China's Forbidden Subject

...congress, Amnesty International or Tibetan exiles...

...Yet the young dissident—a hero of the Democracy Wall—was tried publicly and imprisoned in 1979, the third year of the Carter Administration...

...Prisoners receive the equivalent of about $1 a month as an allowance for incidentals...

...When former President Jimmy Carter was in Beijing in 1987 on a goodwill mission, he was asked at a press conference whether he would raise the issue of political prisoners—and particularly of Wei Jingsheng—with Chinese officials...

...We boiled water for a bath...

...The situation was barely mentioned, for instance, as President George Bush was preparing to leave on a trip that would take him to China...

...Rather, the government routinely dismisses allegations of such abuses as interference in China's internal affairs, whether the allegations come from the U.S...

...An electric light burned all night in the hut, to prevent theft...

...In thecase of the People's Republic of China, however, even its known record of suppression or strict limitation of commonplace civil liberties—freedom of speech and press, of assembly, of worship and political choice—receives at most perfunctory attention from the West...

...HUMAN RIGHTS China's Forbidden Subject BY MARK HOPKINS Bedino One bright afternoon early this winter in the sprawling Chinese city of Chengdu, Fang Li—not his real name—hunched over a map and for two hours described the labor camps in his large southwest province of Sichuan...

...Of course, they say, conditions were worse during the Cultural Revolution...

...The Chinese Communist Party, while more predictable in its policies under a pragmatic Deng Xiaoping and Zhao Ziyang, denies all opposition...

...Chinese traditionally do not go outside their communities to vent grievances...

...Fang Li estimated that today 3 per cent of the 100,000 incarcerated in Sichuan, a province of 100 million people, are political prisoners...

...Chinese names, places, history and culture rouse little interest beyond Asia...

...The provincial government's Labor Reform Department administers the camps themselves...

...He believes they currently hold 100,000 prisoners...

...In the Western world the name Andrei Sakharov is widely known...

...They rioted in the '60s and '70s, but it doesn't happen now...

...Chinese authorities now acknowledge, in brief official reports, that police torture criminal suspects to extract confessions...

...Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms have had an impact on the laogai network as well...

...Reorganization of the camp's management helped to improve conditions...

...Laogai directors in Sichuan Province follow the "Three Treatment" policy of the Chinese penal system, which includes standard prisons and less severe "reform through education" centers...

...The Chinese government seldom issues any statistics, and the few that are released are so fragmentary that they fail to give a full picture of who is imprisoned, forwhat, for how long, and where...

...In 1984, the Sichuan provincial government ran a deficit of 40 million yuan—about $11 million—for camp operations...

...But as China recovers from the devastating Cultural Revolution, which decimated its intellectual class, and tries to re-establish the rule of law, the new generation knows that it falls short of fulfilling its own promises of civil liberties—and that few outside of China care...

...That time, they think, remains far off...

...Another is that there are no active organizations in the United States or Western Europe recruiting public opinion to the cause of the China's Wei Jingshengs...

...Prisoners are assigned the worst and most dangerous work— in coal, asbestos and sulfur mines, for example—and discipline is rigorous...

...Many Chinese intellectuals and young students have increasing contact with the United States and the West European democracies...

...Mark Hopkins, a frequent NL contributor, has just returned from a four-year stay in the People's Republic of China...

...Still, it was hard...

...Finally, in marked contrast to their counterparts in the Soviet Union, Chinese dissidents do not share with foreign correspondents underground information on internal security police interrogations, arrests, trials or imprisonments in their country's vast penal network...

...We lived 20 prisoners to a hut of 20 square meters...

...His Administration, after all, had been identified internationally with advancing human rights...

...Some are tortured, shot, or so mistreated in prisons and labor camps that they die early or go insane...

...Fang Li identified six Sichuan cities that have labor camps, each containing about 10,000 prisoners...

...But authorities will not elaborate, nor will they discuss any specific categories of human rights abuses...

...But except for rare personal accounts like Fang Li's, little is known about the camps...

...The punishment is hard for prisoners who riot," Fang Li noted...

...There are nearly 20,000 Chinese scholars and students studying in the West today...

...The rest have been confined for routine law violations, with a growing number convicted of theft, larceny and other economic crimes...

...And its assertion of single-party rule results in arrests of young students forming a Marxist society, of Tibetan monks, of troublemakers in factories, of Protestant ministers...

...A slim, youthful-looking man, Fang Li himself spent 10 years in the camps after internal security police arrested him in 1977 for attempting to organize a group to flee to Nationalist-controlled Taiwan...

...Prior to the 1980s, the system was entirely financed by the provinces...

...The young prisoners just want decent living conditions, they don't have the courage...

...The perimeter outside the walls and wire is guarded by the People's Armed Police, a branch of the national Ministry of Public Security, the internal security apparatus...

...Whereas before, the workday was 12-16 hours, at present it is normally eight hours...

...Now the camps, organized around production, are supposed to cover at least part of their costs...

...Because statistics are scarce in China, and suspect, the most diligent investigators here find it impossible to give an accurate portrait of human rights violations, even under the more liberal leadership of Deng Xiaoping...

...Each prisoner is allotted about 100 pounds of food monthly, a fairly rich diet, particularly if one considers that in the '60s deaths due to hunger were not uncommon...

...One reason is that the vast China market and work force of 1 billion people is, rightly or wrongly, seen as an overriding priority not to be jeopardized by "periphery matters" such as civil liberties...

...China's laogai ballooned after the Communists took power in 1949, when tens of millions of Nationalist officers and government officials, along with other millions of Chinese hostile to the new rulers, were sent to the inland provinces...

...The food in those years was bad, the work backbreaking, the guards brutal...

...There was no heat year around—but then there isn't anywhere in China south of the Yangtze River...

...The cost of laogai labor is, naturally, low...

...Food, clothing and housing, said Fang Li, total about $13 monthly per prisoner...

...His knowledge thus extends well into the period of Deng Xiaoping's leadership...

...The Deng regime introduced the "double zero" policy of laogai management: zero escapes, zero deaths...

...The numbers have been about the same since 1960, but not the type of inmate...

...The watershed year seems to have been 1980...

...The People's Armed Police—generally young, badly trained peasant youth—are meant to prevent escapes and to put down camp riots...

...There was no warm water...

...Once senior leader Deng Xiaoping began to establish his power the laogai started to change...

...Sichuan Province's labor camps— or what the Chinese call laogai, shorthand for "reform through labor"—are part of a network stretching across the People's Republic of China, but especially concentrated in inland provinces where living conditions are harsh enough for the local inhabitants, let alone political and criminal prisoners...

...I worked in a coal mine," Fang Li said...

...The policy says, "Treat prisoners as a parent to children, a teacher to students, a doctor to patients.' Fang Li observed that while the policy has nurtured more humane conditions in Chinese labor camps, there is no mistaking that the ultimate objective is, indeed, reform through labor...

...By 1985, the deficit had dropped to $8 million, and a year later to less than $3 million, thanks to the income from prison labor in the Sichuan laogai industrial and raw materials complex...

...According to Fang Li—whose brother spent 18 years in the camps for trying to go to Taiwan—there are comparatively few political prisoners in the laogai now...

...Still, China's intellectuals —the writers, poets, playwrights, artists, philosophers, political scientists— look to a time when they can say and believe whatever they wish...

...In 1984 when six prisoners died in a coal mine explosion, Fang Li said, a camp vice-director was fired and a captain was demoted...

...They are deeply aware of their country's continuing authoritarian rule...

...Camp directors who maintain double zero records are rewarded, and those who don't are punished...

...During the previous two decades the camps were heavily populated with Chinese convicted of criticizing Mao Zedong or the Communist Party, or simply because they were suspected of political subversion...

...Nonetheless, every day Chinese are wrongly accused, wrongly imprisoned, or imprisoned simply for their political thoughts or religious beliefs...

...From all reports, including those of former prisoners, the network has shrunk substantially...

...Amnesty International, though, finds just thenumber of verifiable executions appalling...

...It is estimated, for example, that as many as 20,000 Chinese have been shot as a result of Deng's campaign against crime begun in 1983, and the actual number may be twice or half that...

...China's Constitution assures freedom of speech and press, say the more cynical Chinese intellectuals, but the freedom is merely to praise the Communist Party leadership...

...We had some income, so the mine could spend some money on living conditions...

...Mostly poverty stricken, they are primarily concerned with securing the basic necessities of life...

...That compares with an average factory worker's wage in China of about $40...

...Human Rights Watch in New York City says it has the names of more than 250 Tibetans who were arrested in connection with pro-independence demonstrations in the fall of 1987 and the spring of 1988...

...Uncounted prisoners were shot attempting escapes...

...He said he had never heard of Wei Jingsheng...

...From talking with other prisoners, explained Fang Li, he determined that roughly half the labor camp inmates in the '60s and '70s were political...

...Uprisings werecommon and were put down severely...

...If this were any of a number of other countries, not to mention the Soviet Union, the international human rights lobby would be pressuring the White House to express its concern...

...But the State Department, like foreign offices in Western Europe, is reluctant to inject the irritant of Tibetan or, broadly, Chinese human rights into relations with Beijing...

...He was not suggesting that life had become pleasant in the camps, but merely that one could survive after 1980...

...Probably the majority of China's 1 billion people are indifferent to the trampling on their lawfully guaranteed political rights...

...Labor camp managers have other advantages over regular industry in the Chinese marketplace, too, and by offering prisoners small bonuses for efficient work, the Sichuan prison camp system seems on the way to becoming self-financing...

...Innocent people have been beaten, trussed up and deprived of proper medical treatment, among other practices...

...In failing to press the question of human rights violations in China, Western governments give little encouragement to those few dissidents who are embittered by the government's policies...

...It was only at the insistence of a handful of Congressmen that the State Department last year officially deplored the suppression of anti-Chinese demonstrations by monks in the Chinese region of Tibet...

...In addition, he pointed out, there are40-50 more in the province with 500 to 3,000 prisoners...

...Is the name of astrophysicist Fang Lizhi...

...Is the name of Communist Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang...