From 1949 the People's Republic of China built a nationwide system of penal labour, known as laogai or reform through labour, in which convicted prisoners worked in camps, farms and factories, many of them in the far west and north-east; it expanded massively during the campaigns against counter-revolutionaries, the Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957 and the Cultural Revolution. Alongside it ran laojiao, re-education through labour, an administrative measure allowing the police to detain people for up to four years without trial for offences including petty crime, prostitution, drug use, petitioning and, in practice, religious and political dissent. Conditions in the camps have been documented by former prisoners and by human rights organisations, which recorded forced labour, malnutrition, and the export of camp-produced goods; the Chinese government has maintained that the system was lawful punishment and productive rehabilitation. China renamed laogai facilities simply 'prisons' in 1994 and abolished laojiao by decision of the National People's Congress Standing Committee in December 2013, though critics including Amnesty International argued that other forms of extrajudicial detention, including drug rehabilitation centres and 'legal education' centres, absorbed much of its function. Later mass-detention systems in Xinjiang are treated separately.
The Chinese state operated a nationwide penal and administrative labour-camp system holding criminal convicts and, without trial, those deemed politically or socially deviant
The 1953 census counted 582,603,417 people, and the population had reached about 1.36 billion when re-education through labour was abolished in 2013. Estimates of the camp population at any one time range from roughly 500,000 to several million: Domenach and Chinese official figures give around 1-2 million in laogai in the 1950s, and about 160,000 in laojiao when it ended, while Harry Wu's cumulative claims of 40-50 million passing through the system since 1949 are contested and rest on extrapolation rather than records.
No defensible range. Deaths in the camps were high during the famine years and the political campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s, and former prisoners and researchers describe large mortality, but no archival mortality series has been released and the estimates in circulation are extrapolations.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the UN Committee against Torture have documented detention without trial, compulsory labour and torture in the laojiao and laogai systems.
China