Behind Cry for Help From China Labor Camp

[Randy W]

.

Behind Cry for Help From China Labor Camp

 

In the New York Times

 

MASANJIA, China — The cry for help, a neatly folded letter stuffed inside a package of Halloween decorations sold at Kmart, traveled 5,000 miles from China into the hands of a mother of two in Oregon.

 

Scrawling in wobbly English on a sheet of onionskin paper, the writer said he was imprisoned at a labor camp in this northeastern Chinese town, where he said inmates toiled seven days a week, their 15-hour days haunted by sadistic guards.

 

. . .

 

The letter drew international news media coverage and widespread attention to China’s opaque system of “re-education through labor,” a collection of penal colonies where petty criminals, religious offenders and critics of the government can be given up to four-year sentences by the police without trial.

But the letter writer remained a mystery, the subject of speculation over whether he or she was a real inmate or a creative activist simply trying to draw attention to the issue.

 

Last month, though, during an interview to discuss China’s labor camps, a 47-year-old former inmate at the Masanjia camp said he was the letter’s author. The man, a Beijing resident and adherent of Falun Gong, the outlawed spiritual practice, said it was one of 20 such letters he secretly wrote over the course of two years. He then stashed them inside products whose English-language packaging, he said, made it likely they were destined for the West.

 

“For a long time I would fantasize about some of the letters being discovered overseas, but over time I just gave up hope and forgot about them,” said the man, who asked that only his last name, Zhang, be published for fear of reprisal.

 

 

[warpedbored]

Why I'm shocked that western propaganda would even insinuate the benevolent Chinese government would do such things.

[Fu Lai]

OMG, the injustice!

"Although he was released from Masanjia in 2010, Mr. Zhang, the man who said he wrote the letter, has vivid memories of producing the plastic foam headstones, which were made to look old by painting them with a sponge. “It was an especially difficult task,” he said. “If the results were not to the liking of the guards, they would make us do them again.” He estimated that inmates produced at least 1,000 headstones during the year he worked on them."

Why I'm shocked that western propaganda would even insinuate the benevolent Chinese government would do such things.

 

IMO, the people should clean their own house before, as they always do, hypocritically attack others. No country should point fingers away from themselves when their own hands are dirty.

 

http://fabiusmaximus.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/20130209-apathy-plato.jpg

 

Prisons should be for rehabilitation.

Edited June 13, 2013 by Fu Lai (see edit history)