Laogai

As I have been reading Safely Home, I'm learning more and more about China and thus have been praying more and more for Christians there that are persecuted for being part of the underground church.

A recent section of the book talked about Laogai and explained how China forces political and religious dissidents to do forced labour after being arrested even though they have never had a proper trial or conviction.

One of the documents reads, "The fundamental task of our Laogai facilities is punishing and reforming criminals. To define their function concretely, they fulfill tasks in the following three ways: 1. punishing criminals and putting them under surveillance; 2. reforming criminals; 3. organizing criminals in labor and production, thus creating wealth for society. Our Laogai units are both facilities of dictatorship and special enterprises."

So basically it is a system that provides free forced labour. It gives the government a double incentive to put people (including many Christians whose only crimes is following Jesus) in prison: first, it nullifies resistance to the Party, second, it puts them to work to make money for the Party.


You can learn more about this by typing it into google. One website says:

A Mandarin term, "Laogai" translates literally as "reform-through-labor," but within China, the term has come to have a wider, colloquial meaning. There, the word - no matter the context in which it is uttered - can strike fear in the hearts and minds of average Chinese. Almost everyone in China is related to or knows someone who has served a lengthy sentence in a Laogai camp. Millions know people who simply disappeared into the camps, never to be heard from again.