Bianco devotes a long, sombre chapter to Russia's gulags and China's system
laogai and laojiao (reform through labour and re-education through labour).
camps within the laojiao system (81)--the parallel and larger
laogai(112) Scheper Traffic, supra note 7, at 196 (detailing interview conducted by Harry Wu, Director of
Laogai Foundation at a 1996 Berkeley conference).
Much of the money set aside for the Yahoo Human Rights Trust Fund were diverted to the
Laogai Human Rights Organization and the
Laogai Research Foundation, both (https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/273014189) apparent shells of non-profit organizations run entirely by Wu with essentially no traceable presence, including no website or phone number for contacting the organizations.
Burma's Commander-in-Chief Snr-Gen Min Aung Hlaing says there is "no prospect for peace" with the ethnic Kokang militants of the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDA) as it was they who provoked fighting in
Laogai by attacking government forces first.
Sponsored by the Pioneer Institute and several partner organizations, it featured three Pulitzer Prize-winning authors -- Anne Applebaum, Edmund Morris and William Taubman -- as well as a pair of retired social studies teachers, JFK Library Director Thomas Putnam, and Harry Wu, the founder and director of the
Laogai Research Foundation, and a man who survived 19 years in Chinese prison camps.
(15) See for example, "Wishful Thinking: Tibet in the Face of Communist China's War against Autonomy,"
Laogai Research Foundation.
"Many Chinese who have profited most from the country's growth," Page observed, "also express increasing concerns in private about social issues such as China's one-child policy, food safety, pollution, corruption, poor schooling, and a weak legal system." Beneath its veneer of modernity and order, Chinese politics is still a graft-ridden spoils game and the Communist Party, with its secret police and
laogai, is still autocratic and unaccountable.
Reports published by Aid to the Church in Need clearly show that persecution continues in several countries, from Cuba to North Korea, not to mention China, where the forced-labor camps (
laogai) inaugurated by Chairman Mao in 1950 are still being used to break down political opposition and provide the regime with an enormous (and no-cost) workforce.
The European Commission is willing to consider a mechanism to prevent the import into Europe of products from
laogai', Chinese forced labour camps, based on the model in force in the United States, Commissioner Stefan Fule told the European Parliament, on 23 September.