SHANGHAI — For the first few weeks, Shen Yongmei was told to sit on a rough plastic stool from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m., her back absolutely straight, her hands on her knees, and stare in silence at three sentences painted on a wall.
“What is this place? Why are you here? What attitude are you going to employ to comply with the police?” were the three questions the 55-year-old woman was told to contemplate. Any slackening of concentration invited a beating.
Then, her brain supposedly washed clean of disobedient thoughts, she was sent to work. For months, she screwed in the plastic plugs at the end of ballpoint pens, working with only brief food and bathroom breaks as she fulfilled her daily quota of 12,000 pens.
This “reeducation through labor” program was China’s way of reforming minor offenders — drug users and petty criminals — as well as government critics and people regarded by police as a nuisance.
Last month, China announced it would finally close the much-criticized program as part of a series of measures supposed to improve the rule of law. But former prisoners are giving the move a lukewarm welcome. They say dissidents still face the prospect of being locked away, often without trial, in facilities that are grim and abusive — even if they will no longer involve forced labor and attempted brainwashing.
Shen’s problems began when her house was demolished to make way for a luxury apartment complex in Shanghai in 2003. The former factory worker had been petitioning the government for years for what she considered adequate compensation. She said she was rewarded for her efforts by being locked up repeatedly and sent to unregistered detention centers — spending a total of 650 days in them over the past decade.
Finally, in 2012, after joining two demonstrations in support of people who had died in detention, she was sentenced without trial to nine months in a labor camp for disturbing social order, according to documents she showed The Washington Post.
Shen was released in August, one month ahead of schedule, as the labor camp system was wound down in and around Shanghai ahead of the formal national announcement. But she said the abolition of the camps was just a “smoke screen,” a response to domestic and international pressure.
Human Rights Watch says there were around 160,000 people in around 260 labor camps at the end of last year, although the number has been steadily dwindling ever since. Roughly half the prisoners were drug offenders, but the number also included burglars, pickpockets, sex workers, blackmailers and card tricksters, as well as an array of political prisoners: petitioners like Shen, people who criticized the government in public or online, and members of underground Christian churches or banned spiritual movements such as the Falun Gong.
With the closure of the camps, many inmates may see only marginal improvements in their conditions. Drug addicts and dealers are likely to remain inside facilities officially reclassified as rehabilitation centers but in practice little different from the labor camps that have housed them, according to human rights groups. Petty criminals may be absorbed either into prisons or into a new community correction scheme. Political prisoners may simply end up back in the “black jails” that exist all across the country, activists say.
Nevertheless, Nicholas Bequelin of Human Rights Watch said the abolition of the camps removed a black spot on China’s criminal justice system and ended a pernicious system that reached back to Mao’s time.
“The system was predicated on the totalitarian idea that it is possible and legitimate to brainwash people, and to force them to change their political or religious beliefs through psychological pressure and manipulation,” he said.
