Re-education through labour
노동교양
The system of administrative detention in the People’s Republic under which people were confined in camps and made to work by decision of the police and other authorities, without trial; abbreviated laojiao. A practice used against counter-revolutionaries from 1955, it was given legal form during the Anti-Rightist Campaign by the State Council’s “Decision on the Question of Re-education through Labour” of August 1957, became the chief means of punishing rightists, and lasted until the NPC Standing Committee abolished it in December 2013.
In depth
At the Qingdao conference of July 1957 Mao said that, apart from a few well-known figures, rightists should be sent to re-education through labour, and that regulations should be drawn up. The plenary State Council passed the decision on 26 July, the 78th session of the NPC Standing Committee approved it on 1 August, and the People’s Daily published it on 4 August. Its first article defined those to be confined:
一、对于下列几种人应当加以收容实行劳动教养：……（2）罪行轻微，不追究刑事责任的反革命分子、反社会主义的反动分子，受到机关、团体、企业、学校等单位的开除处分，无生活出路的；
1. The following kinds of people shall be taken in and subjected to re-education through labour: … (2) counter-revolutionaries and anti-socialist reactionaries whose offences are minor and who are not held criminally liable, who have been expelled by an organ, body, enterprise, school or other unit and have no means of livelihood.
Article 2 called it “a measure of compulsory educational reform and also a way of arranging employment”, and Article 3 had confinement approved by the provincial people’s council on application by the civil affairs or public security departments, the person’s unit, or the head of household or guardian. No court was involved.
At first there was no upper limit on terms; a maximum of four years (three plus a one-year extension) was set only in 1979, and in 1983 management passed from the Ministry of Public Security to the Ministry of Justice. At Jiabiangou farm in Gansu, where rightists were sent, most of the inmates starved to death in the famine. In the reform era the system was used against petty thieves, prostitutes and drug offenders and also against dissidents, petitioners and Falun Gong practitioners, with estimates of 190,000 to two million detainees in a given year. UN bodies and Chinese legal scholars pointed to its conflict with the Constitution and the Criminal Procedure Law; after the Third Plenum of the 18th Central Committee announced its abolition in November 2013, it was abolished on 28 December. Human-rights groups say other forms of extra-legal detention took its place.