Labor
Prisoners at Qincheng Prison are tasked to perform manual labors instead of being executed in accordance with Mao Zedong's order given in 1957 in one of his speeches in which Mao explained why political prisoners must not be executed:
- 1st: If one was executed, the more would have to be executed for the same crime later on for equality, and it would difficult to spare the lives of future prisoners who committed the same crime, because justice system would be criticized as unequal, giving preferential treatments
- 2nd: Wrong people and even innocent people might be executed by mistakes
- 3rd: Executing prisoners could mean the vanishing of evidence
- 4th: When prisoners were executed, it could not increase production output, could not improve scientific research, could not strengthen national defense, and could not liberate Taiwan
- 5th: You (the Communist regime) would be accused of excessive killings
Reactionaries are evil but once captured, they could be turned to something useful for the people.
As result of this speech of Mao, prisoners at Qincheng Prison are put to work instead of being executed, and they are subjected to be assigned to tasks other than that of the Qincheng Prison to help out outside the prison. Heavy manual labor was performed only by the nationalist war criminals classified by the communists, but since the release of the last group of this kind of prisoners in 1975, there are no longer any such duties. However, light manual labors continues such as making straw hats and making boxes for matches. Jiang Qing requested and was permitted to make dolls. These light manual labor is often conducted in their own cells.
Read more about this topic: Qincheng Prison
Famous quotes containing the word labor:
“We belong to the community. It is not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a man; it is as much the preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer. Where is this division of labor to end? and what object does it finally serve? No doubt another may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The most remarkable aspect of the transition we are living through is not so much the passage from want to affluence as the passage from labor to leisure.... Leisure contains the future, it is the new horizon.... The prospect then is one of unremitting labor to bequeath to future generations a chance of founding a society of leisure that will overcome the demands and compulsions of productive labor so that time may be devoted to creative activities or simply to pleasure and happiness.”
—Henri Lefebvre (b. 1901)
“Women of a selected class, by the use of slaves and servants have become inactive, the mere recipients of values, no longer creators but “feeding on unearned wealth.” This hurts their nature and debases the social fabric. If a woman does no labor in her home which could properly make her self-supporting outside that home she is in duty bound to do something outside her home to justify her claim to support.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)