The Economist: China’s Re-education Through Labor Camp, A Jail by Another Name

December 21, 2002

Apart from its ten-meter wall, the Women's Re-education Through Labor Camp in Beijing looks more like one of the modern housing complexes favored by the capital's nouveaux riches than a correctional facility. Its pink-colored buildings, grecian columns, expansive lawns, rose beds and plane trees welcomed the first inmates in March. "It feels inviting," enthuses the warden, Zhu Xiaoli. One of her underlings chimes in, "We don't want to make it like a fortress. It should be lively and human."

Little, however, is human about China's re-education through labour (RTL) system. The 900-odd prisoners at Miss Zhu's $6.7m camp are serving sentences of up to three years, entirely at the recommendation of the police without having had a chance to defend themselves in court. Most of the inmates are drug addicts (about 40%), followers of the Falun Gong spiritual movement (28%) and prostitutes (about 10%). Their offences are considered too minor for punishment in the regular prison system, whose inmates are tried in court. Yet instead of being fined, put on probation or sentenced to community service, they are incarcerated like convicted criminals with little difference between their institution and a normal jail, except in this case for the architecture and color scheme. The Beijing RTL camp happens to be a showcase for foreign visitors. Most of the other 300-odd RTL facilities in China are indistinguishable from prisons. The justice ministry says there are some 260,000 people now serving in the RTL system, compared with more than 1.3m in prisons (which are often confusingly referred to as "reform through labor" camps). The true numbers are probably greater. Bizarrely, a minor offender could end up with more time inside than a violent criminal. The maximum RTL sentence is three years, extendable to four for those who behave badly. In the regular prison system, a rapist or robber could be out after three years.

China's courts, unencumbered by juries, are hardly impartial. Yet the secretive process whereby police-dominated committees hand out RTL sentences is especially open to abuse. Even officials admit that there is a problem. A book of guidelines for handling RTL cases, published in China in July, acknowledged that the sentencing procedure was not in accord with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which China signed in 1998 but has yet to ratify. Nor, it said, was it compatible with China's own judicial system. Some RTL committees send to labor camps even those involved simply in immoral behavior or civil disputes.

Lorne Craner, a senior American diplomat who was in China this week for talks about human rights, said his hosts had for the first time agreed unconditionally to invite United Nations' investigators to look into abuses, including the jailing of citizens without due procedure. But while this was an unusual gesture by China to a country it normally resents for pontificating on human rights, there is little likelihood that the RTL system will be scrapped or significantly modified any time soon.

Western diplomats involved in human-rights talks with China say that a couple of years ago indications of possible reform were somewhat more encouraging. The Chinese have now gone quiet on reform, says one envoy. One reason, he suggests, is the campaign against Falun Gong, which has resulted in thousands of its followers being sent to RTL camps since 1999. This has played into the hands of the police, who regard RTL as a useful tool for suppressing dissent without the encumbrance of judicial bureaucracy. The courts, too, oppose any reform that would give them a lot more cases to handle.

Even abolishing RTL would leave the police with considerable power to detain people at whim. They can send people to centers where drug rehabilitation is carried out forcibly, and send migrants back to their registered homes. This latter procedure often involves being detained for weeks or months and has been increasingly abused in recent years to extract payments from rural laborers working in the cities. Shanghai police detained 10,000 such people in 1988 (1% of the city's migrant population). By 1997 the figure had risen to 100,000, or 3.6% of those registered as living outside the city. Of those detained, some 80% had committed no offence, according to a government study.

Writing in November 2001 in the Peking University Law Journal, Chen Ruihua, a lecturer at the university law school, said the police should be deprived of all their powers to impose custodial sentences. This was the only way to progress from a police state into a state ruled by law. The police, not surprisingly, see matters differently.