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Crime and Punishment in Post–Liberation China: The Prisoners of a Beijing Gaol in the 1950s*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Frank Dikotter
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Extract

A number of recent publications have given detailed accounts of the gulag system in the Peoples Republic of China (PRC), filling an important gap in the available literature. Comprehensive descriptions of the huge prison and labour camp network, which has administered the lives of 20 to 30 million convicts since 1949, are generally based either on the analysis of official documents, in particular notices and regulations,1 or on information gathered from former prisoners.2 The brutal treatment of political prisoners in the regimes penal institutions, the gradual destruc– tion of human beings in labour camps, and the widespread use of torture and physical violence in thought reform are some of the most disturbing aspects of a gulag system that have been vividly evoked in many autobiographies.3 Beyond these general descriptions, however, virtually f nothing is known about the number of camps, the scope of labour reform or even the daily lives of common prisoners. The major difficulty encountered in research on the gulag system is the lack of more substantial empirical evidence, as internal documents formulated by prison administrations, public security bureaus or other security departments are f difficult to find. Indeed, anyone found guilty of leaking special classified documents will be convicted of a counter–revolutionary crime.

Type
Research Note
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 149 , March 1997 , pp. 147 - 159
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1997

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Footnotes

*

The author would like to thank Professor T.H. Barrett, SOAS, without whose support this article would not have been possible.

References

1 For instance Dutton, Michael, Policing and Punishment in China: From Patriarchy to The People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); an excellent critique of the fragile evidential basis of Duttons work and the chasm between official documents and actual reality is made by John Honeyman in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 3, No. 3 (November 1993), pp. 493–95.Google Scholar

2 Domenach, Jean–Luc, Larchipel oublie (Paris: Fayard, 1992); see also Jean Pasqualini, Glimpses inside Chinas gulag, The China Quarterly, No. 134 (June 1993), pp. 352–57.Google Scholar

3 See for instance Pasqualini, Jean, Prisonnier de Mao. Sept ans dans un camp de travail en Chine (Paris: Gallimard, 1975); Pu Ning, Red in Tooth and Claw: Twenty–Six Years in Communist Chinese Prisons (New York: Grove Press, 1994); Harry Wu, Bitter Winds: A Memoir of My Years in Chinas Gulag (New York: John Wiley, 1994).Google Scholar

4 Bodde, Derk, Peking Diary: A Year of Revolution (New York: Schuman, 1950), p. 67. In the context of this study, the same authors piece on a Beijing prison under the Manchus should also be mentioned; see Derk Bodde, Prison life in eighteenth–century Peking, in Essays on Chinese Civilization (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 195–215.Google Scholar

5 See Juefei, Xu, Hongkang, Shu, Mingzheng, Shao and Qisheng, , Laodong gaizaoxue (Reform Through Labour) (Beijing: Qunzhong chubanshe, 1983).Google Scholar

6 The best introduction to judicial procedures in the PRC is Shao–chuan, Leng, Justice in Communist China: A Survey of the Judicial System of the Chinese Peoples Republic (New York: Oceana, 1967); see also Jerome Alan Cohen, The Criminal Process in the Peoples Republic of China, 1949–1963: An Introduction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968); James P. Brady, Justice and Politics in Peoples China: Legal Order or Continuing Revolution? (London: Academic Press, 1982).Google Scholar

7 Ching–wen, Chow, Ten Years of Storm: The True Story of the Communist Regime in China (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), p. 143.Google Scholar

8 Xianliang, Zhang, Grass Soup (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1993), p. 121.Google Scholar

9 Wu, Harry Hongda, Laogai: The Chinese Gulag (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), p. 8.Google Scholar

10 Deliusin, Lev, The I–kuan Tao Society, in Jean Chesneaux (ed.), Popular Movements and Secret Societies in China, 1840–1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972), I pp. 225–233.Google Scholar

11 Kenneth Lieberthal, The suppression of secret societies in post–liberation Tientsin, The China Quarterly, No. 54 (June 1973), pp. 242–266; Lieberthal, Kenneth, Revolution and Tradition in Tientsin, 1949–1952 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980), pp. 108–118.Google Scholar

12 Ladany, Laszlo, The Communist Party of China and Marxism, 1921–1985 (London: Hurst & Co., 1988), pp. 180–81.Google Scholar

13 Doak Barnett, A., Communist China: The Early Years, 1949–55 (London: Pall Mall, 1964), pp. 138–141.Google Scholar

14 Provisions Laid Down by the Economic Practice Investigation Committee for the Disposal of Cases of Corruption and Waste and for the Conquest of Bureaucratic Deviations, Current Background, No. 168 (2 March 1952), p. 4.Google Scholar

15 Teiwes, Frederick C., Politics and Purges in China: Rectification and the Decline of Party Norms, 1950–1965 (New York: Sharpe, second edition, 1993), pp. 107–108.Google Scholar

16 Chow Ching–wen, Ten Years of Storm, pp. 143 and 171.Google Scholar