China Daily and police detention centers

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Apologies for ignoring too many important developments lately, but - hey - sometimes we do have to make a living too. So I had no time to give my take on the apparent rise in death penalties in 2008, but do have to make a short remark about the China Daily who, here according to The Peking Duck, is about to become a real newspaper by slamming the police detention centers.

Inmates in China’s 2,700 pretrial detention centers suffer bullying and torture at the hands of fellow prisoners and police officers, and some experts want a neutral body to take the centers out of police control to curb the abuses, the state-run English-language newspaper, China Daily, reported on Tuesday.

Unfortunately, this dispatch does not carry the hallmarks of excellent or even emerging journalism, but of an internal power struggle in the Chinese bureaucracies, where the China Daily is siding with the central government.
The extra-legal powers by police and other security forces have been reduced greatly since the beginning of the 1990s. Arbitrary arrests and detentions for almost anything considered now normal was possible in those days and indeed sometimes happened. Homosexuality, extramarital affairs, living together unmarried, all those things could be reason enough to put Chinese citizens behind bars, without the interference of any court.
Those police powers have been reduced greatly, but the detention centers and indeed occasional extra-legal arrests are still there and sometimes used, although in terms of numbers not comparable with the past.
Internationally those detention centers have been a huge embarrassment: officially China is making great leaps forward to the rule of law, while security forces still maintain their detention centers. (I would not call them illegal, as you noticed, but rather extra-legal.) While security forces have lost much of their non-legal power over the society, the central government has never been able to get those detention centers actually closed.
So, when the China Daily suddenly writes about these centers, it is a sign that bureaucracies are clashing internally and the central government is mobilizing support - possibly also internationally - to get those detention centers closed. There is no possible link with journalism here.