US-China Commission Report - Fatal System Error

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most literal sense, the term laogai referred to the punishment
meted out to those prisoners who had been arrested and formally
sentenced to reform through manual labor in a prison factory,
farm, or other such production facility. 14 In 1994, the Chinese government
formally dropped usage of this term in favor of the word
for ‘‘prison,’’ 15 possibly in response to negative connotations that
had come to be associated with the term laogai in the international
arena. 16
A second category, ‘‘reeducation through labor,’’ 17 refers to the
sanctions regime meted out to offenders judged to be guilty of
crimes of a less serious nature. Sentencing to ‘‘reeducation through
labor’’ does not require any formal judicial proceedings; rather, police
or courts can sentence a prisoner arbitrarily to up to three
years of ‘‘reeducation through labor’’ without the need for a trial. 18
A third category, ‘‘forced job placement,’’ 19 applies to prisoners who
have completed their terms of sentencing but still may be kept confined
within the same facility under prison labor conditions as a
post-sentence ‘‘work assignment.’’ 20 While ‘‘forced job placement’’
prisoners have some greater privileges as compared to other prisoners,
they still are kept confined within prison facilities under restricted
conditions and may be mixed together with other prisoners
without noteworthy distinction of status. 21 The practice of ‘‘forced
job placement’’ has been decreased in recent years but has not been
completely abolished. 22 Irrespective of such formal administrative
classifications, however, laogai remains a commonly used term to
refer to the prison labor system as a whole.
The composition of the prisoner population within the laogai system
also has changed over time. While political prisoners composed
a large part of China’s prison population during the earlier years
of the People’s Republic—particularly following the mass arrests of
Mao’s political campaigns—the ratio of political prisoners to ordinary
criminal offenders has diminished over time. One estimate
from the early 1990s assessed that political prisoners composed
roughly 10 percent of the population of the laogai system. 23 Another
more recent estimate has asserted that the crackdown on
Falun Gong from 1999 to the present has produced a ‘‘reeducation
through labor’’ prison population in which 15 percent of the inmates
were practitioners of Falun Gong, 24 although such estimates
are difficult to verify independently.
The Extent of the Chinese Forced Labor System Today
Accurate information on the size of the Chinese forced labor system,
the scope of its economic production, and the demographic
composition of its prisoner population is difficult to obtain from official
sources. The Chinese government classifies such information
related to the prison system as a state secret. 25 Furthermore, the
decentralized nature of contemporary management of prisons and
prison economic production—in which local and provincial officials
bear primary responsibility for these facilities and processes—
means that national-level officials themselves may not have a consistently
accurate picture of the extent of economic production in
the prison labor system.
As stated in one recent diplomatic cable from the U.S. embassy
in Beijing, ‘‘information about forced and child labor in China,