Page 190 - Communist Chinas Policy of Oppression in East Turkestan

186

In fact, one of communist ideology's fundamental principles, the
idea that "people are only important so long as they are productive,

and the important thing is to increase production," also applies in the
laogai. In the view of the Chinese Communist Party, human beings are
the most important means of production, and everyone must serve as
vehicles of that production. Violence is, in turn, the most effective way
of raising production. Harry Wu, who spent 19 years in the laogai, now
claims asylum in the United States. He has since used the Laogai
Association he founded as a means of fighting the human rights viola-
tions in China. Wu calculates that the laogai make a profit of some 100

million dollars a year, a figure that has been accepted in official state-
ments from Beijing. 44
As we have seen, the laogai are not simply a prison system, but
rather an important political tool for the survival of the Communist
Party. Mao expressed this in these words:
Marxism holds that the state is a machine of violence for one class to
rule another. Laogai facilities are one of the violence components of
the state machine. They are tools representing the interests of the pro-
letariat and the people's masses and exercising dictatorship over a mi-
nority of hostile elements originating from the exploiter classes. 45
No matter how much the Chinese government attempts to conceal
the true nature of these camps, those people who have spent many

years in them, and then found asylum abroad, keep telling the world
about what goes on in the laogai. One of these is Jean Pasqualini who
spent many years in a laogai. He claims that the laogai is not an institu-
tion, as has been claimed, but rather a system of torture. He describes
how the most inhuman things possible go on in these camps. Pasqualini
claims deceptive language is employed by Red China when discussing
the laogai or the punishment of prisoners. In his view:

Prisoners in China are still compelled to work, to "reconstruct social-

Communist China’s Policy
of Oppression in East Turkestan