Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (42 page)

An inmate operating a milling machine at Beijing Number One Prison, a model facility.
Photo: Jan Wong/
Globe and Mail

Police and judicial authorities recording the details just after a mass execution of drug dealers in Yunnan province
.
Photo: Max Photo/
Globe and Mail

O
ne by one, Wei Jingsheng, Zhang Lin and Professor Ding Zilin had all been in and out of China’s gulag. Many activists like them had spent years in jails and labor camps. Some had been tortured. Some had endured solitary confinement. Others had been tossed into overcrowded cells full of rapists and murderers. A few had had show trials, but most had been locked up for years without formality.

As a starry-eyed Maoist, I had not given it much thought when “counter-revolutionaries” were bundled off after a struggle meeting. And even when the slogan shouting and denunciations seemed cruel, I tried to suppress any pity I felt because I thought that caring about class enemies was hopelessly bourgeois. Only at Big Joy Farm had I begun to think my first subversive thoughts: was China just one big prison camp?

After Mao’s death, as people unburdened themselves at Democracy Wall, my friends began talking openly for the first time about the gulag. Later, as a news assistant for the
New York Times
, I started probing the underside of China in earnest. Now, as a reporter for the
Globe and Mail
, I asked questions, lots of them, and I no longer cared what Teacher Dai or anybody thought.

I began noticing that I was sometimes followed. The first sign
would be the officer from State Security, China’s KGB, at my compound gate, picking up the phone as I drove out. A block later, an unmarked car or, occasionally, a motorcycle, would ease out from a side street. It would follow me, always staying one or two vehicles behind. I became adept at flushing them out, by circling a traffic rotary several times to see who stayed on the merry-go-round, or by abruptly slowing to a crawl to see who ducked behind a bus. While it was easy to spot them, it was hard to shake them. State Security stationed plainclothes “spotters” at key intersections across the city. As you passed one, he would stare hard at you, talking into his collar, presumably warning the next spotter you were on your way.

At first I was rattled. Later, I took a childish delight in trying to lose them. Eventually, I got so used to being followed that it hardly bothered me. I even caught myself feeling inordinately flattered when my “tail” was a big black Mercedes and deflated when it was a mere Volkswagen. Always, there were four men inside: a driver and a spotter in front, and two men in back to follow me on foot if I got out of my car.

In the provinces, the tails seemed particularly crude and inept. At the Fuzhou airport, on the east coast, two plainclothes agents, a male and a female, persisted in snapping pictures of Lena Sun and me with cameras secreted inside shoulder bags — until Lena took out her camera and began photographing
them
. In Qinghai, the Chinese province infamous for its labor camps, I got so sick of being followed on foot that I turned around and chased my tail all the way down the street.

In one sense, the surveillance was a blessing. It reminded me never to be careless. I talked obliquely on the telephone and avoided sensitive topics at home, in my office and in my car. If I obtained a secret document, I wrote the story without making it clear whether I had actually seen the document, then destroyed it before filing my story. When I saw I was being followed, I altered plans to meet friends or contacts. Occasionally I didn’t notice and was once horrified to bump into one of my tails on the street just outside a friend’s apartment building. Luckily, they never figured out exactly whom I was seeing inside.

After the Tiananmen Square massacre, I was haunted by a compulsion, an
obligation
, to examine the darkest side of China’s police state. I knew I had to stare it in the face, in a way I might not have done before, in order to exorcise the ghosts of my past. In Canada, academics complained that my harsh reports hurt their scholarly exchanges. Businessmen muttered about ruined trade prospects. In Montreal, my mother scolded: “Don’t tell people the bad stuff. That’s just what
lo fan” –
foreigners — “want to hear.”

I agonized over the question of fairness. Was I overcompensating for having been a youthful apologist for the regime? Was I going overboard for fear of being duped again? At the
Boston Globe
, I had never felt any twinges when I wrote exposés of money laundering at New England banks. Now my job was to write about a country in flux. I concluded that China deserved the same treatment as any other beat. If you don’t like bad publicity, I figured, don’t shoot people in cold blood. After Tiananmen, I began an investigation that would take me to half a dozen prisons, a death rally and an execution ground. To my dismay, the wildest rumors turned out to be true.

One cool spring day, I flew into the heart of the Chinese gulag. For centuries, emperors had exiled traitorous officials to a living death in Qinghai, a landlocked northwestern province of snow-capped mountains and high-altitude plains. A little-known policy called forced job placement doomed many convicts to remain in the gulag long after their prison terms ended. By the 1990s, one-fourth of Qinghai’s 4.3 million population were prisoners, ex-prisoners or their families.

“I call Qinghai China’s Siberia,” said Harry Wu, who spent nineteen years in Chinese labor camps after criticizing the Soviet invasion of Hungary. When I talked to him by telephone from Beijing, he had just published a ground-breaking book,
Laogai, the Chinese Gulag
, and was planning to testify before the U.S. Congress.

Wu, who emigrated to California in 1985, seemed to live a charmed life. Twice in 1991, he daringly returned to China. Variously posing as a local Chinese, a policeman and a Chinese-American businessman, he documented prison-camp life and surreptitiously filmed inmates in a tannery standing waist-deep in toxic fluids. In
1994, he returned to help the BBC film a documentary about harvesting organs from executed prisoners. His luck ran out in June 1995, when he was arrested on his fourth fact-finding trip. By then a U.S. citizen, he was charged with spying. That August, he was sentenced to fifteen years and expelled with the warning that if he ever returned, he would have to serve his sentence in full.

In the mid-1990s, Beijing claimed a nationwide prison population of 1.26 million, or one inmate per one thousand citizens, a figure that would put China on a par with many European nations. Harry Wu — and Amnesty International — estimated the prison population at 20 million. If true, China would have the most inmates per capita of any country in the world, sixteen or seventeen prisoners per one thousand people, compared with five or six per one thousand in second-place Russia, itself reeling from a post-Communist crime wave, and five per one thousand in third-place United States.

Just as the Inuit have many words for snow, so the Chinese have a rich and varied penal vocabulary. There
were jian yu
(prisons),
kan shou suo
(lock-up pens) and
shou rong suo
(detention centers), not to mention half a dozen kinds of labor camps. You could disappear for months or even years if you were
ju liu
(detained),
shou rong shen cha
(taken in for investigation) or
ge li shen cha
(isolated for investigation). In the meantime, Chinese officials could play semantics. If anyone asked, they could deny with a straight face that you had been
dai bu
(formally arrested).

Every Chinese understood the fine distinctions. A nasty “reform-through-labor farm” was much worse than a “re-education-through-labor camp.” But a policeman could toss anyone into one of these re-education camps for up to three years without a formal charge or trial. And if the victim was imprudent enough to object, the police could tack on a fourth year for bad behavior.

Qinghai (pronounced
Ching-hi
) was normally closed to foreign journalists. To my astonishment, they agreed to let Caroline Straathof, a Dutch reporter for
De Volkskrant
, and me in after we applied to write about tourism and economic investment. (I subsequently kept my promise, albeit slightly tongue-in-cheek: a regional gastronomic specialty was yak penis and a local guest house beside Qinghai Lake was a former torpedo test site.)

Xining, the provincial capital, was filled with prison factories and ringed by labor camps. At a visit to an ordinary factory, Caroline casually asked the manager what the prison facility “up the road” manufactured. He rattled off four or five different jails, uncertain which one she meant — until our handler from the provincial Foreign Affairs office glared at him.

Although inmates in the West also worked, several countries banned imports of Chinese prison-made products because of Beijing’s forced-labor policy for political detainees. While Beijing didn’t deny that it used prison labor, it claimed that it didn’t export the products. But in Xining, along an extraordinary street lined with prison-factory outlets, we found a number of items that appeared designed for export. I bought a set of toy police equipment in a package showing two Caucasian boys playing cops and robbers. It said, in English: “SPECIAL AGENT. Fun! Safe! For ages 3 and up. Made in China.”

“It’s made in the Qinghai Number One Prison,” the shop clerk said to me as I paid for it. “Don’t tell the foreigner,” she added, glancing at Caroline, who pretended to be engrossed in some toy machine guns.

Like Treblinka, Auschwitz and Dachau, which in their time were secret, Chinese prison camps weren’t marked on local maps. The actual number of prisoners in Qinghai was also a state secret, although the official number was a suspiciously round “ten thousand,” low even by China’s already low national figure of 1.26 million. “Every country has its secrets. Our prisons are our secret,” said Dong Maicang, deputy chief of Qinghai’s Labor Reform Bureau, in his first interview ever with journalists, foreign or Chinese.

A local resident with a friend in Tanggemu, the notorious labor camp where Wei Jingsheng once talked back to his television, told us that inmates in solitary confinement were locked inside a metal box so small they had to crouch. “You can’t sit or stand. There are no toilet breaks. They make you soil your pants.”

Deputy Chief Dong denied such bleak conditions existed. “Solitary confinement means the prisoner can choose the television channel he wants to watch,” he said with a wide smile. When we asked about forced labor, he replied, “Criminals who meet production quotas are paid cash bonuses.”

One afternoon, Caroline and I strolled into the retail outlet of the Qinghai Hide and Leather Garment Factory. Harry Wu and others had tipped us off that the innocuously named factory was actually a prison. Its three thousand inmates apparently included Tibetans – Qinghai, which borders Tibet, has a sizable Tibetan population – because the shop displayed photographs of traditional blue and white canvas tents. As we browsed among the crudely made leather jackets and miniskirts, Caroline, pretending she didn’t speak Chinese, asked through me to see some of the Tibetan tents. I duly translated, and the clerk, an old man, assumed she was a bona fide Western tourist.

“Would you like to go into the warehouse?” he asked helpfully. We nodded, hardly believing our luck. He led us down the street and through the factory’s outer gates. Caroline and I exchanged glances. Several dozen police cars filled the parking lot. The inner entrance, invisible from the street, was flanked by a watchtower and a guardhouse. A uniformed soldier cradling a semi-automatic rifle on a catwalk above us stared down in surprise. As we walked through, four or five people rushed out of the guardhouse, shouting.

“They’re customers,” the clerk explained.

As they berated him for being such a numskull, I drank in every detail. A sign ordered visitors to remove their sunglasses and produce identification. All cars had to stop and open their trunks. The actual prison, fifty yards farther down a narrow alley, was blocked by a solid iron gate topped with spikes. Another watchtower loomed.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” said a young man in plain clothes, shooing us out. “You must wait in the store. He will bring the tents to you.” While the chastened clerk continued into the factory, the young man escorted us back to the shop. On the way, he whispered to me: “You can’t go in the factory. There are prisoners there.”

“I’ve heard that,” I said, nodding conspiratorially.

Back at the shop, he handed me a perfumed business card of pale iridescent pink and blue stripes. It identified him as Zhao Lixin of the sales department and helpfully included the prison’s bank account number so buyers could wire payments. I guess Deng Xiaoping had figured out from personal experience that there was
nothing mind-reforming about labor. Convicts still had to work, but now they toiled for Gulag Inc. In the West prisons drained tax dollars; in China they produced revenue. Convicts had always paid for their own food. Now, under Deng’s get-rich-quick philosophy, the camps and prisons had been given a green light to make a profit. The harder they drove the prisoners, the more money there was for bonuses, pensions and cattle prods. Torn between the need for secrecy and the pressure for profits, some prison enterprises were abandoning discretion.