Doors slam shut on ‘re- education’ system
Memories of the controversial punishment and the fight to abolish it live on, Zhao Xu reports in Beijing.
One of the most startling pieces of news to emerge from the Third Plenary Session of the 18th Communist Party of China Central Committee in November was the decision to abolish the long-standing, controversial correction system known as “re-education through labor”, or laojiao.
The system originated in the mid1950s as a means of dealing with “counterrevolutionaries” and “rightists”, but from the 1980s its focus was expanded to target various forms of social deviancy, ranging from petty theft to prostitution and drug abuse. It enabled the police to sentence habitual petty criminals to up to four years detention without trial.
For He Fengming, a retired language professor from Gansu province, the decision came more than half a century too late. In December 1960, her husband died of hunger and cold at a laojiao farm in the remote northwestern province, but she wasn’t officially informed. Instead, she only discovered the news when she visited the farm to check on her husband, who had been sent for re-education through labor after being denounced as a “rightist”.
“I remember standing at the farm making a tentative inquiry about my husband. A man who was clearly in charge took out a notebook of names and started to run his middle finger down the first page, from top to bottom, and then the second, the third ... until he stopped at my husband’s name. I thought he was about to tell me where he lived. But he just said one word: ‘Dead’. He had been dead for a month,” said the 81-year-old.
During the long winter of 1960, in the depths of the nationwide famine (1959-61), nearly 1,500 people died in Jiabiangou, their bones buried in shallow mass graves in the sandy soil.
“The night I learned about my husband’s death, I cuddled up in the freezing cold of one of the underground caves that served as residences for the detainees, seeking consolation from a woman whose husband had died a similar death, and a brother and sister who had lost their father,” said He. The woman, who described her experiences in a 2001 autobiography, My 1957, is also a lead character in the epic novel Stories from Jiabiangou, written by Yang Xianhui, and based on the real-life experiences of farm inmates. “Everything depicted in the book really happened,” said the 67-year-old author. “But due to the circumstances, the information that remains about those men is fragmentary at best. I had no choice but to add up these piecemeal details in the telling of several related, but selfcontained, stories, and present the book as a novel.”
Fundamental flaws
Yang first heard about Jiabiangou in the 1960s, but started researching the book in the late 1990s. Stories from Jiabiangou was published in 2002, but banned in 2005, remaining out of circulation until the ban was lifted in 2008.
“The abolition of laojiao is a triumph for society, the intellectuals in particular,” said Zhou Yongkun, a law professor at Soochow University in eastern China’s Jiangsu province, who is one of the most vociferous critics of the laojiao system. “It’s also a triumph for Chinese legal practitioners, and most significantly, the ruling party which has shown genuine interest in acting on people’s will, in rectifying social injustice, and improving the rule of law.”
Zhou believes the system’s fundamental flaw lay in the fact that it effectively allowed people to be deprived of their freedom without even being tried by the courts.
“The ‘rightists’ hadn’t committed any specific crimes, but were thought to be harboring bad feelings against the government as a result of their backgrounds,” said Zhou. “Laojiao, which was carried out by an administrative order instead of a court ruling, provided an easy way to store these ‘subversive elements’ without giving them any due-process rights.”
However, despite the faults of the laojiao system, not everyone is willing to denounce it completely. “Any discussion about laojiao has to be put into context to have any real meaning,” said Song Lu’an, presiding judge of the administrative division at the High People’s Court of Henan province. “In the initial decades after the Communist Party came to power, it needed a mechanism to cement its rule and to push through some of its most important policies, land and economic policy, for example, in the face of strong opposition from certain groups and sectors of society.”
“At the time there were no jobs except those provided by the state. And since many ‘rightists’ had lost their jobs as a direct result of their designation, laojiao farms, which actually paid their inmates a paltry, albeit crucial, wage, could well be those people’s last chance to work,” he said, pointing to the fact that some “rightists” were ordered to choose between laojiao and unemployment. Fearing the uncertainty of a jobless future, many chose laojiao.
Given his current stance, it’s surprising to learn that 17 years ago, when he was a doctoral candidate of law, Song published an article in a Chinese legal magazine, advocating the abolition of laojiao.
“My understanding of the system has deepened and broadened ever since, but I haven’t changed my view that China should do away with laojiao, especially now, when the country has adopted a market economy and has built a much sounder and sophisticated legal structure,” he said.
But between then and now, there have been many twists and turns, reflected by the evolution of the laojiao system as much as society in general. “From time to time, the voices of the abolitionists were muffled, or even drowned out, by those who attempted to revise and reform the system,” said Zhou, the law professor.
Serious questions about laojiao started to be raised when the reform and opening-up policy was implemented in the late 1970s and early 80s. “With fresh air being breathed into Chinese society, people began to openly express their resentment of arbitrary power and their longing for the restoration of law and order,” said Zhou.
Evolution of
However, by this time, laojiao was no longer associated with political stance. Instead, it was mainly used to detain people for minor offenses such as petty theft and prostitution. Under Chinese law, these offenses are not serious enough for those who commit them to be tried by the courts and sent to prison. That’s where laojiao came in, viewed by its defenders as a solution to a social malaise that many believed was a byproduct of an increasingly commercialized society.
“From its very beginning, laojiao was the closely guarded turf of the police, which issued the orders, but under the name of a local laojiao committee. How could the right to issue such an order be given to the same men who turned up at people’s doors and took them away?” asked Song. “Realizing the consequent abuse of power, the central government sought to alleviate the situation by introducing judicial reviews and legal counsel, which in reality were often denied to laojiao detainees.”
Another contradiction, according to Zhou, was that laojiao detainees, who by definition are not criminals, were often detained for periods far longer than many criminal sentences.
“Laojiao didn’t have a time limit until the 1980s. Then, it was decided that the typical sentence would be one to three years, with the possibility of a one-year extension. Keeping in mind that the minimum criminal sentence is one month, that arrangement appears illogical, even absurd,” he said. “Little wonder I have met people undergoing re-education punishment but begged to be convicted and sent to prison.”
It’s estimated that 310 laojiao were in operation in 2007, and in April that year, a group of leading scholars drafted an open letter calling for the abolition of the system.
In the years that followed, the calls gained momentum as laojiao became entangled with another hotly debated policy — xinfang, or “letters and calls”, a nationwide form of petitioning through which a person can take his grievances to xinfang bureaus from the local level all the way up to the head office in Beijing.
“Xinfang has always been there, since 1949. But in the past 15 years, it has started to gain widespread public attention, because the sheer amount of controversy it generated seems to have overshadowed its original goal,” said Wei Rujiu, a lawyer in Beijing. “When the government first shifted its emphasis toward xinfang, in the early 1990s, it was to check the conduct of local governments and improve the transparency of legal proceedings at local courts. However, since all decisions made by xinfang bureaus are basically administrative ones, the policy has unintentionally weakened the authority of court rulings.”
A chain reaction occurred: Knowing that court rulings are often subject to challenges, dissatisfied parties in a legal case would then engage in a seemingly endless process of petitioning, working from the lowest to the highest authorities. In desperation, some went on hunger strike or laid siege to xinfang bureaus and their personnel.
Besieged by petitioners, the State Bureau for Letters and Calls called on local governments to keep the trouble within their own territories. Officials who failed to do so were marked down in their annual appraisals, so they instigated measures to prevent people from traveling and making their cases in Beijing, a practice known as “intercepting”.
“It would be an exaggeration to say that repeat petitioners accounted for the bulk of laojiao detainees in recent years, but some of them were indeed thrown into the camps by their local government to be ‘re-educated,’” said Wei. “In the worst cases, laojiao was used to stop people petitioning against local governments in relocation or land condemnation lawsuits. That emboldened some local officials to gain revenge without the law entering the equation.”
One high-profile 2006 case involved a woman from Yongzhou in Hunan province, whose 11-year-old daughter had been gang-raped and forced into prostitution. Two of the six men convicted were given the death sentence and two were jailed for life. The other two were sentenced to 15 and 16 years. Dissatisfied and determined to pursue the death penalty for all six men, the woman began petitioning the local xinfang. However, when she took her case to Beijing, the local authorities became involved. In August 2012, the mother was given a laojiao sentence of 18 months, but only served nine days because of the intensive, sympathetic media coverage of the case. She sued the local laojiao committee, and a high court ruled in her favor in July this year, just four months before the CPC Central Committee announced the abolition of the system.
“That mother not only won her case, she helped to expedite the demise of laojiao by fixing national attention on the issue and turning a no-go area into the hottest Internet search word,” said Wei.
Legal conflict
“The laojiao system conflicts with the 1982 Constitution, which requires all deprivation of liberty to be imposed by judicial authorities. It also violates the 2000 Legislation Law which demands that all deprivation of liberty be authorized by national law,” added Wei. “Now, all that should end.”
Yang the writer has seen and heard enough to be cautious. “Will they create something to fill that void? I’m not sure,” he said.
But Wei feels there is no void. “Currently, we have the administrative law for minor offences and criminal law for serious crimes. In terms of the confinement period, the upper limit of administrative law meets the lower limit of criminal law. Believe me, the number of petitioners will be reduced drastically if the government acts to put administrative power in a cage, and ensures the supremacy of law, as promised.”
“A surrogate system under a different name would be a fatal blow to people’s confidence in the government and the rule of law that China has long sought to embrace,” he said.
In the years since his book’s publication, Yang has often visited Jiabiangou, occasionally in the company of a former detainee. “I remember this man whose cupped hands trembled as he allowed the sandy earth to slip through his slightly contorted fingers and form a tiny mound on the bank of a long-dried-up river,” said Yang. “He gazed at it for a long while. Then he stood up, made a deep bow, and left. He didn’t look back.” Contact the writer at zhaoxu @chinadaily.com.cn