in
anguish every time the magnets are charged. I doubt that we could
move the thing without it falling apart. The betatron is the ticket."
"But the cyclotron gives out with a lot more soup."
"If I had to increase the output of either one, I could do it a lot quicker
with the betatron," said Channing. "In a cyclotron, the revolution of
the ions in their acceleration period is controlled by an oscillator, the
voltage output of which is impressed on the D chambers. In order to
speed up the ion stream, you'd have to do two things. One: Build a
new oscillator that will dish out more power. Two: Increase the
strength of the magnets.
"But in the betatron, the thing is run differently. The magnet is built
for A. C. and the electron gun runs off the same. As your current
starts up from zero, the electron gun squirts a bouquet of electrons
into a chamber built like a pair of angel's food cake tins set rim to
rim. The magnet's field begins to build up at the same time, and the
resulting increase in field strength accelerates the electrons and at
the same time, its increasing field keeps the little devils running in
the same orbit. Shoot it with two-hundred-cycle current, and in the
half cycle your electrons are made to run around the center a few
million times. That builds up a terrific velocity—measured in six
figures, believe it or not. Then the current begins to level off at the
top of the sine wave, and the magnet loses its increasing phase. The
electrons, still in acceleration, begin to whirl outward. The current
levels off for sure and begins to slide down—and the electrons roll
off at a tangent to their course. This stream can be collected and
used. In fact, we have a two-hundred-cycle beam of electrons at a
couple of billion volts. That, brother, ain't hay!"
"Is that enough?"
"Nope."
"Then how do you hope to increase this velocity? If it is easier to run
this up than it would be the cyclotron, how do we go about it?"
Channing smiled and began to draw diagrams on the tablecloth. Joe
looked over with a worried frown, and then shrugged his shoulders.
Diagrams or not, this was an emergency—and besides, he thought,
he needed another lesson in high powered gadgetry.
"The nice thing about this betatron," said Channing, "is the fact that it
can and does run both ends on the same supply. The current and
voltage phases are correct so that we do not require two supplies
which operate in a carefully balanced condition. The cyclotron is one
of the other kinds; though the one supply is strictly D. C., the
strength of the field must be controlled separately from the supply to
the oscillator that runs the D plates. You're sitting on a fence,
juggling knobs and stuff all the time you are bombarding with a cyc.
"Now let us inspect the supply of the betatron. It is sinusoidal. There
is the catch. There is the thing that makes it possible. That single
fact makes it easy to step the power up to terrific quantities. Since
the thing is fixed by nature so that the output is proportional—
electron gun initial velocity versus magnetic field strength—if we
increase the input voltage, the output voltage goes up without having
to resort to manipulistic gymnastics on the part of the operator."
"Go on, Professor Maxwell."
"Don't make fun of a great man's name," said Arden. "If it wasn't for
Clerk Maxwell, we'd still be yelling out of the window at one another
instead of squirting radio beams all over the Solar System."
"Then make him quit calling me Tom Swift."
"Go on, Don, Walt and I will finish this argument after we finish
Hellion Murdoch."
"May I?" asked Channing with a smile. He did not mind the
interruption; he was used to it in the first place and he had been busy
with his pencil in the second place. "Now look, Walt, what happens
when you smack a charged condenser across an inductance?"
"You generate a damped cycle of the amplitude of the charge on the
condenser, and of frequency equal to the L, C constants of the
condenser and inductance. The amplitude decays according to the
factor Q, following the equation for decrement—"
"Never mind, I've got it here on my whiteboard," smiled Channing,
pointing to the tablecloth. "You are right. And the purity of the wave?"
"Sinusoidal ... hey! That's it!" Walt jumped to his feet and went to the
telephone.
"What's 'it'?" asked Arden.
"The betatron we have runs off of a five-hundred-volt supply,"
chuckled Channing. "We can crank that up ten to one without
running into any difficulty at all. Five-hundred-volt insulation is
peanuts, and the stuff they put on wires nowadays is always good for
ten times that just because it wouldn't be economical to try to thin the
installation down so that it only protects five hundred. I'll bet a crank
that he could crank the input up to fifty thousand volts without too
much sputtering—though I wouldn't know where to lay my lunch
hooks on a fifty-thousand-volt condenser of any appreciable
capacity. Well, stepping up the rig ten to one will dish us out just shy
of a couple of thousand million volts, which, as Brother Franks says,
is not hay!"
Walt returned after a minute and said: "Warren's measuring the
inductance of the betatron magnet. He will then calculate the value
of C required to tune the thing to the right frequency and start to
achieve that capacity by mazing up whatever high-voltage
condensers we have on the station. Now, Don, let's calculate how
we're going to make the thing mobile."
"That's a horse of a different color. We'll have to use electromagnetic
deflection. From the constants of the electron stream out of our
souped-up Suzy, we'll have to compute the necessary field to deflect
such a beam. That'll be terrific, because the electrons are hitting it up
at a velocity approaching that of light—maybe a hundred and
seventy thousand miles per—and their mass will be something
fierce. That again will help to murder Murdoch; increasing mass will
help to keep the electrons from being deflected, since it takes more
to turn a heavy mass—et cetera, see Newton's laws of inertia for
complete statement. Have 'em jerk the D plates out of the cyc and
bring the magnet frame down here—to the turret, I mean—and set
'em up on the vertical. We'll use that to run the beam up and down,
we can't possibly get one hundred and eighty degree deflection, of
course, but we can run the deflection over considerable range. It
should be enough to catch a spaceship that is circling the station.
For the horizontal deflection, what have we got?"
"Nothing. But the cyc magnet is a double pole affair. We could break
the frame at the D plates and set one winding sidewise to the other
and use half on each direction."
"Sure. Have one of Warren's gang fit the busted pole pieces up with
a return-magnetic frame so that the field will be complete. He can
weld some girders on and around in an hour. That gives us complete
deflection properties up and down; left and right. We should be able
to cover a ninety-degree cone from your turret."
"That'll cover all of Murdoch's ships," said Walt.
"Too bad we haven't got some U-235 to use. I'd like to plate up one
of his ships with some positive ions of U-235 and then change the
beam to slow neutrons. That might deter him from his life of crime."
"Variations, he wants," said Arden. "You're going to impale one ship
on a beam of electrons; one ship on a beam of U-235 ions; and what