Disinfo: How Educational Is A Chinese Re-Educational Camp?

Jacob Leibenluft | Slate:Two women in their late 70s were sentenced to "re-education-through-labor" by the Beijing police after they applied repeatedly for a permit to hold a protest. How much education actually happens at these re-education camps?Not much. The emphasis in re-education-through-labor is on the labor: People sentenced to so-called laojiao may spend as much as 12 to 14 hours a day, according to some accounts, doing work like construction, making bricks, or mining. (U.S. Customs investigations have also implicated Chinese prison labor in the production of binder clips and diesel engines.) That work serves as both a means of punishment and as a major source of revenue for a camp.Since the re-education-through-labor camps were created in the late 1950s, they have - at least in theory - been oriented toward "rehabilitating" inmates both politically and morally. Over time, however, the emphasis on political study sessions appears to have declined. Some laojiao camps do have rules requiring inmates to study two hours a day, although one in-depth report on a camp in southern China found that sessions occurred only when there was a lull in production.