Jiabiangou labour camp
자볜거우 농장
A re-education-through-labour farm on the edge of the Badain Jaran desert north-east of Jiuquan, Gansu. Some 3,000 “rightists” from across Gansu were sent there in 1957–1960, and from the second half of 1960, during the Great Famine, most of the inmates starved to death; deaths are estimated at about 2,500. It was closed in October 1961, and the authorities disguised the causes of death as natural.
In depth
Jiabiangou began in March 1954 as a labour-reform farm built to hold forty to fifty prisoners. As the Anti-Rightist Campaign widened in the second half of 1957 it became a re-education-through-labour farm for rightists, receiving its first inmates in November; by the end of 1960 around 3,000 had been sent there, with a peak of 3,074 in 1958. The land, ringed by salt marsh and desert, could not feed them, and the managers and higher authorities, on the logic that “rightists are reactionaries”, did not supply enough grain; people began to starve from the second half of 1960.
In September 1960, under the Gansu party committee’s plan to reclaim land in the Hexi corridor, some 1,900 inmates were moved to a new farm at Mingshuitan in Gaotai county that had no facilities at all. People ate leaves, bark, worms and rats, excrement and the flesh of dead inmates, and the dead were left on the dunes because the survivors were too weak to bury them. In November the minister of the interior Qian Ying discovered the situation and a central inspection team began a “rescue of lives”, but only about two hundred came back alive from Mingshuitan, some five hundred survivors in all. When the farm was closed in October 1961 the Gansu authorities had a doctor write a medical record for every dead inmate citing illness, not starvation.
The number of inmates differs by source: a 1964 Gansu document counts 2,369 people sent there (887 of them rightists), the farm reported 3,074 in 1958, survivors’ testimony and a warder’s diary put it above 3,000, and the writer Zhao Xu estimates about 3,500. Yang Xianhui’s stories Farewell to Jiabiangou and Wang Bing’s film The Ditch (2010) made the camp known. A memorial put up by families in 2013 was soon destroyed by local authorities.