Talk:Laogai

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Human rights[edit]

where are all the sentences about human rights violations? who washed up the article?87.11.32.198 (talk) 16:50, 7 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

--- —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.11.32.198 (talk) 16:51, 7 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I can't believe how biased the article is. It is washed out of all the human rights violations that are committed in laogais. Another source states: "Exhausting work and being beaten by clubs is a norm. Common punishments include standing stark naked in freezing cold, being locked up for months in rooms of a size of a fridge, or places without light, heating and basic sanitation..."

Another section on prisoner mortality reads: "It is not known what prisoner mortality actually is, but most probably it is similar to stalinist or nazi concentration camps. It is confirmed by few smuggled reports. Out of 10,000 prisoners of five forced labour camps in Jang Calakhla (Northern Tibet), 10-30 people die every day because of starvation, beating or exhaustion."

That should give you an idea.

Another comment I have is that perhaps it's not a human rights violation to use forced labour, but it certainly is to: - jail people without a fair trial or court's decision - beat them - make them work up to 18 hour a day - starve them - make them live in inhumane conditions

Think about this. If PRC were so spotless would they still censor the news??


83.26.228.157 23:19, 23 April 2007 (UTC)Wojtek[reply]

China doesn't have to be spotless - no country is. And no country doesn't censor news. More-importantly, I see this stupid line: `Most prisoners are there for acts considered crimes in the West' Why is the West the standard? Plus, why is everyone ready to believe these wild speculations about prison conditions in these countries? I trust the conditions are very, very bad. But let's not be biased. What am I thinking? This Wikipedia - mouthpiece of the Western majority, be they right or wrong. Revence27 16:35, 10 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

@Revence27: I don't think the wikipedia is a "mouthpiece of the Western majority". But it is a sort of distilled version of the conventional wisdom of the main stream media (MSM). The MSM are considered "reliable sources", so what is taken to be truth in the wikipedia is the opinions of the editors and especially the owners of the New York Times and others in that part of the ruling class. Son of eugene (talk) 00:43, 2 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Made some extensive changes. There was an implication that Laogai is a system which outside the Chinese criminal justice system and that China runs a system of detention which is separate from the prison system.

In fact the "labor camps" that are being refered to are regular Chinese prisons.

dude, this article has been massacred by a chinese propagandist.

this article was created by an american propagandist, and is filled with lies. 99% of this article is pure fiction. the fairy tales told about China is cooked up to take attention away from the rotten condition inside american prisons, not to mention the countless number of cia prisons across the world, where torture is the norm, and goal. i dont buy for a single second that Chinese prisons are even 1/10 as bad as american run prisons. as far as censoring the news goes, the west also has this mastered. i can't remember the last time i ever read anything legitimate news coming from propaganda news sources like cnn, bbc, al jazira, reuters, ap. most of the stuff on the corporate media is absolutely ridiculous such as the alleged assasination of laden. anyone with half a brain wouldnt believe 99% of the stuff coming out of the corporate media, including wikipedia articles that are edited by various paid agents representing the various imperialist foundations that dominate the west. — Preceding unsigned comment added by AFDS89YDSFY8 (talk • contribs) 12:48, 7 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Question on quotas:[edit]

Where is the proof that there has been indiscrimminate nabbings to fill quotas? It sounds incredibly far-fetched; are there certified documents that record this purported phenomenon?

Cleanup[edit]

OK I removed a few POV statements, some speculations and other unsubstantiated claims. Removed the part about nabbing people randomly, since there is no proof of it yet. If there is, please provide them and it'll go back up. --Miborovsky 05:18, 1 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

concerned about this[edit]

clearly this is something that is not well known outside of the government of china so it is hard to get a fair depiction, but i think it is important for someone to add a section on laogai and laojaoi from earlier time periods when it would have been much much worse (according to the descriptions of harry wu and also bau ruo wang)

Removed text[edit]

I took this out: "Chinese use of prison labor is an interesting case study of the interaction between capitalism and prison labor," because it's not very clear from the succeeding passage how and why this is so. - Nat Krause(Talk!) 07:24, 8 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Deletion[edit]

Why doesn't this article have any references? I'm suspecting a Chinese propagandist is to blame, as since they have been allowed access to Wikipedia by their government they seem to be pretty widespread with their vandalism.

Deletion[edit]

Unless someone can create an article that actually cites references I believe it should be completely erased. If there aren't any references to back up the article it looks like any old Joe could have made this up. Nolomorte (talk)


Deleted "Supporters point out that Wu revisited China in the 1990s, investigated labor camps, determined that little had changed, was arrested again, but was released under pressure from United States politicians." Since according to Harry Wu,he was arrested and immediately expelled when he tried to reenter China, it is clearly impossible for him to reinvestigate the labor camps after 1990.--128.210.68.66 (talk) 04:41, 21 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]


It was in 1995 that Harry Wu "was arrested and immediately expelled when he tried to reenter China". In prior years, he had made previous visits where he had investigated the [then] current situation in the laogai. Reference: Troublemaker, by Harry Wu - 63.228.28.107 (talk) 15:44, 4 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

No one with an IQ over ten should believe this Harry Wu shyster. If even one-tenth of what he claims were true, there's no way in hell he'd ever have been allowed to leave china. And returning is even more ridiculus, he'd not have been denied entry, he'd have been welcomed with open arms then had an accident.

It's stupid to believe this garbage. 2603:3023:752:E000:9C0E:29B:9F5C:B0D4 (talk) 21:46, 12 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Reliability of Map Data[edit]

The map shows location of laogai camps. Is that reliable? it showed most camps are in Guangdong, specifically near the city of Guanzhou. I am unaware of any recent uprisings in the Guangzhou metropolitan area in the last few decades and I personally grew up there. Shaoquan (talk) 21:35, 2 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

To find out about the map, you should get in touch with the map's creator on Wikimedia Commons (here) and ask him about his sources. As for the high concentration of laogai facilities in Guangdong, I wouldn't be surprised if that's the case; according to the Laogai Handbook put out by the Laogai Research Foundation every couple years, Guangdong does indeed have a very high number of prisons, RTLs, and other detainment facilities (in comparison with most other provinces and regions). Politizer talk/contribs 21:56, 13 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I am concerned that the map is original research. The map's author cites the source as "own work". Now Wikipedia is clear on this point: a source must be cited. If this is not possible, the map should not be used.POVreferee (talk) 03:51, 19 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
User-created maps are extremely common on both WP and Commons (for example, there are thousands of language maps that have been made by users). If you want to challenge the map, first get in touch with the map creator (I linked him above) and ask him about his sources; you can't really take any action against the map if you haven't taken that step. Policy (specifically, WP:AGF) is to assume that his map is a proper interpretation of the information, unless you can prove otherwise. Politizer talk/contribs 04:32, 19 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I've e-mailed the map creator to see if he can be reached for comment. Politizer talk/contribs 04:32, 19 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I totally agree with you. I was concerned because the under source it said "own work". If the source had been his own work it would be original research. I'm not worried about one uncited source. POVreferee (talk) 11:48, 19 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The origins of the map is Laogai the chinese Gulag of Harry Wu: the second half of the book has maps of every chinese province with point locations and lists on laogai names. I've scanned each page map and put them together. Something like this [My italian login is "Fata Morgana"] —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.156.51.126 (talk)

I'm happy with that. Can the picture data be edited to contain this information? POVreferee (talk) 11:33, 19 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I was not sure about the meanings of data. "My own work" is for copyright: I draw the picture without directly scan it but re-placing all the points with a long work. I didn't know about including NPOV concept in the image. It's only me who can add this 'cause I've loaded the file? Or you can add it for me? Please note that in the italian voice the origin (Harry Wu) of information are written in the label of the image tag. Isn't this the way? [Fata Morgana] —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.156.51.126 (talk)

Don't worry; I edited the image page on Commons last night to include the source data. There's no need to put it on the image itself; it's on the image's info page now. Politizer talk/contribs 16:24, 19 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Gulag[edit]

"Gulag, the equivalent of laogai in Russia" - It says the opposite in the actual article, which is incorrect? Vectoor (talk) 22:40, 9 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It's a matter of detail. Used in the see-also section, "the equivalent of laogai in Russia" is a convenient shorthand to let the reader know why that entry is there and why it's relevant to this article. In the main article, there's a somewhat more detailed discussion over how "equivalent" they actually are. Regardless of whether or not they are equivalent, they are frequently compared; I'll change it to "counterpart." rʨanaɢ (formerly Politizer)talk/contribs 12:24, 10 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]


California use Inmate Fire Crews[edit]

so this is USA version Laogai..... http://www.salem-news.com/articles/october222007/inmate_firefighters_102207.php —Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.168.191.2 (talk) 21:10, 13 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Not really. This is actually quite common. rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 21:15, 13 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
another analogy would be the system of plantation slavery in the southern US before the civil war, and looking at the link between crime and slavery as a 'punishment', which i dont know much about, but it would be worth investigating imho. the next closest i personally can think of would probably be the penal 'colony' type organizations in the southern US, theres a book IIRC called 'one dies, get another'. after that, maybe federal UNICOR or other modern 'prison work' type programs, where the output is sold on a market and directly competes with the products of free labor.. iirc Microsoft has used prison labor to shrinkwrap copies of Windows in the past. if you want to take it farther, another interesting analogy might be with slave labor in nazi germany, which benefited a lot of large corporations like Volkswagen, who later got sued by ex-slaves. and of course Stalin, who told Churchill that collectivization probably killed 10 million people. but a big difference is that in China, people are put in prison for the things they say or for coming together in meetings, in the US this is theoretically illegal for the government to prohibit, although you could look at the arrests of various protesters around the national party conventions and ponder the question more deeply... another big difference is that in the US there are supposed to be 'trials' and juries, many 'speech crimes' in china dont require a trial for imprisonment. very interesting and complicated question. Decora (talk) 21:49, 18 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Laogai Denial?[edit]

Should one perhaps move with the liberal media times and create a Wikipedia entry on laogai denial - the equivalent of Holocaust Denial or Gulag Denial? Or what else does one do with those writers who might be inclined to claim incarceration rates that are significantly lower than those cited in the latest study on the subject, p. 269 of Criminal Justice in China: A History (Harvard U Press, 2009), where a "cautious and conservative estimate" has it that "at least 5 to 7 percent of the Chinese population was imprisoned in labor camps". The author provides no precise year, but for the Mao era this would make for anything between 27 million [5 percent in 1949] to 65 million [7 percent in 1976] in "the laogai"! In line with one of the "key claims of Holocaust deniers" in the Wikipedia site on that subject, one could creatively characterize as engaged in "laogai denial" those individuals who have the chutzpa to assert that such numbers are "a gross exaggeration, and the actual number is an order of magnitude lower". Just a thought…Villa Giulia (talk) 11:47, 11 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds like POV-pushing to me. This article already talks about that, and "laogai denial" is not a huge and well-known phenomenon like holocaust denial. Plus, right here you have not provided any sources of notable people denying laogai, you've only provided sources arguing that there is laogai. rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 11:55, 11 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Just wanted to test the waters and have no intention of joining the ranks of the POV-pushing (had to check the wiki-entry on that term to understand it…). I do believe, however, that "notable people" may one day ignite a debate on the figures "out there" now.Villa Giulia (talk) 16:02, 11 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
If they "may one day" start this debate, then we can deal with that after it happens. Until then, Wikipedia is not a crystal ball. rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 20:39, 11 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
for there to be denial, there first has to be acceptance. denial is pretty much the 'norm', its a huge question, but probably goes back to the cold war and Nixon's alliance with Mao against the USSR... and going right up to the US 'free trader' and business alliance with China in the 1990s,2000s. thats just my opinion though. once upon a time nobody talked about the holocaust either. Decora (talk) 21:54, 18 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Deaths in laogai[edit]

Okay, the very first reference (actually the first reference has been deleted, but I've got a bunch more starting with the next sentence) says that 50 million people have been through the Laogai system. Laogai, the Chinese Gulag, 1992, by Wu and Slingerland estimates 50 million: "the cumulative number of CLR and LTR subjects confined to LRCs during the past forty years is over 50 million." p18. Laogai Report, v.12 iss.2, 2003, by the Laogai Research Foundation estimates 50 million: "Since its inception, the laogai has held over 50 million prisoners" p12. Fifty years after the declaration: the United Nations' record on human rights, 2001, by Wagner and Carbone, article by Harry Wu estimates 50 million: "I estimate that 50 million Chinese have been the victims of the Laogai since 1949." p70. Note that the Laogai Research Foundation is funded and directed by Harry Wu, so all these sources are from the same person. So let's say that by 1992, 50 million people had been through Laogai. However, reference 11 claims that 27 million people have died - 10 million people per year in the Laogai system, a tenth of whom die, for 27 years.

Doing a little number crunching (making the assumption that deaths are distributed uniformly among old prisoners and new; probably not valid but shouldn't make the hugest difference to the final analysis) I get these figures: if the average person spends ten years inside before leaving, then there are approximately 47.9 million entries into the system over those 27 years (including people who are leave and then later imprisoned again); if it is 19 years (like Wu), there are 39.3 million entries; if people never leave, it is 37 million entries. This means that, for every 10,000 people who enter the Laogai system (counting people who enter multiple times as multiple people), between 5638 and 7300 people died. For comparison, over the period 1934-1953, for every 10,000 people who entered the Soviet Gulags, about 480 died (based on the references on the gulag page). During WWII, the death rate for prisoners at Nazi camps was between 5579 (for all camps) and 7835 (for just extermination camps) for all people. This seems to suggest that, rather than being prison labour camps, the Laogai are in fact extermination camps where the Chinese government has been attempting the systematic slaughter of its political prisoners on a massive scale.

Either that, or there's something fishy with the 27 million number.

Now, according to the quoted text, that number is based on "descriptions of camp life by inmates". I'm by no means a history expert, but is that a particularly accurate method? I would also like to draw your attention to the criticism section of the Wikipedia page on the cited text, which includes such praise as "many of their discoveries come from sources that cannot be checked, others are openly speculative or are based on circumstantial evidence, and some are untrue.", "the 'facts' in The Da Vinci Code are about as reliable as those to be found in...Mao: The Unknown Story.", and "[the] book is not a history in the accepted sense of a reasoned historical analysis, [it] reads like an entertaining Chinese version of a TV soap opera."

Any thoughts? --superioridad (discusión) 04:52, 8 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

You are right to question Chang & Halliday—it's a very important book, but it's not real "history". More importantly, though, you have to be more careful reading the "27 million" figure. I don't have the book handy (although I could get it within a couple days), but judging by the footnote and by what I remember from reading it, this is a figure for all deaths in all prisons and all labor camps. Laogai is just one element of China's prison system (there are at least 8 different elements, others include detention centers, laojiao, custody and repatriation, and ankang), so you can't directly compare the laogai statistics to this statistic. Also, prison deaths throughout Mao's rule were certainly not uniform—the deaths spiked during mass campaigns and purges, whereas in between they probably dropped. rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 05:32, 8 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

laogai or prison[edit]

"In 1990 China abandoned the term laogai and started labelling the facilities as "prisons" instead."

This is confusing because "劳改" is not a place, it is a method （手段） of correction. The word has to my knowledge not been abandoned at all. The penal code of the PRC (中华人民共和国刑法) contains this sentence: "被判处有期徒刑、无期徒刑的犯罪分子，在监狱或者其他执行场所执行；凡有劳动能力的，都应当参加劳动，接受教育和改造。" (para 46) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.224.49.68 (talk) 01:20, 14 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Current status?[edit]

Pretty much all quoted sources in this article are at least ten years old and yet many are claimed to represent a current status. Much has changed over the years so I think this needs a rewrite that clarly distinguishes between the historical status and current prison camps. For example, I would really like a name and date along with that quote “Our economic theory hold the human being is the most fundamental productive force. Except for those who must be exterminated physically out of political consideration, human beings must be utilized as productive forces, with submissiveness as the prerequisite. The Laogai system's fundamental policy is 'Forced Labor as a means, while Thought Reform is our basic aim.’” because I am certain the current Chinese leadership would not issue such a statement (sounds more like the 70s to me). 79.225.8.141 (talk), 07:26, 19 June 2014

I have added this section manually; the IP whose signature it is attempted to add this comment on this date, but for some bizarre reason, it was blocked by the abuse filter. Nyttend (talk) 02:42, 7 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding the current status, in 2021 Xi Jinping Thought is the dominant ideology and its first tenant is: "Ensuring Chinese Communist Party leadership over all forms of work in China". Xi Jinping Thought also promotes a return to Maoism (point 7 of the 14 basic points). The quote in question is ideologically consistent with the current Communist Party of China. Baron Muck (talk) 11:29, 21 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

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Move discussion in progress[edit]

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提尔巴 (talk) 17:19, 3 November 2018 (UTC).[reply]

neutrality disputed[edit]

The wording of the phrase "critics", in "critics likened it to slavery", there is plenty evidence laogai fits the definition of slavery, even if it is considered justified.

First of all, the use of the word "critics" (definition 1b) is objectively correct. Also, welcome to Wikipedia, a site that claims to be (and fails to be) neutral. "Neutral" means not having bias against something. If you don't have a source definitively proving it's slavery, your only other option is to use WP:RfC to gain consensus (see: Why Sega Genesis isn't called Sega Mega Drive even though it's only called Sega Genesis in the US (there's a whole talk page header about the long dispute process and how the page was moved to Sega Mega Drive then moved back and all attempts to move it again failed)). Also please sign your posts by using four tildes (shift+the key next to the 1 key) Mattwo7 (talk) 01:17, 29 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
forced labor of an unfree person is slavery. It's not OR to apply a basic definition to well-cited facts. 21:09, 28 March 2023 (UTC) DenverCoder9 (talk) 21:09, 28 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Challenge on source recency[edit]

Only two cites are from the past decade - cite 4, referring to China's penal code, and cite 15, referring tangentially to the Uighurs' treatment in Xinjiang. A couple more are from the past 15 years. The majority of the sources here are older than two decades old - with the most-cited being from 1997. I'm not even sure if this program is still active anymore - I've read reports that its been done away with. No record exists here, however, that suggests anything of the sort may have occurred. Augend (drop a line) 06:57, 23 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

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