The violent machine - prisoners in concentration camps forced to work like slaves

New Internationalist, August, 2001 by Harry Wu

In his book of essays and quotations, Mao directed: 'Marxism maintains that the State is a machine of violence for one class to rule another. The machine of violence is operated through the army, police, courts, prisons and other necessary facilities...The Laogai, as a part of this state machine, is a facility of violence. It is a tool representing the interests of the proletariat and the masses to exercise dictatorship over a minority of hostile elements. According to this philosophy Chinese leaders designed their systematic mechanism, the Laogai, to eliminate a segment of society that they found unacceptable and to repress an entire nation. They created the Laogai just as the Soviet Union created the gulag, South Africa created apartheid and Pol Pot created the killing fields. We cannot condemn the evil actions of Stalin's Gulag or of Hitler's concentration camps and ignore the continuing brutality of the Laogai. If we want to bring an end to totalitarian rule in China, we must confront the Laogai.

Harry Will is the founder and Executive Director of the Laogai Research Foundation, which compiles information on the Chinese gulag and exposes other human-rights abuses in China.