Amid the bad publicity engendered by the laogai, Chinese authorities switched from the designation laogai to jianyu (監獄), or prison. But as the book tells us, the new name was not accompanied by a change in policy and served more as a political smokescreen. As the government-sanctioned Beijing Legal Daily wrote in 1995: “Our renaming of the laogai is what our associating with the international community calls for, and it is favorable in our international human rights struggle.
“Henceforth, the word laogai will no longer exist, but the function, character and tasks of our prison administration will remain unchanged.”
They also argue that as prisoners in laojiao (勞教, re-education through labor) camps are under “administrative detention” and therefore not considered convicted criminals under Chinese law, goods produced by inmates do not constitute prison labor goods for the purpose of bilateral agreements reached between China and a number of countries.
Sadly, the book’s title is somewhat misleading, as rather than simply focus on the laogai system, it also contains chapters on the history of human rights (or lack thereof) in China, black prisons, executions, organ harvesting and control of the media. It also adopts what is slowly — and necessarily — becoming the accepted notion: while the PRC has liberalized economically, the CCP has absolutely no intention of relinquishing its grip on power and will continue to use the penal system — including laogai — to ensure its survival. Consequently, all the state-sponsored crimes this book covers are likely to continue, no matter how much Beijing is integrated into the international community and engages in discussions on human rights with the US.
It should be noted that this book comes in a coffee-table format with dozens of excellent, and sometimes very graphic, pictures (many of which were taken surreptitiously by Harry Wu (吳宏達), one of the authors and himself a former laogai prisoner), which, along with biographies of a number of individuals who went through the prison system, adds a personal touch to the text.
This indispensable book is an unforgiving indictment of the many crimes perpetrated by the CCP in the name of development and stability. While today’s China is a better place in some ways than it was during the Cultural Revolution, the indiscriminateness and exploitation that marked Mao’s folly are still very much alive today. A Chinese-language version of this book is also available.
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