Over at Frog in a Well, K.M. Lawson has a great post on the recently announced guidelines in the PRC that will exclude from trial evidence gained through torture.  He provides some historical background and a brief comparison with Japan.  Bottom line: the new regulations are a step in the right direction (and could be seen as an incremental gain for the rule of law) but they are not enough to stop abuse of prisoners.  This paragraph stood out for me:

Issuing clear guidelines blocking “illegal” evidence obtained through
torture is an important step in the right direction. This can be seen
as a message delivered to two primary recipients. First, China is
making a statement to its own people, who have been outraged by the
tragic-comical case of Zhao Zuohai who was tortured into confession and
imprisoned for over a decade for committing a murder of someone who
wasn’t even dead. Second, the judiciary is sending a message to
interrogation officers in the Public Security Bureau who may be proud
of the confessions they extract through their violent means.
PSB officers likely have incentives to produce such confessions in
terms of an increased number of cases solved as well as personal
satisfaction that a villain has been caught and prosecuted. If they
believe that a bit of “third degree” interrogation will starve them of
that solved case and allow a guilty (or innocent) suspect go free, then
this may reduce the occurrence of such abuses.

Institutional and political disincentives and constraints have to be put in place to make sure the stated goal is achieved.  (Notice: for those who want to argue that the "West" should not be forcing China to comply with "foreign" values, all of this is generated from within the PRC political system.  China's political leaders are recognizing that torture is a problem in their legal system and they are setting the abolition of torture as their goal…).

We could also bring in a little traditional moral suasion as well.  Torture is clearly un-Confucian.  Confucius himself was against the death penalty ("How can you govern by killing?" he rhetorically asks in Analects 12.19) and Mencius makes a fairly clear statement against other forms of coercion:

Mencius said: "To pretend force is Humanity – that's the mark of a tyrant, and a tyrant needs a large country.  To practice Humanity through Integrity – that's the mark of a true emperor, and a true emperor doesn't need a large country.  T'ang began with only seventy square  miles, and Emperor Wen began with only a hundred square miles.  If you use force to gain people's submission, it isn't a submission of the heart.  But if you use Integrity to gain the people's submission, it's a submission of the sincere and delighted heart…(3.3)

Good political leadership should not be measured in terms of power resources (how big your country is) but by the achievement of Humane governance and Integrity.  Of course, historically, there has always been coercion and torture in Chinese politics and government (Lawson shows how this played out in the CCP before it came to power), but those practices are rooted in the Legalist tradition, not in Confucianism, and their persistence over time is simply evidence of how China has been more of a Legalist society than a Confucian one….