- They work 10 daily hours for one euro per month, They do continuous instruction and barely sleep
- Many of the 310.000 imprisoned without sentence are simple critics of the Beijing regime
He 19 March 2011, Huang Chengcheng, a young man from Chongqing Municipality, was formally arrested by the police, accused of “conspiring to overthrow the Government”. The tests: two texts he had written on the short message service QQ, in which he invited friends to go out for jasmine tea, in the heat of the calls that circulated on the Internet in China urging people to walk in central places in cities as a peaceful form of protest. No need for trial, court or judgment, Huang was sent days later to the Shanping Forced Labor Camp., and Chonqging. The world was experiencing the outbreak of the Arab revolutions —or jasmine—, and the Chinese government, alarmed at the possibility of contagion, launched a harsh campaign across the country against activists and dissidents. Huang thus fell into the system of reeducation through work, which allows police to imprison up to four years without trial.
“Two messages were all the evidence of my crime. Happens 21 months in reeducation camps; until 3.50 in the afternoon of 17 December 2012”, explains on the phone. “They intend to change your behavior. They forced us to sing revolutionary songs, to sit in a certain way, to walk in line. They made us train like in the army, they indoctrinated us. "They tried to tire us out as much as possible so that we wouldn't think about anything else.".
The system, inspired by the Soviet model, dates back to the mid-1990s 1950. Originally, arose to imprison “counterrevolutionaries”, “capitalists” and critics of the new communist government of Mao Zedong, after the founding of the People's Republic of China, he 1 October 1949. But, later, was extended to perpetrators of other crimes, prostitutes or drug addicts. It is also widely used against political and religious activists., and members of the Buddhist-inspired movement Falun Gong, which Beijing considers a “diabolical cult”, so he made it illegal at the end of the 1990s. 1990.
According to the Ministry of Justice, in 2008 there was in China 160.000 people hospitalized in a total of 350 of these centers. The public television channel CCTV raises the number to 310.000, in 310 centers.
The reeducation through work It is an administrative detention system for minor crimes, issued by the police outside the judicial system. It is different from the one previously called reform for worko (laogai), which includes prisons, farms and forced labor camps for those convicted by a court, with longer sentences. These facilities continue, but the Government does not use the term laogai since the mid nineties.
En Shanping, Huang was forced to first work in team two of unit five, where he manufactured motorcycle components, and then on team two of unit one, where, as he says, automobile cables are produced for Chinese company Changan. “I worked 10 hours a day. sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on the needs in the factory. We slept very few hours, because we also had all the other activities”. En Shanping, The prisoners are divided into seven units, according to account: from one to nine. There are no number four —whose pronunciation is similar to that of the word death— not even eight —lucky number in China, since it sounds like fortuna—. They paid him eight yuan (one euro) per month.
In each unit there were between 100 and 300 internal. “They are petitioners [people who protest to the authorities for causes ranging from illegal land expropriations to corruption or injustices in the courts], little thieves, participants in public altercations, pimps, and people like me, who is stopped by her words”, says this man 29 years. In the room where he slept they crowded together 16 people in double bunks. Unit seven was the Falun Gong members..
The fields of re-education have been highly criticized by international organizations such as United Nations, but also, inside china, by lawyers and academics, who consider them illegal and a source of abuse. She further , They are a field of corruption, with relatives of detainees who pay officials to reduce their sentences or to improve their diet.
“The system of reeducation through work violates the Chinese Constitution and the law, It is not humanitarian, has been used in many unfair cases, false and wrong and causes many fights in society. It is time for it to be abolished.", afirma Hu Xingdou, Professor of Economics at the Beijing Institute of Technology, which has frequently denounced the model. “Those who are interned have not broken the criminal law, and these fields are illegal; therefore, They are not criminals. “This system deprives people of their rights without a trial.”, adds Pu Zhiqiang, a lawyer who has handled many sensitive cases and contributed to Huang's release.
For years, the government says that is going to reform the system. but the pressure, inter alia, of the Ministry of Public Security, which has warned that its elimination would pose a threat to social stability, has been delaying the decision. Its defenders argue that it helps reduce crime. Some experts believe his change could increase cases in already overloaded courts., and others, that its transformation will mean a loss of income for local governments, who benefit from free labor to manufacture products, that are even exported.
The arrival of Xi Jinping, last November, to the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and his calls to fight injustice and corruption seem to have given new impetus to reform.
He People's Daily —official organ of the CCP— published an editorial in November in which it said that the re-education violates the law and has become “a tool of revenge” in the hands of some. At the beginning of January, Meng Jianzhu, Politburo member CCP and director of the Political and Legal Affairs Committee, He assured that its use “will end this year”, after approval in Parliament, whose annual session takes place in March. The senior official's statements were nuanced, shortly after, by the official Xinhua agency: “The Chinese Government will promote reforms to its controversial tax system this year. reeducation through work, what, according to experts, contradicts higher laws, including the Chinese Constitution”.
Huang, an operator specialized in numerical control machines, states that security in Shanping is, even, “bigger than in a prison”, and the operating regime, very strict. “You have the so-called six mandatory fixed positions. Each inmate has their table and their place at it to eat., your place in the ranks, your place for study classes, your job, his bed. You can't walk freely, and if you break the rules, They punish you standing for hours, they confine you alone in a small room or they beat you. She further , They deduct points and extend your stay”. He says that abuse is frequent. “I have often seen inmates beaten until they bled and had to be given several stitches in the head.”. Those who hit are not the police, but other employees”.
Some critics fear, however, that the reform is just a make-up operation. According to Human Rights Watch, In recent years, Beijing has considered replacing the camps re-education for a detention system that “would essentially leave key features of the existing mechanism intact.”: an administrative detention system, under the control of the Department of Public Safety, that it would exist in parallel to the formal criminal system and would allow long-term detentions without the benefits of a trial and due process of law.”. According to the organization, “I would use a different name, would establish a maximum sentence and, in theory, would allow some procedural rights, like access to a lawyer”.
