Thread by @NavroopSingh_

The Chinese Laogai - The Chinese Labour Camps its Gulag Version !

The Chinese word laogai, meaning “reform through labor,” refers to the most extensive system of forced labor camps in the world -- modeled after the Soviet gulag -- which has spanned the territory of China since the early days of the communist regime.

The Laogai Research Foundation has identified 1,045 laogai camps still in operation today, though it is likely that
many more exist.

The Chinese government has consistently defended the laogai system against criticism,
claiming that the labor camps comprise a normal, even model prison system, no different than
that of any other nation.

The entire legal system in China is viewed by the Communist Party as, foremost, a tool through which it can maintain its dictatorship over the people, consistent with Marxist-Leninist thought.

Accordingly, throughout its reign, the Party has used the laogai to persecute and intimidate large numbers of Chinese people who posed no real threat to their fellow citizens.

As the system was being developed
throughout the 1950’s, Mao relied heavily upon the laogai to consolidate power, imprisoning within it many Kuomintang supporters and members of the bourgeoisie.

They would later be joined by scores of the Party’s own, who were purged for deviating from whatever the Party
line was determined to be at any given moment.

Although such purges ended when Deng Xiaoping came to power, he and his successors continued to suppress political dissent, whether in isolated incidents, such as when a journalist oversteps the boundaries in reporting on government corruption, or on a larger scale.

Articles 35 and 36 of China’s 1982 constitution supposedly safeguard these freedoms, but the State has
consistently put forth other laws that trump these protections in order to maintain control over its people.

And although China has signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which also protects those rights, its government has not yet ratified the treaty, despite
continuing calls for it to do so.

As a result, the laogai has been filled not only with common criminals, but also with journalists (China is the largest jailer of journalists in
the world), authors, cyber-dissidents, China Democracy Party members, public interest activists, human rights lawyers;

underground “house church” leaders, Falun Gong practitioners, and discontented members of China’s oppressed ethnic minorities, especially
Uyghurs and Tibetans.

All prisoners within the laogai, dissidents and common criminals alike, are victims of a Chinese regime that does not respect the rule of law. During the early years of communist
rule, having established little in the way of a legal system, the regime often sentenced suspects

The Chinese Communist Party
remains in control of the courts, and this political interference comes at the expense of judicial independence and due process. Suspects often do not have adequate access to legal
counsel and are unable to fully defend themselves.

This practice, known in Chinese as jiuye (forced job placement), essentially extends the prisoner’s sentence indefinitely at the
discretion of police or prison authorities.

This change, however, was in name only, and it did not reflect any actual change to the structure or operation of then Laogai.

Current Chinese law allows for police to arbitrarily detain individuals for long periods of time without clear judicial regulations.

One such form of detention is the notorious laojiao (reeducation through labor) – an administrative measure
which allows police to detain any person for up to three years without a trial. Laojiao enables the government to easily cleanse city streets of undesirables,

this including migrant workers,
petitioners, vagrants, and dissidents, as was the case with Beijing during the 2008 Olympic Games.

In some cases, police have even committed healthy persons to psychiatric hospitals. Even
prisoners who were convicted and have served out their sentences within the laogai may be forced to accept “jobs” at the same labor camps in which they were imprisoned or a nearby factory.

For many prisoners, thought reform and forced labor are only the beginning of the severe cruelties they must face.

While the exact figures are state secrets and thus unknown outside of the Chinese government, human rights groups estimate that the number of executions carried out in China every year amounts to several thousand—more than all other countries
combined.

Moreover, the world became aware in the 1990’s that China had found a new way to exploit prisoners, even after death.

Undercover investigations revealed that Chinese hospitals were
harvesting the organs of executed prisoners and transplanting them to privileged Party officials or, for a profit, to wealthy foreigners.

In 2006, China’s Vice-Minister of Health, Huang Jiefu, publicly admitted that most of the organs used in China’s organ transplants, which rank
second in the number conducted each year only to the U.S., came from executed prisoners.

China has responded with defiance and in some cases with cosmetic modifications. In 1994 it ceased using the word “laogai,” and instead began referring to the system as “jianyu”, meaning “prison”.