Laogai - History

History

During the 1950s and 1960s, Chinese prisons, similar to organized factories, contained large numbers of people who were considered too critical of the government or "counter-revolutionary." However, many people arrested for political or religious reasons were released in the late 1970s at the start of the Deng Xiaoping reforms.

In the 21st century, critics have said that Chinese prisons produce products for sale in foreign countries, with the profits going to the PRC government. Products include everything from green tea to industrial engines to coal dug from mines. Similar practices are found in Western countries (the production of license plates in the US for example). According to the researchers James D. Seymour and Richard Anderson, the products made in laogai camps comprise an insignificant amount of mainland China's export output and gross domestic product, . They argue that the use of prison labor for manufacturing is not in itself a violation of human rights, and that most prisoners in Chinese prisons are serving time for what are generally regarded as crimes in the West. The Western criticism of the laogai is based not only on the export of products made by forced labor, but also on the claims of detainees being held for political or religious violations, such as leadership of unregistered Chinese House Churches. While the laogai has attracted widespread criticism for the poor conditions in the prisons, Seymour and Anderson claim that reports are exaggerated, stating that "even at its worst, the laogai is not, as some have claimed, 'the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet gulag.'"

The downfall of socialism has reduced revenue to local governments, increasing pressure for local governments to supplement their income using prison labor. At the same time, prisoners usually do not make a good workforce. The products manufactured by prison labor in China are of extremely low quality and have become unsalable on the open market in competition with products made by non-imprisoned paid labor.

Harry Wu has written books, including Troublemaker and Laogai, that describe the system from the 19r0s to the 1990s. Wu spent nineteen years, from 1960 to 1979, as a prisoner in these camps, for having criticized the government while he was a young college student. Almost starving to death, he eventually escaped to the US.

In Mao: The Unknown Story, the Mao biographer Jung Chang and historian Jon Halliday estimate that perhaps 27 million people died in prisons and labor camps during Mao Tse-tung's rule.They say that inmates were subjected to back-breaking labor in the most hostile wastelands, and that executions and suicides by any means (like diving into a wheat chopper) were commonplace.

Jean-Louis Margolin writing in The Black Book of Communism, which describes the history of repressions by Communist states, claims that perhaps 20 million died in the prison system. Professor R.J. Rummel puts the number of forced labor "democides" at 15,720,000, excluding "all those collectivized, ill-fed and clothed peasants who would be worked to death in the fields." Harry Wu puts the death toll at 15 million.

Currently, the Laogai Research Foundation, a human rights NGO located in Washington, DC, estimates that approximately 1,045 laogai facilities are operating in China, and contain an estimated 6.8 million detainees. The number of detainees is uncertain.