| Summary: | Duration: 00:50:00
Laogai is the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet gulag. According to estimates, over 50 million people have passed through the laogai camps since their inception during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The aim of the camps as well as the methods used there are similar to those once employed in the Soviet Union: torture, executions, and slave labor. What is different however in the Chinese laogai is the emphasis on “the re-education” of the prisoners through work. With Harry Wu’s help, a Chinese dissident living in the US, who spent 19 years in the work camps, the film manages to document the existence of 1,100 camps, in which, at the time of the film being released, over five million people were in prison.
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