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The Laogai and Laojiao Systems (1954–2013)

Reform through labor (laogai) and re-education through labor (laojiao) were two parallel systems of forced-labor detention spanning six decades. Laogai applied to court-convicted criminals; laojiao was an administrative penalty — police could order 1–3 years of detention with no trial. Laojiao was abolished in 2013, but forced-labor detention did not end with it.

Time

1954 (Laogai Regulations) – December 2013 (laojiao abolished); laogai continues as the prison system

Place

Nationwide; laogai farms and factories in every province

Decision-makers

Mao Zedong (founder of the system); Luo Ruiqing (Public Security Minister, builder of laogai); 1957 State Council (drafted laojiao decision), 1st NPC Standing Committee (approved)

Background: a system learned from the USSR

The laogai's intellectual roots lie in the Soviet Gulag. In the early 1950s Mao invited Soviet experts to help build China's prison network. On September 7, 1954, the State Council promulgated the Regulations on Reform Through Labor, establishing "reform of criminals through labor" as the foundation of penal execution: laogai organs would apply "the policy of combining punishment with reform, and labor production with political education" to all counterrevolutionary and criminal offenders.

Laojiao grew more directly out of political campaigns. On August 25, 1955, the CCP Center's Directive on Thoroughly Purging Hidden Counterrevolutionaries first proposed it: those purged who could not be sentenced yet were "politically unfit" to remain in society should undergo "re-education through labor" — people who did not meet the threshold for criminal sentencing, but were deemed politically "unsuitable" for society, would be detained and forced to labor anyway.

On January 10, 1956, the Center ordered provinces and cities to set up laojiao institutions immediately. During the 1957 Anti-Rightist Campaign, large numbers of intellectuals were sent to laojiao; the detainee population swelled to roughly 500,000 in 1957–58.

Who decided

Mao Zedong was the system's founding architect. During the 1951 zhenfan campaign he proposed sentencing large numbers to lifetime laogai as a labor source; the 1954 Regulations were issued under his direction. Laogai was from the start a dual instrument of political repression and economic development — prisoners were sent to open frontier land, build roads, and mine.

Luo Ruiqing (Minister of Public Security, 1949–1959) built the laogai network in practice, handling site selection, construction, and logistics.

Laojiao's legal path: on August 1, 1957, the 78th meeting of the 1st NPC Standing Committee approved the State Council's Decision on Re-education Through Labor; on August 3 the State Council promulgated it. On November 29, 1979, the 12th meeting of the 5th NPC Standing Committee approved Supplementary Regulations, fixing terms at 1–3 years plus a possible 1-year extension. On December 28, 2013, the 6th meeting of the 12th NPC Standing Committee passed the Decision on Abolishing Laojiao Legal Provisions, formally ending the system.

Laogai vs. laojiao: two systems compared

This distinction is the key to the whole system. The names sound alike, but their legal nature differs completely:

Laojiao's defining feature was deprivation of liberty without trial. Aimed at "illegal but not criminal" behavior, decided by police, terms up to 4 years — and no explicit cap at all before 1979. This made it the handiest tool of every political campaign: the Anti-Rightist drive, the post-Cultural Revolution years, post-June Fourth, and the Falun Gong crackdown all filled laojiao camps without trials.

Who executed

The Ministry of Public Security originally ran both systems — laogai through its laogai bureau, laojiao through its laojiao bureau. In 1983 administration of both moved to the new Ministry of Justice (prison administration, laojiao administration). But decision power over laojiao always stayed with public security — the fundamental difference from laogai, where courts decide.

At the grassroots, 1957–58 saw laojiao proliferate to counties, communes, even production teams; for lack of space, many laojiao detainees were held together with laogai convicts under similar regimes. In 1961 the Ministry of Public Security admitted it had "widened the scope of detention, wrongly taking in people who did not qualify… causing serious abnormal deaths among laojiao personnel."

During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1969) laojiao was denounced as "a tool that feeds the enemy" and largely suspended; most laojiao enterprises were handed to local authorities in 1969. The system was formally restored in 1975.

Scale & methodology

Laogai and laojiao figures were never fully published by Chinese authorities. Competing accounts:

Laojiao composition (estimates): political prisoners ~5–10%, drug offenders up to 40% (nearly a third of laojiao camps were built for drug detainees in 1998), the rest petitioners, prostitution, theft and public-order cases. The political share swung wildly by era: dominant during the Anti-Rightist Campaign, a minority by the 1990s, with Falun Gong practitioners a major component after 1999 (exact figures disputed — unverified).

2013: the abolition of laojiao

On December 28, 2013, the 6th meeting of the 12th NPC Standing Committee passed the Decision on Abolishing Laojiao Legal Provisions, repealing the 1957 Decision and the 1979 Supplement. After 56 years, laojiao formally ended.

The proximate trigger was the Tang Hui case (2012): a Yongzhou mother, detained in laojiao for 18 months after petitioning over her daughter's rape, provoked national outrage. Earlier, Chongqing village official Ren Jianyu's 2-year laojiao term for retweeting a microblog post (2011) had drawn similar condemnation. The official line: laojiao's "historic mission has been completed," its functions superseded by the Criminal Law, the Public Security Administration Punishments Law, and the Anti-Drug Law.

Transitional terms: laojiao decisions made before abolition remained valid; those serving terms were released with remaining time waived; personnel were reassigned and sites repurposed.

After abolition

Abolition did not end forced detention. Verifiable subsequent developments, carefully worded:

• The laogai (prison) system continues: renamed "prisons" in 1994, forced labor as penal execution continues today. China's Criminal Law still requires able-bodied prisoners to labor.
• Repurposing of laojiao sites: some became compulsory drug-rehabilitation centers, detention houses, or "legal education centers." No systematic official list of conversions has been published.
• International skepticism: the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) expressed "legitimate doubts" about whether forced-labor detention had truly ceased. (Quoted verbatim; judgment left to the reader.)
• Xinjiang "re-education camps": the post-2017 mass detention facilities drew international scrutiny. Beijing calls them "vocational education and training centers" and denies continuity with laojiao; critics see parallels in scale and coercion. Both accounts are presented at the Xinjiang page; no verdict here.

Who opposed

Harry Wu (1937–2016) was the best-known opponent of the laogai system. Sentenced to laogai in 1960 for "counterrevolution," he spent 19 years in the camps (1960–1979). After emigrating to the US in 1985, he repeatedly slipped back into China to film the camps clandestinely (footage aired on 60 Minutes and the BBC), founded the Laogai Research Foundation in 1992, and opened the Laogai Museum in Washington, D.C. in 2008. His camp lists and scale estimates are among the principal English-language sources on the system.

Legal scholars: Chinese jurists long attacked laojiao on constitutional grounds — violating constitutional protections of personal liberty and the Legislation Law's requirement that liberty restrictions be set by statute. NPC delegates had tabled abolition motions for years before 2013.

Case protagonists like Tang Hui and Ren Jianyu: the public outcry over their cases is widely seen as the direct force behind the 2013 abolition.

Impact

Institutional legacy: laogai and laojiao together form one of the longest-running, widest-reaching detention systems in modern Chinese history. They normalized long-term detention without trial as a routine governance tool and supplied a ready-made channel for every political campaign — zhenfan, the Anti-Rightist drive, the Cultural Revolution, June Fourth, Falun Gong: each mass crackdown swelled the camps.

Economic dimension: laogai products — from farm goods to exports — were long part of local economies. The Laogai Research Foundation documented prisoner-made goods entering domestic and world markets. After the 1990s, prison enterprises lost competitiveness in the market economy, but the economic function never fully vanished.

Legal dimension: laojiao's abolition was a landmark in China's human-rights legal process — but it abolished the name laojiao, not necessarily the practice of detention without trial. The legal safeguards of the various post-abolition "education" and "training" centers remain to be verified. This site keeps the record open.

Places: Jiabiangou, Chaka and Tuanhe

Jiabiangou (Jiuquan, Gansu) is one of the best-known place names of the laogai system. The Jiabiangou farm, set up in 1957 on the Gobi desert northeast of Jiuquan, received about 3,000 people between 1957 and 1960 — overwhelmingly "Rightists" labeled in Gansu's government offices, schools and factories during the Anti-Rightist Campaign: teachers, cadres, doctors and engineers made up a large share. They reclaimed wasteland, dug irrigation channels and farmed on starvation-level rations. During the nationwide famine of 1959–1961, the farm's food supply collapsed and detainees died in large numbers from hunger, edema and other diseases, buried where they fell in the surrounding desert. No official death toll has ever been published. Yang Xianhui's Chronicles of Jiabiangou, based on years of survivor interviews, Ai Xiaoming's documentary The Epic of Jiabiangou, and numerous survivor memoirs commonly put the deaths above 1,000, with some studies estimating roughly 1,300 or more; what is certain is that when the farm was dissolved in 1961, only a few hundred of the roughly 3,000 sent there walked out of the Gobi alive (survivor accounts differ; figures are presented side by side here without a verdict). Survivors were transferred to other farms around Jiuquan or gradually released. After the "Rightists" were "rehabilitated" in 1979, some Jiabiangou survivors settled in Gansu. From the 2000s, survivors and victims' families made their own pilgrimages to the site and raised simple markers in the desert; after the 2010s such commemorations were restricted, no official memorial has ever been built there, and circulation of works such as Yang's book has been curtailed on the mainland.

Chaka, Qinghai, and the plateau camps. Sparsely populated, high and bitterly cold, Qinghai Province was a major destination for laogai prisoners. The Chaka salt lake facility in Wulan County (outwardly the Chaka Salt Works) ran on prisoner labor — detainees harvested salt by hand in the lake — while farms and factories around Xining, Delingha and Golmud held "counterrevolutionaries" and "Rightists" shipped in from across the country. In the famine years of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Qinghai's camps also saw severe food shortages and abnormal deaths, but the archives have never been opened and the death toll cannot be reliably reconstructed; survivor memoirs are the main source. Qinghai's laogai farms were converted into prisons or local enterprises from the 1980s onward; the salt works and farms still operate, their history rarely mentioned in public.

Tuanhe, Beijing. The Tuanhe camp in Daxing District — formerly the Tuanhe farm — was the emblematic site of the laojiao system, holding detainees from Beijing and the surrounding region who performed farm labor and processing work. After the Falun Gong crackdown began in 1999, Tuanhe became one of the main sites holding male Falun Gong practitioners sent to laojiao; the Beijing Women's Laojiao Camp (Xin'an, also in Daxing) held large numbers of female practitioners and drew sustained attention from international rights groups. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International documented allegations of torture and deaths in custody at Tuanhe and similar facilities in reports through the 2000s; Chinese officials consistently denied torture and attributed deaths in custody to illness and other "normal" causes — both accounts are presented here side by side. After laojiao was abolished in 2013, Tuanhe and similar sites were closed or converted; no systematic official account of their new uses has been published.

After the sentence: "retained for employment." One easily overlooked part of the laogai system came after release. Large numbers of prisoners who had completed their sentences were not sent home but "retained for employment" (liuchang jiuye) at the farm: nominally free workers drawing minimal wages, in practice forbidden to leave the farm's area, their household registration fixed at the farm, their families pressed to join them, their children born and raised there. At some large farms the "employed persons" numbered in the tens of thousands — legally free, in daily life under controls little different from prisoners'. The arrangement let farms keep their labor force through release years. After 1979 central policy ordered localities to clear the retained population in batches and let people return to their home places, but implementation dragged on for years and the total size of this population was never fully published.

From abolition to Xinjiang: continuity and dispute

The limits of the 2013 abolition. It is undisputed that, at abolition, everyone still serving laojiao was released with the remainder of their terms waived. But in the same period, multiple rights organizations argued that detention without trial did not disappear with the name laojiao: compulsory drug rehabilitation under the Anti-Drug Law runs two years, extendable by one, decided by public security organs, and a substantial share of drug-rehabilitation facilities are renamed laojiao camps; "legal education centers" (commonly called "brainwashing classes") aimed at Falun Gong practitioners and other groups had no published legal basis or fixed terms, and detention there likewise bypassed the courts. Amnesty International's December 2013 report was titled Changing the Soup but Not the Medicine? — Abolishing Re-education Through Labour in China, arguing that some camps had simply changed their signboards while continuing to hold the same populations. Chinese officials rejected that judgment, holding that all such facilities are lawfully established and different in nature from laojiao. Both accounts stand here side by side: the renaming of institutions and reassignment of personnel are confirmed facts; whether the successor facilities amount to laojiao in substance remains the dispute.

The Xinjiang camps and their comparison with laogai and laojiao became the center of international controversy. From 2017, large-scale detention facilities were built across Xinjiang. The Chinese government calls them "vocational education and training centers," says trainees enrolled voluntarily to study the national common language, legal knowledge and job skills, and announced in 2019 that all trainees had "graduated." On August 31, 2022, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights published its assessment of Xinjiang, finding a pattern of "large-scale arbitrary detention" of Uyghurs and other groups and stating that the violations "may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity" (the report's own wording). The Chinese government issued a lengthy rebuttal, firmly rejecting the report and denying any connection between the centers and laojiao or any forced labor. The United States passed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act in 2021, effective June 21, 2022, imposing a "rebuttable presumption" that bars imports of goods made wholly or in part in Xinjiang on forced-labor grounds; the EU, UK and Canada adopted supply-chain scrutiny measures of their own. Critics draw the parallel with laogai and laojiao from mass detention without court conviction, together with witness testimony and satellite-imagery research on forced labor; Beijing denies any connection whatsoever. Under this site's editorial rules both accounts are presented without a verdict; the detailed record is at the Xinjiang page.

Commemoration and research today. Harry Wu died in April 2016 in Honduras while on a work trip, aged 79. The Laogai Research Foundation and the Laogai Museum in Washington, D.C. have continued operating since his death and remain the principal overseas repositories of laogai archives, survivor testimony and records of laogai products. Inside China, the history of laogai and laojiao appears in no textbook, sites such as Jiabiangou have no official memorials, and the space for survivors to speak publicly keeps narrowing; the survivor generation is passing quickly, and oral-history rescue work is carried out mainly by overseas institutions, independent scholars and documentary filmmakers. No official history of the laojiao system itself has ever been published — what the six-decade system did, and how many people it touched, awaits the opening of the archives.