Safeguard Defenders is marking the 36-year anniversary of China’s Tiananmen Square Massacre with a new publication on a seldom-reported, unusual type of arbitrary detention that Chinese police routinely carry out on activists around this time.

China Travel Magazine: Dissident Edition examines the illegal practice of forced travel, where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) disappears its critics on secret trips to keep them silent at sensitive times.

Click here for your copy.

China Travel Magazine is the first time that this bizarre type of arbitrary detention has been explained in such detail. We used interviews and media reports to show what forced travel looks like, how it changed during COVID and after COVID, and even include a calendar to show the peak periods when activists are forcibly taken on trips.

We have designed our new report to look like a luxury travel magazine to attract more attention on this issue. We’re also using the format to satirize a human rights abuse that the CCP has absurdly dressed up to look like a holiday.

Within the glossy pages of China Travel Magazine: Dissident Edition, we also include a map of the country showing some of the actual forced trips that activists went on in the past few years and look at how local cash-strapped governments may now be scaling back forced travel budgets.

While forced travel is not as draconian as the CCP’s other tools of repression used against activists and petitioners, such as Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location, psychiatric detentions, collective punishment of family members or criminal prosecution and yearslong prison sentences, it is still a form of arbitrary detention. It violates the fundamental human rights to freedom, liberty of movement, expression and privacy. Some activists have been forced to go on trips while a loved one is dying back home.