Beijing, January 27, 1995. According to Reuter, "Beijing cannot allow the International Committee of the Red Cross unsupervised visits with any of China's 1.285 million prisoners, a senior prison official said Friday. China also had told the ICRC it was not obliged to allow outside scrutiny of 2,679 'counter-revolutionaries' in its 690 prisons because they are not political prisoners or war criminals as defined by the United Nations, he said".