Chinese President Xi Jinping has made it a priority to eliminate corruption within the Chinese Communist Party.
"The [Communist Party] desperately wants the appearance of cracking down hard on corruption because they understand that rampant corruption is threatening the party's legitimacy," says Associated Press reporter Gillian Wong.
In a story published Sunday, Wong uncovers how that crackdown on corruption has led to another problem: abuse and torture of party officials.
"The way [the party] goes about investigating corruption tends to be so opaque — within the party, controlled entirely by the party — that it allows for these types of abuse to occur," she says.
The investigations are carried out under the government's secretive detention and disciplinary system called shuanggui.
Shuanggui is an "extra-legal form of detention, in that it operates entirely outside the scrutiny or oversight of police or courts," Wong explains.
According to her AP report, "Experts estimate at least several thousand people are secretly detained every year for weeks or months under an internal system that is separate from state justice."
Wong broke the story of a local official named Zhou Wangyen, who says he was tortured by the Communist Party. She first read his account on a Chinese lawyer's blog, and later convinced him to tell her what happened.
Zhou was a director of the land resources bureau, parceling out land for developers. In China, that position is a hotbed of corruption. Wong says it's very common for developers to bribe officials like Zhou — that's what first led authorities to him. But Zhou says he was innocent.
One morning in July 2012, he was rounded up by three men from the local party's discipline inspection commission.
"If he were arrested formally, that would have almost been a better fate for him," Wong says.
The investigators took him to a hotel where he was accused of accepting 100,000 yuan ($16,000) in bribes. They wanted him to admit it.
"They made him stand, and they surrounded him with men on four sides and just kept pushing him back and forth between them, letting him rest for only an hour a night," Wong says. "And this went on for a whole week."
Read Gilian Wong's Report From The Associated Press
In China, Brutality Yields Confessions Of Graft