[{"id":12264,"date":"2026-09-24T07:55:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-24T11:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chinabooksreview.com\/?p=12264"},"modified":"2026-09-23T09:48:42","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T13:48:42","slug":"inside-the-camps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chinabooksreview.com\/2026\/09\/24\/inside-the-camps\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside the Camps"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Ed: <\/strong>Below is an adapted excerpt from Orville Schell\u2019s new book Inside China’s Secret Prisons: An Undercover Expos\u00e9 and Its Lasting Legacy<\/a> (Columbia University Press, September 2026). The book revisits a 1991 investigation into China\u2019s reform-through-labor camps (\u52b3\u6539\u961f) for the CBS 60 Minutes documentary \u201cMade In China<\/a>,\u201d and explores how similar camps still exist today, notably in Xinjiang.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In 2021, just after the death of my wife, Baifang, I was looking through some boxes of old papers when I chanced upon a yellowing manuscript. As I began leafing through it, I immediately recognized it as the long-form piece I had written for The New Yorker<\/em>, for which I was China correspondent from 1975 into the mid-1990s. The manuscript chronicled a project I had worked on for nearly a year with an investigative team from the CBS News program 60 Minutes <\/em>and Wu Hongda (Harry Wu), who had himself been imprisoned in this system for 19 years. Our assignment had been to document the prison camp system that arced across the People\u2019s Republic of China (PRC), held many political prisoners and was reported to be illegally exporting goods made in prison factories with forced labor into the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Uncovering this relic from three decades ago made me feel a little like an archaeologist stumbling on an ancient text hidden in a long-sealed tomb. The article was drawn from a journal I had kept throughout the nine-month 60 Minutes<\/em> investigation into China\u2019s vast \u201creform-through-labor camp,\u201d or laogai<\/em>, system (\u52b3\u6539\u961f\u7cfb\u7edf) that was aired<\/a> by CBS in the fall of 1991.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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After the broadcast, I had set to work writing a narrative piece for The New Yorker<\/em> about this dangerous and exciting but often hair-raising investigation. However, it was not until after the magazine had edited my draft that I fully came to my senses and realized that identifying myself so closely with this cloak-and-dagger investigation drawing back the veil on China\u2019s prison and forced labor systems would provoke the wrath of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Fearful of the consequences not only for my own career as a China writer but also for the future of my Chinese-born wife, her Beijing-based parents and our many friends still living in China, I decided, after much agonizing, to withdraw the piece from publication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I first rediscovered this lost-and-found manuscript, I expected to quickly conclude that after three decades, its shelf life would have long since expired. However, as I began leafing through its pages, several things surprised me. First, the saga still made for a really exciting story. Second, because a new global debate over yet another generation of goods made with forced labor had erupted in the United States, the issue of prison labor was more relevant than ever. This was especially true of goods made in China\u2019s westernmost region, Xinjiang, which had a land mass four times the size of California and was home to an estimated 12 million Uyghur Muslims. Now thousands of them were reported to be under detention in a newly built network of high-tech prison camps, many of which had attached production facilities. These new camps had engendered a whole new wave of antagonism over the still divisive issue of prison labor and were once again bedeviling U.S.-China relations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thirty years ago, I had considered following the Czechslovakian President Vaclav Havel\u2019s admonition to speak truth to power, publishing this piece on China\u2019s reform-through-labor camp system as planned, and letting the devil take the hindmost. However, in the end, the downside risk loomed so large that I yielded. Now, however, the situation had changed. My life\u2019s partner was gone, so I no longer needed to worry about her welfare. Her parents still live in Beijing, but they were so elderly the Party did not care about them. Being older myself, I no longer needed to be so concerned about having my own career damaged. And since my children were now grown, I did not need to be so mindful of maintaining a connection to their mother\u2019s birthplace for them. So, even if it meant banishment forever, I decided to go ahead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A new global debate over yet another generation of goods made with forced labor had erupted in the United States.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

China\u2019s prison camp system was made up of a bewildering archipelago of penal facilities at almost every level of government in every part of the country. They included ordinary jails (\u76d1\u72f1), administrative detention centers (\u62d8\u7559\u6240), general detention centers (\u770b\u5b88\u6240), Central Commission for Discipline Inspection detention centers (\u7559\u7f6e\u6240), reform-through-labor detachments (\u52b3\u52a8\u6539\u9020\u961f), and reeducation-through-labor detachments (\u52b3\u52a8\u6559\u517b\u961f) [technically abolished in 2013], to name only some of the major categories of prisons that the Party maintained for people it viewed as social and political malefactors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Shayang Re-education Through Labor camp in Hubei province.
(<\/em>Laogai Museum<\/em><\/a>)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In the reform-through-labor universe, there was one last murky category known as \u201cforced job placement\u201d (\u7559\u573a\u5c31\u4e1a), a term used for inmates who had finished their formal reform-through-labor sentences but no longer had homes to return to because they had been imprisoned for so long, their families and friends had renounced them, forgotten them or died. With no place to go, these inmates were allowed to continue working in their old prison camp enterprises as poorly paid laborers, but to live on the outside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although China\u2019s laogai system had been borrowed from Stalin, it also had its own Chinese characteristics that distinguished it from its Soviet counterpart. One element that made it unique was the way it combined punishment with both \u201cthought reform\u201d (\u601d\u60f3\u6539\u9020) and \u201clabor reform\u201d (\u52b3\u52a8\u6539\u9020). A Peking University publication I found at UC Berkeley explained the logic of combining forced labor with thought reform: \u201cExcept for those who must be exterminated physically due to political considerations, human beings must be utilized as a productive force with submissiveness as a prerequisite.\u201d It went on to note that \u201cthe fundamental policy is: Forced labor is the means, while thought reform is the basic aim.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In other words, forced labor and thought reform \u2014 more commonly referred to in the United States as \u201cbrainwashing (\u6d17\u8111)\u201d \u2014 formed a kind of yin<\/em> and yang<\/em> relationship with each other. They were complementary processes designed to collectively purge a prisoner \u2014 whether a criminal or political prisoner \u2014 of whatever wrong behavior or \u201cincorrect political thinking\u201d they were seen as being afflicted by. The practice of brainwashing was perfected early in Mao\u2019s revolution as a companion therapy for political miscreants who stubbornly resisted the tonic effects of imprisonment and forced labor and therefore required an even deeper \u201crectification of thought\u201d (\u601d\u60f3\u6574\u987f).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A criminal reform handbook issued by the Ministry of Justice in 1988 explained the rationale for forced labor this way: \u201cThe [prison] system organizes criminals in labor and production, thus creating wealth for society.\u201d Then, it noted that by \u201crepresenting the working class and the working people of our country,\u201d China\u2019s reform-through-labor system \u201cexercises dictatorship over a minority of elements who are hostile to socialism, thus safeguard[ing] our socialist system.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

China\u2019s prison camp system was made up of a bewildering archipelago of penal facilities at almost every level of government in every part of the country.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The reform-through-labor system underwent some reassessment in the early 1980s, when leaders like Xi Jinping\u2019s own father, Xi Zhongxun, a revolutionary veteran, was brought out of political exile to help revive the National People\u2019s Congress in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. In 1981, Xi Zhongxun was put in charge of the Congress\u2019s Legislative Committee, where one of his assignments was to look at the institutions of China\u2019s reform-through-labor system, the very system in which he himself had been imprisoned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Xi Zhongxun\u2019s take was somewhat surprising. He concluded that while many laogai inmates might have done some wrong things, many were also victims of what he called \u201cleftover poisons\u201d from the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, when those in charge of the camps had prioritized force and abusive tactics over the rights of inmates. A subsequent Ministry of Public Security conference on the laogai <\/em>system called for a new policy that would include a modicum of \u201crevolutionary humanism,\u201d even going so far as to speak of the need for leaders to run camps more \u201clike parents treating a sick child rather than disciplining unruly students.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While Xi abjured from totally rejecting the notion of reform-through-labor, in one speech he observed: \u201cAfter prisoners are sentenced and they are laboring at a laogai facility, if you do not treat them as people, if you abuse and humiliate them, or even engage in a fascist dictatorship, wouldn\u2019t that also be the influence of leftism?\u201d \u201cLeftism\u201d and \u201crightism\u201d were two erroneous, if nebulous, tendencies that kept manifesting themselves in Party history, causing many to be grievously punished.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Implementing a rule of law did make some halting progress in China during the 1980s. However, the laogai <\/em>system continued unchecked. Moreover, many of the reforms that were implemented were set back by the political crackdown that followed the Beijing Massacre in 1989. The ensuing retrenchment not only served as the death knell for more meaningful political reforms but gave hard-line conservative veterans in the Party cause to insist that the laogai system still had utility and should remain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A 1991 Human Rights Watch report<\/a>, \u201cPrison Labor in China.\u201d<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I vividly recall coming upon my first prison camp in China, on a trip I had made to Qinghai province in 1981. As part of his \u201creform and opening\u201d agenda, paramount leader Deng Xiaoping began opening up many long-closed Tibetan ethnic areas to foreign mountaineering and trekking groups as a way of earning much-needed foreign currency. Since I had always been interested in China\u2019s historically fraught ethnically Tibetan region, I joined an expedition attempting to summit Qinghai\u2019s 20,610-foot-high Mt. Amne Machin (\u963f\u5c3c\u739b\u537f\u5c71), one of the few remaining peaks of consequence on the planet that was still unclimbed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During our weeks in Qinghai, we drove for days on arrow-straight dirt roads that lanced across vast expanses of alpine grasslands and deserts sparsely inhabited only by pastoral Golok nomads. Never had I seen a more desolate but also strangely beautiful landscape. The starkness of Qinghai\u2019s treeless mountains, barren grasslands and endless deserts marked the province as a place of fathomless remoteness, emptiness and isolation. It was precisely these qualities that made it a perfect place for prison camps. Even if an inmate somehow managed to escape the confines of a prison, it was all but impossible to escape the hostile surrounding wilderness. So, like Xinjiang, Qinghai became a favored place to send ideological criminals with long sentences. Soon prisons became one of the province\u2019s most important industries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We had been driving across a vast flat stretch of grassland when the outlines of a fortress-like rampart rose on the horizon before us like a distant ship on a calm sea. Only as we drew nearer did I see that it was, in fact, a compound ringed by stamped-earth walls, fringed with barbed wire and turreted guard towers. As we passed, a long file of prisoners with shaved heads and wearing faded blue uniforms appeared trudging down the road. When I asked our Chinese Mountaineering Association guide if they came from a nearby reform-through-labor camp, he just squeezed his eyes closed and shook his head, as if such a question was too forbidden to be addressed openly to a foreigner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1991, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report<\/a>, \u201cPrison Labor in China,\u201d that should have ended all debate as to whether Chinese prisons factories and farms sought to sell goods and commodities produced with forced labor on global markets. HRW researchers had gained access to a restricted-circulation journal published for Chinese prison officials that, in the most upbeat language imaginable, extolled China\u2019s prisons as playing a key role in a burgeoning export drive. Ding Banghua, an official in a provincial prison bureau, was even quoted as raising the question of whether reform-through-labor enterprises could and should develop \u201ca foreign-oriented economy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe answer must be affirmative,\u201d Ding jauntily responded. \u201cSome enterprises have already done so with flying colors,\u201d he continued. \u201cAfter 30 years and more of hardship getting started and vigorous development, labor reform enterprises throughout the country have great potential for \u2026 earning foreign exchange.\u201d Then Ding candidly acknowledged that \u201cnearly every province has its own sizable community of labor-reform enterprises.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite such brazen official self-admissions, Chinese officials still regularly insisted that goods made with forced labor were not being exported to the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I vividly recall coming upon my first prison camp in China, on a trip I had made to Qinghai province in 198.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

After almost a year of work, our 60 Minutes<\/em> \u201cMade in China\u201d segment aired on CBS in the fall of 1991. Newsweek<\/em> ran a cover story; The Washington Post<\/em>, Business Week<\/em>, The World Journal<\/em>, the BBC, Voice of America<\/em> and many other media outlets extensively covered the story. Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell asked for a meeting, and a congressional committee announced its intention to hold hearings on products made with prison labor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beijing\u2019s reaction to having its darkest interstices exposed by an American television network was predictable. Wu Jianmin, China\u2019s Foreign Ministry spokesman, charged 60 Minutes<\/em> with having \u201cconfounded black and white\u201d and attacked the program as \u201cnotorious for vilifying China\u201d and for revealing its \u201cextreme hatred for the social system which the Chinese people have chosen.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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