Long hours in darkness, brutal interrogations and months of solitude: Inside China’s secret ‘black’ jails… and why the mysterious disappearance of Xi’s high basic may plunge the world right into a terrifying new conflict: IAN WILLIAMS

China excels at the pompous theatre of state visits, and Keir Starmer naively lapped it all up – from the stony-faced guard of honour to the marble-clad grandeur of the Great Hall of the People on Tiananmen Square.

Anthems echoed around the hall’s vast columns as an army of chefs prepared a lavish banquet for the prime minister and his wide-eyed entourage. As a piece of totalitarian theatre, these occasions have no equal.

Despots from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping have held forth here, calculating that the optics will draw attention from the empty platitudes served up with all those dishes – which on last night’s menu reportedly included roasted cod, steamed beef with yam, fried breaded shrimp, stewed vegetables in a pumpkin broth and sweet rice dumplings.

General Zhang Youxia, until this week China’s top general, can expect much rougher gruel, having abruptly disappeared amid accusations of corruption and possibly espionage.

As Starmer and Xi tucked into their banquet, apparently exchanging small talk about the relative merits of Manchester United and Arsenal, the city outside the Great Hall was buzzing with intrigue about a purge that has decimated the top leadership of the People’s Liberation Army with a brutality unseen since the dark days of Mao.

Zhang Youxia is its latest victim, now under investigation for what the Communist Party calls ‘suspected serious violations of discipline and law’. His fate is unknown, but he is almost certainly in what the Party calls ‘administrative detention’.

This is the innocuous cloak for a network of ‘black’ jails, an archipelago of secret detention facilities, which operate outside China’s normal legal system (as far as the country can be described as having a ‘normal’ system).

Those who have emerged from these grim prisons, and have been brave enough to tell the story, describe long hours in solitary confinement, frequently shackled and under constant surveillance, with no right to a lawyer and limited contact with family.

China denies they exist, and legally that is true. They are not subject to any oversight other than that of the Party, which recognises no authority other than its own. Some jails cater to dissidents, though the Party reserves a large part of this black network for its own errant members or other officials deemed corrupt – an infinitely elastic term in China.

Safeguard Defenders, a human rights group, has compiled evidence from former detainees who describe physical and psychological tortures. This includes sleep and food deprivation, beatings, forced medication, denial of medical treatment, sexual abuse, and being forced into stress positions, including being hung by the wrists.

Ai Weiwei, the Chinese dissident artist, now living in exile, was held in a ‘black jail’ for 81 days. He described how he shared his cell with two soldiers, who just stood to attention, staring at him, 24 hours a day, even watching him in the toilet. He would exercise by pacing up and down because he was never allowed outside.

It was, he said, ‘the toughest situation a human being can be in’ and every minute he felt ‘close to death’.

Peter Dahin, the founder of Safeguard Defenders, was himself held briefly in a black jail in China, one of a number of foreigners. He was blindfolded and confined to a cell with those same expressionless guards, who noted down his every move. He was given no access to his embassy, deprived of sleep, denied exercise and subjected to lengthy and hectoring interrogations, which tried to depict him as a spy.

Xi Jinping’s China is not Stalin’s Russia and there is no bullet to the back of the head for rivals – at least not immediately.

The Party likes its version of ‘due process’ and the aim of the ‘black jails’ is to break the prisoner, who will emerge months or even years later, traumatised, having confessed to a ‘crime’, real or imagined. A perfunctory trial will then take place, leading to a lengthy jail sentence or execution.

It’s hard to say precisely what Zhang is supposed to have done. Though more pragmatic than Xi, he was regarded as a loyalist.

‘Corruption’ in China is a catch-all that covers a multitude of sins, including insufficient loyalty to the leader. Reports from Beijing suggest he may have leaked nuclear secrets to America, while some overseas Chinese sources talk luridly of power struggles, coup attempts and mutinies against Xi. These groups have always had a vivid imagination, but the Communist Party is such an opaque organisation, that it can be hard to tell fact from fiction, rumour from reality.

A report in the PLA Daily, an army newspaper, said Zhang and Lui – another purged general – had ‘seriously betrayed the trust and expectations of the Communist Party’s Central Committee’ and accused them of ‘trampling on and undermining the Central Military Commission’.

The CMC controls the armed forces, and 75-year-old Zhang’s official position was vice-chairman. He was also a member of the Party’s 24-strong ruling politburo. Two years ago, the CMC had seven members; now just two are left standing – Xi, who is chairman, and a more lowly general called Zhang Shengmin, who is in charge of discipline. That means that Xi is effectively in sole command of the world’s largest army.

Between October and November last year alone, nine top-ranking PLA officers were purged, while it has been calculated that over a two-year period before that at least 20 generals were removed. It is not known what has happened to them. The purge included six top generals from the elite Rocket Force, which oversees China’s nuclear weapons, while two defence ministers and a foreign minister were also sacked.

The targeting of Zhang, the only top Chinese general with military experience – from China’s brief invasion of Vietnam in 1979 – is especially intriguing. He was known and respected in American military circles, having visited the US and been the go-to contact in the PLA for Washington at times of tension.

David Stilwell, a former US Air Force General who served as the State Department’s top diplomat for East Asia in the first Trump administration, said Zhang struck the Americans as a professional rather than political soldier.

That may have been his undoing in a deeply paranoid Communist Party. If Zhang did get too close to the Americans for Xi’s comfort, or even leaked nuclear secrets, as has been suggested, he can expect little mercy.

The CIA is still reeling from the brutal rolling up of a spy ring it ran in China, with an estimated 30 sources killed or captured between 2010 and 2012. It is seen as one of the agency’s biggest disasters, setting back espionage efforts in China by years.

Certainly, Beijing’s rapidly increasing arsenal of nuclear weapons is of particular interest to Washington. Officially, the US administration is keeping coy about the latest developments in China, a White House official saying they had nothing to share about ‘reports of palace intrigue’.

After the purge in China’s Rocket Force, leaked US intelligence assessments suggested that corruption in the unit was so extensive that missiles were filled with water instead of fuel and silos in western China had lids that could not properly open. That was probably mischief-making on the part of American spooks, but Western strategists are now speculating that the purge inside the PLA, whether the result of corruption or a power struggle, has now gone so far that it may impede China’s ability to fight a war.

The PLA once ran a business empire so big that preparing for war appeared to play second fiddle to money-making. After he came to power in 2012, Xi pledged to professionalise and modernise the PLA, and billions of dollars have been spent on shiny new kit.

Yet the PLA is also a party organisation, which means its loyalty is supposed to be first and foremost to the Party, enforced through a system of political commissars. That can often be at odds with its professional mission, and seed the sort of corruption and power struggles that continue to plague it.

Having cleared out most of his top generals, Xi has more direct control over the army than ever before. Western analysts saw Zhang as a counsellor of caution, especially on Taiwan, but Xi appears more hardline, having ordered the army to be ready to invade by next year.

His purge may not only demoralise the ranks, but encourage more sycophantic generals to tell him what he wants to hear.

Certainly, analysts in Taiwan are pouring over the latest intrigue, fearful of where it might lead.

Tristan Tang, an associate fellow at the Secure Taiwan Association, suggested that Zhang’s purge was because he was not sufficiently enthusiastic about Xi’s invasion timetable.

Before leaving Beijing, Keir Starmer stopped to pose for a picture at the Forbidden City, where he talked of the ‘huge opportunities’ in China. For centuries, the imperial palace behind him was home to emperors for whom palace intrigue was almost a hobby.

When it comes to the brutal banishment of courtiers who are less than sycophantic, little has changed in this deadly game.

Ian Williams is author of Vampire State: The Rise And Fall Of The Chinese Economy