Chapter 101 Nationwide labor reform camps

Journalist: “How do your labor camps compare to the KMT?”

Mao: “Chiang Kai-shek Kuomintang in custody of 90,000 prisoners, and another 120 penitentiaries. Communist Party many also sat in KMT prisons, but not heard of eating unsaturated abuse, most are normally released from prison. After liberation I imprisoned more than a million, not enough prisons, many temples, schools, factories were requisitioned to hold prisoners, a concentration camp prisoner up to 3,000 people, doing hard labor, not enough to eat, but also to participate in learning to reform the mind.

In October 1950, the crackdown began, more than 1 million people were imprisoned within six months, a large concentration camp in Guangxi imprisoned 80,000 people, Pingnan County, the summer is very hot, prisoners only 1 bath per week, 90% suffer from skin diseases, the prison stench is disgusting, more than 100 people died every month. Sichuan prisons are even more tragic, the county of Chongqing area, 20% of prisoners died in 8 years, the Public Security Bureau said: “It does not matter if the prisoners die, it is better to die than to run away”. Throughout the southwest, thousands of inmates die every month.

In Cang County, Hebei, 1/3 of the prisoners were sick and dozens of people died. In 1951, in order to reduce the pressure on prisons, I approved sending more prisoners directly to build roads, dig reservoirs, and clear land, but lacking basic survival conditions, there were 60,000 prisoners mining and digging coal in the mountains of Yunnan, only 3,000 had a place to live, and 200,000 went to build water conservancy projects.

By the end of 1951, the number of prisoners doubled to 2 million nationwide. Of these, 670,000 were sent directly to labor camps, and in a salt mine in Hebei, prisoners slept on damp ground, with only a ragged mat, not enough to eat, not even enough water to drink, and many had dysentery, with an average of 100 deaths per month. In Sichuan, a 300-member labor camp, 14 people froze to death in winter. In Yan’an, 200 people froze to death. In the tin mines of Lianxian, Guangdong, the prisoners lived in such a bad way that 1/3 of them died of illness and suicide in a year. 90% of the prisoners were political prisoners, many without formal trials, and many were unjust cases. Gansu and Ningxia sampled some counties and found that 28% were unjustly imprisoned.

In addition to going to prison, I also invented the method of extra-risoner control, because the prison could not accommodate, some of those considered lesser crimes were put under control. Luo Ruiqing, the Minister of Public Security, estimated that 740,000 people were placed under control (with judicial procedures) in 1953.

In Xinjin County, Sichuan, 96 people were formally sentenced to control, and another 279 were controlled without justice; in reality, 1-2 million people were controlled nationwide.

The actual number of people under control nationwide is 1 to 2 million.

The dean of the law school of a university in Shanghai, a graduate of Stanford University, became the target of a crackdown in 1951 for ‘following the rich and oppressing the poor,’ and also because his brother worked for the KMT government in Taiwan. He was sentenced to three years of control and had to submit a weekly review to the Public Security Bureau. 16 months later, he committed suicide by throwing himself into the river.

In the early 1950s, there were 2 million people in labor camps, and the number increased rapidly in 1955. 770,000 people were arrested during the purge, and the labor camps could not accommodate them, so 300,000 of them were sent to “reeducation through labor”, which did not require a trial.

In the 1950s, I requisitioned a large number of migrant workers to build water conservancy projects, and there were several million of them nationwide. In 1953, when the Huaihe River was repaired day and night, hundreds of people died, more than 100 people were exhausted and vomited blood, and tens of thousands of people were seriously ill without treatment, and some tried to escape. Of the 10,000 laborers at the Nanwan Reservoir site in Henan, 3,000 tried to escape. In some places, the civilian workers did not even have a shelter, and slept in the wild in winter, causing many diseases.

In 1958, the Great Leap Forward, I ordered to make steel in clay furnaces and to repair water conservancy projects. 90 million migrant workers left their hometowns to work day and night, and the whole country became a huge labor camp, but they worked under the red flag and were actually my slave labor.”