carried out between May 2009 and November 2013, Amnesty International documented a wide range of physical torture and ill-treatment, including the use of electric shock batons and various restraint techniques and stress positions.63 MISUSE OF ELECTRIC SHOCK STUN EQUIPMENT IN DETENTION Amnesty International has documented a series of cases where electric shock stun equipment was used to torture detainees in various places of detention in China. In August 2012, Falun Gong practitioners Wang Xiuqing and her daughter Qin Hailong were tortured while being detained in Harbin’s Qianjin RTL camp. According to Qin Hailong, she was tortured with electric shock stun batons and beatings. Her older sister, Qin Rongqian, who visited her in the aftermath of the torture, reported that Qin Hailong had scabs resulting from the electric shocks and could barely walk unaided.64 Yu Zhenjie, a Falun Gong practitioner from Mudanjiang, Heilongjiang province, was also detained in China’s RTL system. She was tortured with an electric baton for resisting the “transformation” process – the forced renunciation of her spiritual beliefs. In August 2012, she recounted her experiences to Amnesty International: “The head of my brigade, which had around 200-300 Falun Gong members – director Li – had been using the electric baton on my face – it’s a kind of torture the police call “bengbao popcorn”, because your face splits open and looks like popped corn. It smelled horrible, the smell of burning skin.”65 Abuses of female detainees in the Masanjia RTL camp in Shenyang, Liaoning province, have been exposed in the Chinese media through an article in Lens magazine, published in April 2013, and a documentary film produced by former New York Times photographer Du Bin in May 2013.66 Du Bin interviewed petitioner Qu Meiyu from Benxi city, Liaoning province, who said she was beaten with electric batons, deprived of sleep and told, falsely, that her husband had died. An investigation into the arbitrary detention of female sex workers in China by the NGO Asia Catalyst also cited cases of torture in detention using electric shock stun equipment. In July 2013, police officers detained Xiao Cao in a dispatch station, where they tried to make her confess to soliciting. She told researchers: “Four policemen took me to a room with a bed in it, and they pushed me onto the bed and used an electric prod this long [gesturing to indicate a length of 20-30 cm] to shock me on my hands, neck, thighs, and armpits. The pain was unbearable, as if I were being stuck with needles all over.”67 THE MISUSE OF RESTRAINTS IN DETENTION A wide variety of restraints are used on detainees in police cells, prisons and other places of detention across China. While it is not always possible to identify the specific restraint mechanism used, many detainees have complained of being bound by the wrists and the ankles, suspended from the ceiling or kept in stress positions, often while beatings are administered. Given the frequency of these reports, the large-scale, unregulated manufacture and supply of a wide variety of restraint devices – some considered by Amnesty International and Omega as inherently abusive – is of grave concern. In one case, human rights defender Ding Hongfen, who was arrested on suspicion of “gathering crowds to disturb social order”, told her lawyer that she had been held in three different “black jails” between 23 June and 2 July 2013. On 1 July, she claimed that she had been interrogated by a plain clothes police officer after he had handcuffed and shackled her to a “tiger bench”68 – a common form of torture in China.69 In another case, Wu Wai Sing (also known as Vincent Wu), was detained on 22 June 2012 and held incommunicado for three weeks at various facilities. He was tortured China’s Trade in Tools of Torture and Repression Amnesty International – Index: ASA 17/042/2014 19