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Museum in US to showcase China's forced labour camps

A 1995 photo shows US human rights activist Harry Wu (C), standing between two Chinese policeman. (Photo taken from a video offered for sale to foreign news agencies.) After languishing 19 years in China’s forced labour camps, a Chinese dissident has set up a museum in Washington to highlight the “horrors and atrocities” in these secret detention facilities. AFP/China

After languishing 19 years in China’s forced labour camps, a Chinese dissident has set up a museum in Washington to highlight the “horrors and atrocities” in these secret detention facilities.

Harry Wu, who labored in 12 different camps in China from 1960 to 1979, set up the museum in memory of the millions who he said perished within the camps, known as “Laogai” or reform-through-labor camps.

Wu hopes it “will preserve the memory of the Laogai’s many victims, including the millions who perished within the labor camps, and serve to educate the public about the horrors and atrocities committed by China’s communist regime,” a statement from his Laogai Research Foundation said.

“To this end, the museum will not only introduce the history and structure of the Laogai, but will also tell the personal stories of many of its prisoners,” it said.

Materials on display at the museum, to open to the public Thursday, include photographs, government documents and prisoner uniforms from Wu’s own archives or donated by other Laogai survivors.

Wu set up his foundation in 1992, seven years after he fled to the United States where he obtained American citizenship.

The Laogai camps were establishd under China’s former leader Mao Zedong after the communists came to power in China in 1949. They included both common criminals and political prisoners.

About 40-50 million people have been imprisoned in the Laogai, many of them prisoners of conscience, Wu’s group said.

In 1990, China abandoned the term Laogai and labelled the detention facilities as “prisons” instead but Wu maintained that evidence gathered by his foundation suggested that forced labor was “as much a part of its prison system today as it ever was.”

This includes so called “Laojiao” or reeducation through labor, a form of administrative rather than judicial detention, where dissidents, petty criminals, and vagrants can be imprisoned for several years without a trial, Wu’s group said.

The Laogai museum in Washington was set up with the support of a human rights fund established by Internet giant Yahoo, whose CEO Jerry Yang is slated to inaugurate the museum on Wednesday.

Yang set up the fund after his company came under fire from rights groups for allegedly helping Chinese police to nab and jail cyber dissidents, including a Chinese journalist, Shi Tao, who is still behind bars.

Ahead of the museum’s opening, rights group Amnesty International accused Yang of not giving priority to pushing the Chinese authorities to release the journalist.

Shi Tao was convicted in 2005 of divulging state secrets after he posted a Chinese government order forbidding media groups from marking the anniversary of the bloody Tiananmen Square massacre on the Internet.

Police identified him using information provided by Yahoo. He was sentenced to 10 years in jail.

“That Shi Tao and others remain in prison after using Yahoo services, as your company remains silent in China, hollows your human rights fund and scholarship into seeming public relations attempts,” said Amnesty’s USA Executive Director Larry Cox in a letter to Yang.

“Your company’s response to the imprisonment of journalists and dissidents who have relied on your services must include a clear focus on their releases,” Cox said.

Yahoo had defended its action on the grounds that it had to comply with China’s laws in order to operate there .

It had reached a settlement with the families of Shi Tao and another cyber dissident Wang Xiaoning to stop a lawsuit, which charged that Yahoo provided information that enabled Chinese police to identify the duo.

Copyright © 2008 Agence France-Presse

Published in AFP/Google News