Laogai--the Chinese Gulag

by Hongda Harry Wu

Overview

In this work, the author reveals the hidden world of the "laogaidui" - the PRC's labour reform camps. The author, a political prisoner for 19 years, takes the reader through the harsh reality found in the camps, describing their ideological origins, complex structures and living conditions. What makes the PRC's "laogaidui" unique, according to Wu, is the essential contribution to China's GNP of the commodities produced by the prisoners and the camps' concomitant indispensability to the nation's economic health.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780429979033
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	10/08/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	247
File size:	19 MB
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About the Author

Wu, Hongda Harry

Table of Contents

The organization and distribution of labour reform camps; convicted labour reform ("laogai"); re-education through labour; forced job placement.

Editorial Reviews

When Harry Wu's home videos of the Chinese gulag were shown on 60 Minutes last September, the American public first learned the dirty secret of China's extensive network of forced labor (laogai) camps. (Earlier, the human rights group Asia Watch showed that Chinese convict labor products were being illegally exported to the United States.) Wu, himself a laogai prisoner for 19 years, is an authentic voice from the vast silence of China's hidden empire. His spare, sober account is a well-documented analysis of the several thousand forced labor camps, where an estimated 16 to 20 million Chinese, perhaps ten percent of them political offenders, labor on prison farms, and in factories and workshops, in a harsh atmosphere permeated by sadism, torture, and malnutrition. The Chinese Communists obviously learned many lessons from their Soviet comrades, whose gulag Solzhenitsyn so brilliantly chronicled. This is a unique and valuable contribution to our understanding of post-1949 China.-- Steven I. Levine, Boulder Run Research, Hillsborough, N.C.

Library Journal

Wu spent 19 years in labor reform camps in China, and likens them to Nazi concentration camps and Soviet gulags; the main difference, he says, is that the forced labor is used to produce many products being exported to the West. He outlines their place in the political structure and provides details of 990 camps. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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