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Laogai: The Chinese Gulag
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10717 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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6 / 1993 |
2,524 Words |
| Author
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Harry Wu
Harry Wu is a research fellow at the Hoover Institute at
Stanford University. |
The events of 1989 graphically underscored the fact that Chinese Communist Party (CPP) leaders are willing to go to great lengths to preserve their absolute monopoly on political power. Even before the tanks rolled into Tiananmen, there were few indications that the party would voluntarily democratize China's one-party political system. To the contrary, for more than 40 years the CCP has maintained a vast internal security system adept at rooting out and eliminating individuals whose actions or attitudes constitute a threat to the one-party establishment.
At the heart of this system lies the laogai--a secret network of prison labor camps where more than 10 million Chinese, many of whom can be classified as political prisoners, are forced to labor in factories, mines, and agricultural plantations, producing goods that enhance the economic viability of the Leninist autocracy by relieving the state of the need to subsidize its fearsome penal system. The laogai has prospered grown since Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978, and it is one of the most enduring symbols of the party's political philosophy, even after 10 years of extraordinary social change. Is there any reason to believe that Deng's latest reform trend will lead to the dismantling of China's brutal prison system or the democratization of its authoritarian political institutions?
To this day, the laogai remains one of the CCP's most important instruments of political control. When Mao Zedong made his triumphant entrance into Beijing in 1949, Soviet trained CCP security specialists had established a system of labor reform camps modeled after Stalin's gulag where the aspiring revolutionaries could silence their political opponents. The laogai system developed as the power of the CCP regime expanded.
Chinese laogai camps retained many basic design and organizational features of their Stalinist counterparts, although Chinese leaders have insisted that their laogai facilities perform two additional tasks, besides the immediate suppression of individuals suspected of opposing the CCP leadership. These corollary functions are clearly delineated in the labor reform regulations promulgated in 1954 that state that "reform through labor of counter-revolutionaries and other criminals carried out by labor reform organizations should completely integrate punishment and thought reform, serving the purposes of both production and political education."
It might be tempting to conclude that these comments are archaic relics from a bygone era. With the possible exception of a few
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