|
"In
China, they want you to become [a] new socialist person, and that's the purpose
of the labor camps," says Harry Wu, a survivor of the prison system known as
"Laogai," which means "reform through labor."
"The major job in the
prison camp is to survive, to find food, that's it," says Wu.
When the
Communist Party of China came to power in 1956, Mao invited Soviet state experts
into the country to develop a Gulag-style prison network to suppress
"counter-revolutionaries" and torture political opposition.
At the age of
23, Wu was imprisoned in the Laogai system simply because his father was a
banker. While the official numbers are a state secret, at the height of Mao's
reign, Wu estimates there were "1,000 labor camps and probably more than 40
million people in the prison camps."
After Mao died in 1979, the Laogai
system was gradually dismantled and most political prisoners, including Wu, were
released.
| 
