Laogai: China's Gulags
The Chinese network of prisons, factories, and farms designed to "reform" prisoners through forced labor, modeled after the Soviet Gulags.
The Laogai system of prisons, factories and farms modeled after the Soviet Gulag to attempt to reform thought criminals and dissidents is still in use today in China. In fact, the plight of the Uyghurs in China have brought this issue to the forefront. Many Americans however are still unware of the horrors of the Chinese concentration camps and how they are used by the state.
"It seems to me my whole country is just like a giant prison camp. My people sooner or later will be free" - Harry Wu, former Political Prisoner In Chinas Laogai
Harry Wu spent 19 years in a Chinese reeducation and forced labor camp. He was lucky enough to get out and make it to America. He bravely snuck back into China and even into the Laogai, facing being locked up again if they caught him. In 1997 the west still pretended to stand against totalitarian regimes and Wu was given the opportunity to write about his story.
He warned about China’s “machinery of suppression” and told Americans it was modeled after the Soviet gulags. In fact, he stated that the Chinese Laogai camps eclipsed the Soviet gulag in two areas. First he claimed that economics and production were stressed and inmates were punished for underperforming. Second, the Chinese put more emphasis on destroying the minds of the inmates. They were mentally and ideologically brainwashed through a rigid “thought reform” program.
Wu laments how few books have been written that truly portray the horrors that were visited upon the inmates on a daily basis. Wu established the Laogai Research Foundation that has a immense amount of documentation and resources for investigators.
Under the section Laogai System LRF writes about the history and purpose of the Laogai1:
China’s Laogai prison system was created soon after Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949 and it still exists today in its essential form.
In concept, it is rooted in communist revolutionary ideology blended with traditional Chinese views on punishment, namely that anti-social behavior (whether criminal or political in nature) can be “reformed” and eliminated through forced labor and re-education. Rather than merely aiming to reduce recidivism, the communists sought to transform inmates into “new socialist men” by forcing them to engage in productive labor to benefit the state and by exposing them to ideological indoctrination. Originally patterned after the Soviet Gulag, and put it place with Soviet assistance, the Laogai prison system has fostered similar inhumane treatment and been used as a vital tool in suppressing dissent and maintaining Communist Party Power.
The Laogai system imprisons both common criminals as well as individuals whose behavior is deemed dangerous to the state – behavior such as opposing government policies, being critical of government officials or practicing banned religions. Political detentions have often been arbitrary, in which prisoners are denied a trial, held on unspecified charges, and serve indefinite sentences.
In 1994, in response to increasing international scrutiny and criticism, the Chinese government ostensibly ended the Laogai system by changing the name of its labor camps for convicted criminals to “prisons” and for non-criminal offenders to “community correction centers”. But these re-named facilities have continued to operate in much the same way, and they’ve become shrouded in increasing secrecy. The Laogai Research Foundation estimates this system currently comprises over one thousand detention facilities, incarcerating millions of individuals.
This history is very disturbing in light of modern parallels. We have the new Biden regime basically labeling half the country “domestic terrorists” and purging the US military and government agencies of “extremists”. This is essentially referring to people who dissent in any way from the party line. Is this how we end up like China or Russia? Those who think ‘it couldn’t happen here…’ clearly do not have a firm grasp on history or reality.
Chinese dissidents are forced to perform hard labor in often extremely dangerous and deteriorating work conditions. They have been made to wade half naked into vats of toxic chemicals.
Westerners have been supporting this horrific organ harvesting by purchasing organs from China. Many of the Falun Gong practitioners have reported having organs taken from them or their family members.2
Laogai Research Foundation has composed an archive database3 that documents Laogai all the way back to 1937 when it was first being theorized by the Central Leaders all the way up to recent times. This is an indispensable resource and I highly recommend looking through these archives. It makes clear that ignorance of China’s crimes against humanity is a choice. There was always plenty of material on this one could find if you knew where to look.
Torture in the Laogai
“Leave no blood on the face.”4 Torture has been regularly employed throughout the Laogai’s history. China’s government has claimed since 1992 that it does not torture prisoners. They also passed laws “banning” obtaining confessions through torture. But this is simply to save face with the international community and to change global public perceptions about the CCP. Evidence that China continues to use torture continues to surface to this day, even though almost nothing about China’s cruel prison system is made public.
Torture is used as standard procedure to extract confessions or to punish prisoners to extract confessions or as punishment for failing to meet production quotas. Some of the most brutal techniques for torture are things like sleep deprivations, stress positions and electric shocks. When it comes to female prisoners, China is known to use gang rape and sexual abuse as forms of torture.
Here are just some examples: beatings by electric batons, solitary confinement which could last for years, brainwashing, beatings, stress positions, forced ingestion (force feeding), electrocution, psychological abuse, burns by cigarettes, branding with hot irons, ripping off of fingernails and toenails, genital mutilation, threats of imprisonment and violence, rape and sexual assault, shackling for months to years, humiliation, filthy conditions and toxic agents, forced sterilization and forced abortions.
China has taken inspiration from both the German Nazi concentration camps as well as the Soviet gulags. It’s an amalgamation of the worst elements of both. Mao’s cultural revolution led to the imprisonment of millions under so-called “counter-revolutionary crimes” as well as the execution of tens of thousands of Chinese citizens. The world ignored these horrific crimes against humanity and did nothing to intervene to save the innocent. One person who was killed for “counter-revolutionary” activity was Zhang Zhixin a woman. She was accused of speaking out against the cultural revolution. She was sent to an all-male prison; male inmates were told to rape her to reduce their sentences. Zhang’s husband and children were not allowed to visit her after her arrest. Without any trial, she was executed. To prevent her from crying out during her execution, police slit her throat and inserted a metal pipe.
These policies led to a multitude of people resorting to cannibalism to survive. One Chinese man killed and ate his own son due to starvation.
The Laogai was created for dissidents and political opposition almost as soon as the CCP came to power. Laogai, which means “labor and reform” was created to try to work people to death or until they became socialist. It was made to coerce and break people to the point that you could turn them into a new person.
In the Laogai system prisoners are forced to produce goods to be sold on the international market. This is not a thing of the past, every time you see cheap goods that say “made in China” on them, this is most likely where it comes from. LRF has confirmed that close to 1000 of these camps exist today.5
The most prominent are the camps in Xinjang where the Muslim Uyghurs are sent.
In 2013 The Atlantic wrote6 about the Laogai system and Harry Wu, while the article downplays the horrors of the camps, it did cover the topic:
In 1987, when Taiwanese President Chiang Ching-kuo finally lifted martial law after nearly forty years, Taiwan's Government Information held its first Taipei International Book Exhibition. The exhibition, which in 1987 gathered 67 publishers from eleven countries, has grown immensely since, attracting 420 international publishers from 60 different countries in 2012.
The exhibition--the "first formal diplomatic event held by the publishing industry in Taiwan"--is a symbol of liberalization and democratization of Taiwan, and its commitment to freedom of speech. Because of strict censorship in the People's Republic of China, many Mainland activists publish their work in Hong Kong and Taiwan, which guarantee freedom of the press. Among them is Harry Wu, a 75-year-old Chinese human rights activist who spent 19 years in so-called "re-education through labor," or laogai, a Chinese labor camp system originally modelled after the Soviet Gulag. Wu has written extensively about the laogai system, combining first-hand accounts with extensive research.
What is so disturbing about reading this now is what is currently happening to both Taiwan and Hong Kong. China has essentially claimed both. This democratization is now gone. China is expanding with that they are becoming bolder and more belligerent.
In 1994, 45 years after the system's establishment in 1949, the Chinese government officially abolished the term laogai, only to rename it jianyu, or prison. "Henceforth, the word 'laogai' will no longer exist, but the function, character and tasks of our prison administration will remain unchanged," announced the government in 1995, betraying any hope for actual reform. According to Wu's research, there are six to eight million inmates working in such prison camps today.
"My father was a right-wing banking official; we were well off. In 1949 the Communist Revolution began, and we lost all our property. My mother committed suicide," said Wu. "I spent nineteen years in laogai because I expressed my opinions."
It was in 1957, a year after the Communist Party began the Hundred Flowers Campaign, which encouraged its citizens to voice their true opinions on politics and society, that Wu was sentenced to life. He was just 21 years old, studying at the Geology Institute in Beijing.
This Hundred Flowers Campaign was a way to trick dissidents into identifying themselves publicly.
In June of this year, NBC News whose parent company does extensive business in China and his a Beijing office wrote7 about the Xinjiang internment camps. It seems the mainstream media didn’t care about the Chinese people being imprisoned and executed. It was only until that same system targeted the Muslim Uyghur minority did western media seem to care.
The prevalence of torture and the lengths to which the Chinese government has gone to cover up its treatment of Muslim minorities are described in comprehensive detail in an Amnesty International report on detention camps in Western China.
Every former camp detainee Amnesty interviewed in the report recounted cruel and degrading treatment, including torture. The report, released Thursday, is based on interviews with 108 people, including 55 camp survivors and several government cadres who worked in the camps.
As part of an attempt to hide camp conditions from the world, Chinese officials created a massive, nearly week-long bonfire, burning as many documents as could be found from an office overseeing the camps, according to an ex-cadre who spoke to Amnesty and whose identity has been concealed for his safety.
The report also gives a behind the scenes look at the "tours" of the camps that the government gives to international journalists, which are meant to paint the facilities, which Chinese officials call "re-education camps," in a positive light.
The document burning occurred in 2019 following a leak of a trove of official Chinese government documents revealing the high-level organization and planning of the internment camps. They were published as part of a global reporting project led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) that included NBC News.
There are rumors about NATO using the Muslim Uyghurs as proxy warriors8 in their campaign to contain China. Some say this is why the western media is talking about the Chinese internment camps finally. They ignored the Laogai system for decades, as well as the horrors of the CCP.
In September of 2020, the Guardian wrote9:
China has built nearly 400 internment camps in Xinjiang region, with construction on dozens continuing over the last two years, even as Chinese authorities said their “re-education” system was winding down, an Australian thinktank has found.
The network of camps in China’s far west, used to detain Uighurs and people from other Muslim minorities, include 14 that are still under construction, according to the latest satellite imaging obtained by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
In total ASPI identified 380 detention centers established across the region since 2017, ranging from lowest security re-education camps to fortified prisons.
That is over 100 more than previous investigations have uncovered, and the researchers believe they have now identified most of the detention centers in the region.
These interment camps are actually all over China, as are sweat shops that the west has no problem supporting and buying goods from. Why is it that western media only focused on the Xinjiang region? They are not telling the full story.
In 2019 the New York Times published a full feature10 on Xinjiang and the Muslim Uyghurs, including leaked documents from the CCP regarding their policy on the Uyghurs.
It rings hollow when you consider the how long this has been going on in China against the Chinese people. Where were the New York Times from day one?
ABC News wrote11 about China’s expansion of the Xinjiang camps, and they include and interesting quote from the Chinese government in their explanation for the camps:
Chinese officials have consistently defended the country's detention policies in Xinjiang, describing the centres as being a core part of China's fight against terrorism and religious extremism.
A Chinese Government White Paper on the camps released last year said the facilities "can effectively eradicate the conditions that enable terrorism and religious extremism to breed and spread".
Asked about the research and whether Beijing was still investing in detention facilities in Xinjiang, Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Wang Wenbin denied that the detention camps ever existed in the first place.
Using the excuse of righting terrorism and extremism sounds awfully familiar. This is exactly what the Biden administration has cited in it’s unprecedented attack on the political opposition and mostly peaceful protesters from January 6. The Biden regime has embarked on a new “Domestic War on Terror” which we see all the tools of the national security state, and all the excesses turned inward against the American people. All in the name of fighting “domestic terror” and “extremism”. They are even creating a new social credit system, to mirror China’s Sesame Credit that will see the dissidents debanked, deplatformed and shut out from society at large.
The New Yorker is another western publication that featured a major exposé12 on the Xinjiang internment camps in February of this year. To be sure, these camps are terrible and should be exposed. I am skeptical about the western mainstream media though due to their incredible failures to report on ALL of these camps and the Laogai historical system. They write:
In the spring of 2017, Erbaqyt Otarbai, a forty-three-year-old truck driver living in Kazakhstan, crossed the border into China to accept a job with a mining company in Xinjiang. His wife had recently undergone surgery to remove kidney stones, and he needed money to cover her medical expenses. For the next three months, he crisscrossed the region, hauling iron ore in a hundred-ton truck. By August, he had saved up enough to pay his debts.
On the morning of August 16th, the county police in Koktokay, near the mine in northern China where he was based, summoned him to a meeting. At the police station, officers led Otarbai to a room lined with spongy, yellow soundproofing. There was a metal chair with arm and leg restraints, but the officers didn’t make him sit in it. One officer asked him questions in Chinese: When had he moved to Kazakhstan? For what purpose? With whom did he communicate? Did he go to a mosque? Did he pray? Otarbai answered honestly. He hadn’t done anything wrong and wasn’t worried. After two hours, the officers released Otarbai but kept his cell phone, saying that they would review its contents.
Later that evening, Otarbai drove a truckload of iron ore about four hundred miles south from Beitun, near the Mongolian border, to a processing plant outside of Ürümqi, Xinjiang’s capital. He arrived around dawn, after an eight-hour journey. While he was waiting to unload his cargo, he heard a knock on the side of his truck. It was a fellow-driver, who said he had received a call from the company dispatcher. The police were coming to pick up Otarbai, who should unload his truck and wait.
When officers arrived at the processing plant, around noon, they told Otarbai that they’d found a problem with his household registration. They would drive him to Tacheng—about six hours away—to get it fixed. As he rode away in the police car, Otarbai realized that he’d forgotten his wristwatch in his truck. The police told him not to worry. “We have some paperwork to fill out, and then you’ll be free and your truck will be waiting for you,” he recalled one of the officers saying. On the highway, they switched on the lights and the siren. Otarbai began to feel nervous.
Otarbai was born in a rural part of northern Xinjiang, near the borders that China shares with Kazakhstan, Russia, and Mongolia. His family’s roots were Kazakh, and, although he grew up speaking both Kazakh and Chinese, Otarbai felt closer in language and custom to Central Asia than to Beijing or Shanghai. Kazakhs are one of China’s fifty-six officially recognized ethnicities and the third-largest ethnic group in Xinjiang. Uighurs, the largest ethnic group in the region, like Kazakhs, speak a Turkic language and are predominantly Muslim.
These stories are important and they matter, but it seems like they never go into the other internment camps sprinkled throughout China as a whole. It makes it seem like a one off thing, like China is only doing this in Xinjiang because they are racist and are attacking an ethnic minority. This is not true, China treats everyone like this that dissents from the Communist Party in anyway. There are so many stories just like this coming from Chinese people like Harry Wu who dedicated his entire life to exposing China’s Laogai system. It is my hope that the world will finally wake up and see China for the totalitarian evil regime that it is. American’s and the west in general must stop doing business with China altogether. Doing trade deals, buying cheap Chinese electronics and goods continues to support and prop up an cruel and inhumane regime. Moreover, it prevents the regime from collapsing under the weight of its own crimes. It kills any hope of change or reform that the Chinese people have been praying for since Mao seized power.
More information
There are so many resources provided by the Laogai Research Foundation on their website. There are also many documentary films that address this system. I will include several here, but you can find more of these films linked on the LRF website13.
This is a short film that goes into stories from Wu’s Laogai Museum.
This film looks at the history of the Laogai.
This film looks at the Qincheng Prison, reserved for the the Communist Party’s high-level purged targets.
The Wall Street Journal film looks at the Xinjiang camps.
This Al Jezeera film looks at a landmark new criminal procedure law that would prevent evidence collected under torture from being used but how China can try to evade it.
This 2008 film by the LRF shares testimony from survivors of the Laogai.
This short documentary was produced by ReasonTV in 2015.
This LRF film documents public executions in China.
This incredible film looks at 10 years of investigation China’s forced organ harvesting program.
This film looks at the women’s labor camp in China.
This film claims China’s prisons are the darkest and most brutal in the world. It reveals that the Chinese prisons and their prisoners’ Laogai life constitute the most ruthless prison in the world.
The study of Mao Zedong and his Chinese revolution is a linchpin of “Xi Jinping Thought,” the Chinese president’s political philosophy which has now been written into the country’s constitution. Xi’s recent consolidation of power suggests he takes Mao’s leadership example very, very seriously.
Kill the Chicken to Scare the Monkey: China’s use of Public Executions to Terrorize the people.
A History of Repression in China.
Prisoners and Victims Stories.
https://laogairesearch.org/laogai-system/
https://rnha.org/chinas-illegal-harvesting-of-falun-gong-organs/
https://laogairesearch.org/archive-database/
https://laogairesearch.org/museum/torture-in-the-laogai/
https://laogairesearch.org/museum/movies-videos/#video-masanjia-womans-labor-camp
https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/272913
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/new-details-torture-cover-ups-china-s-internment-camps-revealed-n1270014
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/03/26/forced-labor-china-us-nato-arms-industry-cold-war/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/24/china-has-built-380-internment-camps-in-xinjiang-study-finds
https://archive.is/uoW7B
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-24/china-building-bigger-uyghur-detention-camps-in-xinjiang/12693338
https://www.newyorker.com/news/a-reporter-at-large/china-xinjiang-prison-state-uighur-detention-camps-prisoner-testimony
https://laogairesearch.org/museum/movies-videos/