MCLC: films document horror of labor camps

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Anne Henochowicz <anne at chinadigitaltimes.net>
Subject: films document horrors of labor camps
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Source: SCMP (5/1/13):
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1227061/films-document-horror-labour
-camps-50-years-ago-and-today

Films document horror of labour camps 50 years ago and today
By Verna Yu verna.yu at scmp.com

When Xie Yihui read about the deaths of many children in a Sichuan
"re-education through labour" camp in the early 1960s, she was horrified.
She had been reading an account by Zeng Boyan, a retired journalist and
former camp inmate, who wrote of his disbelief in 1958 when he saw about
200 children as young as 10 from the Dabao labour camp working in a forest
near the Shaping state-run farm, where he was held as a "rightist".

Years later, a witness who helped bury dead children told him that some
2,600 children from Dabao had died mostly of starvation between 1960 and
1962. Xie said the government had never released the number of deaths at
the camp.

Moved by the piece, Xie decided to interview Zeng and two dozen former
child labourers. Her work resulted in the documentary Juvenile Labourers
Confined in Dabao, being premiered today in Hong Kong's 1908 bookshop and
Taipei's Cafe Philo as well as on the internet.

Xie was struck by what Zeng told her: "I could almost see this image in my
head; several hundred little children labouring in the forest and chased
by a supervisor with a whip."

Juvenile labour and education centres were set up across the mainland in
the late 1950s, based on the Soviet model where delinquents and street
children were sent for reform.

Witnesses said 5,000 to 6,000 children aged from nine upwards were sent to
Dabao from late 1957 until its closure in 1962.

Some were young offenders convicted of petty crimes, but many were sent by
impoverished parents who believed that their children would fare better in
an institution where they were promised food and education. But the
children soon found out that food was scarce and lessons lasted only a few
months.

Former child labourers, now mostly in their 60s, said they were forced to
do hard labour such as transporting wood, clearing land and planting
crops. Against the backdrop of the Great Famine (1958-1961), the hungry
children ate anything they could find: earthworms, mice and poisonous
plants. Many suffered from malnutrition, while others contracted fatal
parasitic infections.

"They [child labourers] lived like ghosts Š and there was no love and
warmth in their lives," Xie said.

The re-education-through- labour system - introduced in 1955 and known as
laojiao - survives to this day.

Above the Ghosts' Heads: The Women of Masanjia Labour Camp, also to be
premiered today, depicts the cruelty and torture in a present-day women's
labour camp as told by recently released inmates. Masanjia, in Liaoning
province, is one of more than 300 labour camps on the mainland where
police can imprison people for up to four years without trial, a practice
condemned by critics as arbitrary and unconstitutional.

"Re-education through labour is the most evil system on earth ... and the
Masanjia female camp is the most evil camp on earth," former inmate Liu
Hua, released in October, says at the start of the film. "There, we were
made slaves and hostages of this evil system."

Liu and a dozen other interviewees told director Du Bin of the severe
torture they endured, from beatings and being suspended by their limbs for
hours, to having toothbrushes and electric batons shoved into their
vaginas. Liu's story was first smuggled out of the camp by another inmate
who hid diary notes in her vagina in 2011.

The mainland's Lens magazine reported abuses at Masanjia last month. It
did not detail the most brutal treatment, described in Du's documentary.
Critics have been calling for the scrapping of the laojiao system for
years and in January, Meng Jianzhu , the Communist Party's top legal
official, hinted the government would reform the system this year.
However, no details have emerged.

Du and Xie said last week that they hoped their documentaries would speed
up the ending of laojiao. "At the camp, they don't treat people like
humans," said Du, a freelance photographer forThe New York Times. "All I
want to say is that they are humans, not animals and they can't humiliate
people like that."

Xie said she hoped mainland Chinese officials can see her film, "so they
could see what consequence those regulations can have on ordinary people."
"LaojiaoŠ is still causing people immense physical pain," she said.

Activist Zeng Jinyan, who organised the internet screening of the two
films, has urged supporters to pay 30 yuan each to financially support the
directors. She said by becoming "co-producers", people could become part
of the social force to end laojiao.