What Does "Re-education Through Labor" Really Mean?

By Chen Zhenghong

(Clearwisdom.net) Chinese officials did not approve a single application for a protest permit during the recent Olympics despite having established three official "protest zones." Instead, people that had applied for permits were arrested and deported (in the case of most foreigners), or simply disappeared. According to reports by the BBC, Wu Dianyuan and Wang Xiuying, two women in their 70s, filed applications to protest being evicted from their homes. Instead of being allowed to protest, they were arrested and sentenced to one year of "re-education through labor." Official reports later claimed that their sentences were rescinded, the result of official attempts at damage control in the wake of an overwhelmingly negative international response.

Mounting evidence shows the Communist regime uses the labor re-education system as a tool to crack down on anyone that expresses dissatisfaction with the government. Human rights groups in China who have long expressed concerns over the laogai system and its abusive and unchecked power. The system can be traced back to the "Decision Regarding the Issue of Re-education Through Labor" published by the State Department in 1957, stating that its function is to "reform" the minds of detainees through "mandatory labor" (translation: forced labor or slave labor) and "political ideological work" (translation: brainwashing). The Chinese Communist Party secretly brainwashes and tortures Falun Gong practitioners, members of any unofficially sanctioned religious group, civil rights activists, lawyers and dissidents in these so-called "re-education through labor" camps under cover of this "law."

Falun Gong exposed the labor re-education system for what it truly is--a mechanism that operates under a thin veneer of legitimacy but which in fact, is against the law, hiding behind its own twisted and arbitrary interpretation of the law and it's ability to arbitrarily send innocent people to the camps without trial or representation from a lawyer.

Many other buildings and campuses all over China are labeled as "Legal Education Schools," places where criminals are allegedly "educated, and their hearts and minds touched by the warm and tender care of Party officials," while in fact it is widely known that these places are nothing more than torture and brainwashing centers where no method is spared in attempts to make Falun Gong practitioners recant their beliefs.

Police can send anyone directly to a labor camp without a trial, or even without filing any charges. Many labor camp detainees are Falun Gong practitioners because the forced labor camp system offers Chinese authorities the easiest and most convenient way to persecute people who have not committed any crime.

Former Chinese president Jiang Zemin ordered the country's police to "annihilate [Falun Gong] physically, bankrupt them financially, ruin their reputation." He told officials that if they "beat [Falun Gong practitioners] to death, count it as suicide; do not identify the body and cremate it promptly." Hence 3,175 Falun Gong practitioners are confirmed dead as a direct result of persecution. Millions of others have been shocked with electric electric batons and undergone round-the-clock brainwashing sessions in that dark abyss of the "re-education through labor" camps. And it continues to this day.

Some types of torture that are typical inside labor camps include being kept in handcuffs and shackles, being back-cuffed, being restrained in interconnected cuffs [handcuffs and shackles are locked together so one cannot move], all for prolonged periods of time; being subjected to water dungeons or the feces pool, the Death Bed, the Tiger Bench, squatting in place, being tied with ropes, having nails or needles hammered into one's fingertips, pinching the flesh with pliers, pulling off the nails with pliers, dripping acid into the nostrils, force-feeding hunger strikers with hot-pepper water, salt water, drugs and feces, inserting thick plastic tubes into the victim's stomach through the nostrils, pouring cold water over the head, stripping the victim naked and throwing them out into the snow or sweltering heat, forbidding restroom use, sexual abuse including throwing women into cells filled with male inmates, rape, forced abortion, psychiatric abuse including the injection of potent drugs that damage the nervous system and the use of electric needles, encouraging criminal inmates to attack Falun Gong practitioners by rewarding them with sentence reductions.

In an article entitled, "Issue in China: Many in Jails Without Trial" published in May 2005 in the New York Times, author Jim Yardley calls Chinese labor camps places that "still remains outside the law." Only heaven knows what horrors take place inside those high walls, with so many atrocities being disguised as "re-education through labor." Hopefully, people around the world will pay attention to this monstrous system, so that together we can end the brutal persecution of Falun Gong and restore justice to those who've been so long denied it.

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