Harry Wu Reflects on Working Toward Peace

Every tyranny needs a suppression machine to maintain its rule. Hitler had his concentration camps; Stalin, his. Yet some people think that Communist China has no need of a suppression machine. They think that China gets along with a normal, even a Western-style judicial and penal system, perhaps with a few Eastern variants.

But this is untrue. The regime in Beijing has exactly the kind of suppression machine it needs to enforce its will. No professor of recent Germany history would fail to speak of the Holocaust. And no scholar of the Soviet Union would omit the Gulag. Yet many so-called China experts, who use terms like "Great Leap Forward" and "Cultural Revolution," make no mention whatsoever of the Laogai. But "Laogai" is part of the everyday language of the Chinese people. Almost everyone in China has family or friends with personal knowledge of this hated system-if he does not himself.

I realize it is difficult to discuss the Laogai. How many people in 1937 were interested in hearing about the Nazi camps? Germany's economy was growing steadily. The West cooperated with German companies. There was no splashy boycott of the 1936 Berlin Games. Few people were willing to believe even the reports of escapees. It was not until the end of World War II that people generally came to grips with the evil that the Germans and their partners had committed.

Today, the blood, tears, and lives of millions of Chinese men and women testify to the awful truth about the Laogai. What is the Laogai? It is, quite simply, the Chinese Communist version of Hitler's camps and Stalin's. In the words of a Chinese government document, "Marxism holds that the state is a machine of violence made up of army, police, court, prison, and other compulsory facilities." As for Mao, he made himself unmistakably clear: "The Laogai facilities are one of the violent component parts of the state machine. Laogai facilities of all levels are established as tools representing the interests of the proletariat and the people's masses and exercising dictatorship over a minority of hostile elements originating from exploiter classes."

Listen to the words of another government document, this one explaining why it is necessary to force Chinese prisoners into labor: "Our economic theory holds that the human being is the most fundamental productive force. Except for those who must be exterminated physically out of political consideration, human beings must be utilized as productive forces, with submissiveness as the prerequisite. The Laogai system's fundamental policy is 'Forced Labor as a means, while Thought Reform is our basic aim.'" The goal of the system, according to the government, is to "reform prisoners into new, socialist people."

Incredibly, Western scholars make casual comparisons of their own prisons to the Chinese. But if they bothered to learn the least thing about the Laogai, they would never utter such comparisons, which are not only ignorant but insulting.

Hitler's ideology divided people by race and religion. Stalin and Mao's divides mainly by class. All three constructed labor camps to destroy the human being. Entrances to the Nazi camps bore signs proclaiming, "Labor Makes Freedom." Laogai camps have signs that read, "Labor Makes New Life." While the German signs are long gone, China's remain, along with the camps. Everyone knows the word "Holocaust." And everyone knows the word "Gulag." It is time for Westerners to learn the word that springs naturally and fearfully to the lips of a billion Chinese: "Laogai."

 

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