China’s forced TV confessions report now out in Chinese

We are pleased to announce that the only in-depth study of China’s illegal TV confessions, Scripted and Staged, is now available in Chinese, allowing readers for the first time access to the testimony of Chinese victims in their original language. This ground-breaking report, exposes the lies and the abuse behind China’s illegal practice of coercing detainees to confess on television and calls on governments to take steps to pressure China to abandon this practice, and put into place safeguards so that detainees are protected against such abuse in the future.

Download new Chinese version of Scripted and Staged here

Download original English version of Scripted and Staged here

Scripted and Staged: Behind the scenes of China’s forced TV confessions uses moving first-person testimonies and in-depth interviews to reveal:

• how confessions are extracted through threats, torture, and fear;
• how police dictate and direct confessions;
• and, how they are often used as tools of propaganda for both domestic audiences and as part of China’s foreign policy.

Little more than a week after the publication of the English version of the report, which was covered by media across the globe from Iceland to Japan, and by The New York Times to Singapore’s The Strait’s Times, China broadcast yet another forced confession via its state media channel, CCTV. Two Chinese-Canadian twins, Chen Zhiyu and Chen Zhiheng, were shown “confessing” to forging documents for exiled Chinese tycoon Guo Wengui. We are using the report to campaign for sanctions or restrictions on Chinese state media that broadcast these illegal and rights abusing confessions. This is an urgent issue right now as China aggressively expands its media overseas – the latest reports suggest CGTN (CCTV’s global arm) is planning to hire 350 new journalists for a massive new media centre in London.