Skeletons lie scattered
Across Qinghai's vastness.
New ghosts cry "Unjust!"
Old ghosts merely weep.
--Tu Fu (712-770)
Despite the many events that have transpired in the thirteen centuries since Du Fu composed this couplet, Qinghai's reputation as a desolate place of punishment endures. Mainland teachers semiseriously warn their young charges that unruly or inattentive behavior may portend a life in exile in Qinghai. Both domestically and internationally, the province has become a metaphor for the dreaded laogai: China's gulag. Hence, Du Fu's poignant lines provide an apt title for Seymour and Anderson's study of the prisons of northwest China, primarily as they existed between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s.
The authors, scholars and human rights activists, examine the penal systems of three contiguous provinces in the north west: Gansu, Qinghai, and Xinjiang. Their concern is to produce a strictly empirical study rather than to discuss theories of incarceration or to advance social science. To produce an objective study on a topic so highly emotional carries the risk of angering both Western civil libertarians, who feel that the system is very bad, and those who are concerned with burnishing the image of the People's Republic of China (PRC), who claim that it represents a breakthrough in penology. Seymour and Anderson are equal to the task. This is a superb study, albeit on a grim topic.
The authors' primary focus is China's main prison regime, the laogai, or "reform-through-labor" system. Due consideration is also paid to laojiao, or re-education through labor. The latter is China's most severe variety of administrative detention, and is intended for those whose behavior is deemed to fall "between crime and error." Those sentenced to laojiao have included vagrants, petty criminals, and some political offenders. Virtually all are from urban areas. Until 1979, laojiao sentences could be open-ended, and conditions might be as bad as those experienced by regular laogai convicts. Since then, sentences have been more clearly defined and generally shorter.
Laogai seems to have originated in Mao Zedong's belief that members of the enemy classes could be remolded into productive, reliable citizens of the new socialist state. The system was thus rooted more in political theory rather than criminal law, and has only begun to catch up with the reality that most prisoners are there for reasons that have little to do with politics or class background.
A 1951 meeting decided that it would be best to clear East China of such political undesirables as landlords and members of anticommunist groups, so that they could never hope to reestablish the old "reactionary" political order. The northwestern provinces did not decide to accept these individuals; the decision was made for them. Moved to the remote and poorly -developed northwest, these pariahs could be rehabilitated while building the area's infrastructure. Given the forbidding climate and lack of communications, escape was unlikely. Prisoners were to grow food for themselves and their guards. The aim was not, however, simple self-sufficiency but collective prosperity: poor provinces would become wealthy while miscreants were turned into politically reliable citizens.
With these noble ends in mind, it is scarcely surprising that Beijing's public relations portrayed the prisons as benign institutions where a "small handful" of reactionaries and the masses they had "hoodwinked" were rehabilitated under the loving care of their jailers. Illiterates were taught to read and write; instruction was given in skills useful to after-prison life. Foreign guests who were escorted through model prisons provided glowing corroboration of these claims.
At the other end of the spectrum, horrific tales began to circulate of torture, sadistic treatment, and slow starvation. A plucky and fortunate handful who escaped to the West wrote books detailing these abominations. Among the more famous are Harry Wu's Laogai--the Chinese Gulag (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), and Pu Ning's Red in Tooth and Claw: Twenty-six Years in Communist Chinese Prisons (New York, Grove Press, 1994). The protagonist of the latter endured several years of living in a dry well, with food being lowered down periodically while waste matter accumulated. He survived, but with permanent physical impairments.
The authors' research, based on visits to prisons, interviews with prisoners, official data, internal reports, and secret documents, shows a system that is generally neither of these extremes. Moreover, despite being under the formal supervision of the Ministry of Justice in Beijing, and apparently in disregard of the leadership's desire for standardization, the systems of the three provinces examined have developed in quite different ways.
Gansu's prison system is the most transparent of the three. Its government typically provides data on such matters as the number of prisoners sentenced each year and breakdowns on the kinds of crimes they are accused of. This is because Gansu's prisons, unlike those of Qinghai and Xinjiang, are only for its own convicts. Since prisoners are not sent in from elsewhere, no state secrets are involved. The authors estimate the rate of incarceration in Gansu at between 125 and 130 per hundred thousand, or somewhat below the national average for the PRC. Although most prisoners must work, the output of this forced labor amounts to less than 0.1 percent of provincial output. No current information was available on the number of political and religious prisoners, though it is likely that some of Gansu's Muslims, Tibetans, and Christians have been incarcerated for political and religious offenses.
Xinjiang is unique in having not one but two prison systems. The first is a standard laogai which is accountable to the Ministry of Justice in Beijing, and whose prisoners are generally residents of the province. The second is run by Xinjiang's Production and Construction Corps (PCC) or bingtuan . Although the PCC is subordinate to the Lanzhou Military Region, Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province, is far away, and the PCC thus enjoys considerable autonomy. With its slogan of "a rifle on one shoulder, a hoe on the other," the corps was created in the early 1950s to safeguard Xinjiang from Soviet influence, suppress independence movements within the province's Turkic Muslim majority population, and develop its considerable economic potential.
Prisoners in the PCC's penal system are expected to aid in all of these endeavors. Like their guards, the prisoners are overwhelmingly Han Chinese. They also tend to be hardened criminals who have been sent in from other provinces to serve lengthy sentences. Between 500 and 1,000 may arrive at once, sent by a single province or city. Though the prisoners are quickly dispersed to different parts of the system, they think of themselves as a group and try to maintain contact through various means. Given their backgrounds and the near impossibility that they will be released by the system, these are men who may resort to violent actions. Their guards are appropriately wary.
One result of this is the system of convicts managing convicts: certain prisoners, generally those with bullying natures, become "cell bosses" and discipline other prisoners in return for perks such as better food and easier jobs. Their methods are often barbaric. Some prisoners try to escape. Since most jobs involve outdoor labor, most escapes involve slipping away from one's work site rather than a classic, Hollywood-style jailbreak. This is not difficult to do, though the area's harsh conditions mean that staying alive long enough to reach one's native area may present a greater challenge than leaving prison. Nonetheless, there are success stories. In one celebrated case, a convict found an unguarded official car and simply drove away in it.
In the early 1990s, prison authorities felt that it had become necessary to deal with the problem of increasing escapes. One measure involved taking away convicts' shoes. Another involved the establishment of three-man mutual surveillance groups. At least in theory, no one was allowed to do anything alone, even visit the latrine. If one man escaped or otherwise misbehaved, the other two were held responsible. Conversely, those who reported on others would be rewarded. These measures appear to have reduced the problem of escapes to what authorities regarded as a tolerable level.
The central problem in Xinjiang's laogai has been getting enough to eat. Even guards have meager rations, which results in their stealing from supplies meant for inmates. Prisoners' families are often asked to make donations. A former prisoner told the authors that his work detail once found and captured a feral cat. The guards ate the cat's flesh; the cell bosses ate the skin. But the prisoners got nothing.
Corruption is rampant. Given a system that provides minimal incentives to work hard, it is not surprising that economic efficiency suffers. One source estimates that local civilian farms are 30 percent more productive than prison farms. Conditions are especially wretched for those who work in the province's uranium and asbestos mines.
Given the poor economic efficiency of the laogai and the difficulties of dealing with its inhabitants, it is logical to ask why the province continues to accept prisoners from outside. Xinjiang's prison population actually did decline in the 1970s and early 1980s. In 1983, however, the central government launched a nationwide crackdown on crime. There was a huge increase in the number of convicts nationwide, while Xinjiang's prisons were underutilized. Beijing agreed to a one-time payment of RMB 500 million (US$60.5 million) to Xinjiang for accepting the prisoners; the province's shipping out the prisoners provided an additional RMB 10,000 (US$1,220) per man; and the PCC agreed to handle the details of transfer and dispersal.
While this seemed to be a neat arrangement with benefits for all sides, it did not work quite so well in practice. Since the RMB 10,000 was paid at the time each man was sent to Xinjiang, the PCC had little incentive to keep the prisoners for their full sentences, and actually made money if they were released early. Hence, too many local officials who thought they had rid their neighborhoods forever of particular ne'er-do-wells found the troublemakers back again after only a few years. There was discontent in Xinjiang as well: Uygurs and Kazakhs were angered by the arrival of more Han in their native lands.
Qinghai had, like Xinjiang, accepted large numbers of prisoners from outside the province. The epicenter of "China's gulag" is Haixi, a name that means West of the Sea--in other words, west of the large lake that also figures in the name of the province. The very word Haixi conjures up images of exile and remoteness. Since ancient times, the Middle Kingdom has considered itself located within the "four seas", and those who dwelt beyond the sea were definitely regarded as beyond the pale. The population of Haixi's Dulan County is 18 percent convicts, the highest proportion in the country.
By the 1980s, however, Qinghai's leadership had, like that of many other areas in China, adopted the pursuit of profit as its primary goal. Prisons were simply not profitable, and they began to be downsized. More than financial considerations were involved: local leaders did not like the fact that their province was regarded as the country's gulag. They were concerned that excess space in Qinghai's prisons would lead to pressure from Beijing to accept convicts from outside. Unlike Xinjiang's leaders, they no longer wished to accept such people.
Qinghai also attempted to utilize excess capacity in the laogai by sending there local people whose crimes would normally have called for laojiao. In the eastern coastal province of Zhejiang, where there was extra capacity in the laojiao but not the laogai, people who normally would have been sentenced to the latter were remanded to the former. In both cases, expediency seems to have outweighed the criminal law.
The provincial government's decision to downsize Qinghai's prison system and utilize its land for more productive purposes ran counter to the interests of its laogai bureau, which resisted. In 1988, the bureau sued for compensation for land taken for a dam project. It lost, after which the province dissolved the units involved in the suit and excluded the bureau from the most promising new industries, such as electricity generation and chemical production. The bureau then attempted to improve its position by investing in agriculture, with good results. Haixi's camps are among the most modern and productive in China's laogai. One camp, Xiangride, alone produces three times as much grain as all the farms under Gansu's laogai bureau.
Summing up their data, Seymour and Anderson conclude that Qinghai prisons have the best conditions and Xinjiang the worst. They suspect that only in Tibet are conditions apt to be worse for prisoners. Only in Qinghai does prison production constitute a significant segment of economic output. The original hopes of their founders notwithstanding, prisons are simply not profitable. Contemporary prison administrators are concerned about this; some have even contemplated asking the central government for preferential policies to compensate for their remoteness from markets and restricted access to raw materials.
As for the size of the PRC's prison population, the authors calculate it to be about two million, or well below the estimates given by Harry Wu for a slightly earlier period. This translates into an internationally unremarkable prisoner-to -population ratio of 166 per hundred thousand. Seymour and Anderson caution, however, that it is not the size of the prison system that is outrageous, but what goes on within its worst units. Conditions have improved somewhat in recent years, but there is scant regard for human rights. Nor is there much gai (reform) in the laogai. Prisoners are increasingly defiant. They refuse to admit guilt, resist efforts to rehabilitate them, and engage in criminal activities while still incarcerated. Mutual surveillance schemes appear to be losing their effectiveness.
Seymour and Anderson are also struck by the fact that a substantial number of convicts do not belong in prison at all. Many factors are responsible for this. Corruption and local protectionism are pervasive in the legal system. Judges are often poorly trained; legal procedures hamper the work of defense attorneys; and the judicial process remains highly politicized. Injunctions that sentences must "placate public outrage" often translate into "satisfying the whim of the party secretary," who is able to manipulate the legal process covertly. Additionally, and contrary to official claims that prisoners are treated humanely, instances of physical abuse and brutal exploitation abound.
The crime rate in China is rising. The Maoist period, with its near-universal poverty and minimal motives for commit ting crimes is gone forever: for many people, the benefits to be gained from illegal behavior outweigh the risks of getting caught. The PRC also has a serious and growing drug problem. These factors would appear to foreshadow another rise in the prison population which the current system is ill-equipped to cope with. Perhaps these are the "new ghosts" of Tu Fu's poem.
June Teufel Dreyer is a professor of
political science at the University of Miami,
Coral Gables. The third edition of her
China's Political System: Modernization
and Tradition will soon be published by
Allyn & Bacon.
Copyright 1998 by June Teufel Dreyer.