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The Emergence of Labour Camps in Shandong Province, 1942–1950*

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The Emergence of Labour Camps in Shandong Province, 1942–1950* Research Report The Emergence of Labour Camps in Shandong Province, 1942–1950* Frank Diko¨ tter ABSTRACT This article analyses the emergence of labour camps in the CCP base area of Shandong province from 1942 to 1950. By using original archival material, it provides a detailed understanding of the concrete workings of the penal system in a specific region, thus giving flesh and bone to the more general story of the prison in China. It also shows that in response to military instability, organizational problems and scarce resources, the local CCP in Shandong abandoned the idea of using prisons (jiansuo)toconfine convicts much earlier than the Yan’an authorities, moving towards a system of mobile labour teams and camps dispersed throughout the countryside which displayed many of the key hallmarks of the post-1949 laogai. Local authorities continued to place faith in a penal philosophy of reformation (ganhua) which was shared by nationalists and communists, but shifted the moral space where reformation should be carried out from the prison to the labour camp, thus introducing a major break in the history of confinement in 20th-century China. Scholarship on the history of the laogai –orreform through labour camps –inthe People’s Republic of China is generally based either on an analysis of official documents or on information gathered from former prisoners.1 The major difficulty encountered in research on the laogai is the lack of more substantial empirical evidence, as internal documents and archives produced by prison administrations, public security bureaus or other security departments have so far remained beyond the reach of historians.2 A similar difficulty characterizes research on the history of crime and punishment in CCP-controlled areas before 1949. Patricia Griffin’s remarkable book on the communist treatment of counter-revolu- tionaries from 1924 to 1949 relied mainly on documents seized by the Kuomintang in campaigns against the communists in the 1930s.3 Her book included a pioneering chapter on prison management, which was * The author would like to thank Michael Dutton and Jean-Luc Domenach for helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. Research for this article was carried out thanks to a research award from the British Council. 1. See Michael Dutton, Policing and Punishment in China: From Patriarchy to “the People” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Jean-Luc Domenach, L’archipel oublie´ (Paris: Fayard, 1992); Harry Wu, Laogai: The Chinese Gulag (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992); James D. Seymour and Richard Anderson, New Ghosts, Old Ghosts: Prisons and Labor Reform Camps in China (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997). 2. However, see Frank Diko¨tter, “Crime and punishment in post-liberation China: the prisoners of a Beijing gaol in the 1950s,” The China Quarterly, No. 149 (March 1997), pp. 147–159. 3. Patricia E. Griffin, The Chinese Communist Treatment of Counterrevolutionaries, 1924–1949 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976). The China Quarterly, 2003 804 The China Quarterly based predominantly on a 1946 report from the Taihang Administrative Office.4 Although her work was published almost a quarter of a century ago, more recent publications from mainland China have continued to rely on similar evidence, thus patching together a small number of official reports from very different regions and periods to reconstruct a penal history which is heavily centred on the base area around Yan’an.5 The official reports and newspaper items used by historians, moreover, tend to be more normative than descriptive: they may reflect official prison policy in Yan’an but provide precious little evidence on actual penal practices. This research report, in contrast, is based on archival material pertaining directly to penal administration in Shandong from 1942 to 1950.6 The use of original source material enables a much more detailed understanding of the concrete workings of labour camps in a specific region, thus giving flesh and bone to the more general story of the prison in China and providing a first building block towards a more nuanced and authoritative history of the laogai in the PRC. On the basis of fresh evidence, moreover, it is argued that penal policy in Shandong evolved primarily in response to military instability, local constraints and practical problems: direct references to penal ideas and practices from the Soviet Union only appeared at the end of the 1940s. The pragmatic policies pursued by judicial authorities in Shandong reflected a broader shift of the local party towards the concentration of human resources and organizational structures in a decade marked by war.7 Contrary to Yan’an, the base area in Shandong was blockaded, invaded and in some places conquered by the Japanese (1941–42) or the Kuomintang (1946–47). As a consequence of these rapidly shifting military situations, no fixed spaces of confinement divided into cells and referred to as “prisons” (jiansuo or jianyu)inboth communist areas and nationalist territory appeared in the Shandong base area: instead, highly mobile “instruction teams” (xunyudui) during the war were followed by relatively independent “penal education camps” (jiaoyusuo)or“education through labour camps” (laojiaosuo) dispersed in small teams throughout 4. She initially published this chapter as an article; see Patricia Griffin, “Prison management in the Kiangsi and Yenan periods,” The China Quarterly, No. 58 (June 1974), pp. 310–331. 5. Zhang Xipo and Han Yanlong, Zhongguo geming fazhi shi (The History of the Revolutionary Law System in China) (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1987). 6. I have used the Shandong Provincial Archives, Jinan, series C23, which encompass the quanzong G1 to G52 of the “revolutionary period”; I also consulted a collection of selected archives published by the local party and available in the Shandong Provincial Archives (Shandong geming lishi ziliao xuanbian (Jinan: Shandong sheng dang’anguan, 1980–87), hereafter SDLS), as well as judicial periodicals and handbooks from the region preserved in the archives of the Investigation Bureau, Taipei. Shandong province was divided into several gongshu, which I translate as “districts,” which in turn were divided into zhuanshu,or “sub-districts,” the next administrative unit being the xian,or“county.” 7. This shift in policy has been analysed by Elise Anne DeVido, “The making of the communist party-state in Shandong province, 1927–1952,” Harvard University, PhD thesis, 1995, a useful study which relies on published PRC documents; see also Elise Anne DeVido, “Wartime mobilisation in the Shandong base area,” in Feng Chongyi and David S.G. Goodman (eds.), North China at War, 1937–1945: The Social Ecology of Revolution (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000). Labour Camps in Shandong Province 805 the countryside. The local CCP in Shandong thus abandoned the prison much earlier than the Yan’an authorities, moving towards a system of labour camps which displayed many of the key hallmarks of the post- 1949 laogai, based on “reform through labour” in economically self- sufficient camps. They continued to place faith in a penal philosophy of repentance and reformation (ganhua) which first appeared during the late Qing and was shared by nationalists and communists, but shifted the moral space where reformation should be carried out from the prison to the labour camp, introducing a major break in the history of confinement in 20th-century China.8 From Instruction Teams to Labour Camps The custodial sentence only appeared in China after the abolishment of traditional penalties, including corporal punishment, during the first dec- ade of the 20th century. As the custodial sentence became the most common form of punishment, the number of prisons drastically increased in order to accommodate a rising tide of inmates. During the republican period (1911–1949), county magistrates, city mayors, provincial gover- nors and central governments, with varying degrees of success, pursued an extensive programme of prison building in line with modern penal principles current in Europe. Modernizing elites viewed the reformation of criminals as an integral part of a much larger project of national regeneration in which social cohesion, economic development and state power could only be obtained by moulding obedient subjects. Based on the idea of reformation, the custodial sentence was, on the one hand, part of a global movement towards penal reform and, on the other, a local reconfiguration of a more traditional faith in the transformative capacity of education. In resonance with the Mencian view of human nature as inherently good and extremely malleable, the notion of reformation sustained the belief that criminals could achieve individual self-improve- ment with proper institutional guidance.9 The prison was also adopted by the CCP, who replicated to a very large extent the penal philosophy of reformation through education as well as the more general penal terminology created by the prison reformers since the late Qing. The primary function of prisons during the Jiangxi Soviet (1924–33), however, was the incapacitation of political enemies, although poor security and inadequate sanitation subverted even this relatively straightforward goal from the very start. Scarce resources also limited the scope of imprisonment, and prisons were gradually forced to take on a productive purpose: the high costs of incarceration, it was thought, could be reduced by putting prisoners to work. As a result of the United Front policy during the Yan’an period (1934–44), the emphasis was finally shifted towards the reformative function of prisons: education should be 8. On reformation (ganhua) and the prison in modern China, see Frank Diko¨tter, Crime, Punishment and the Prison in Modern China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 9. A comparison of communist prisons with the Kuomintang prison system is clearly beyond the scope of this article, although a detailed study of the latter can be found in ibid. 806 The China Quarterly primary and punishment secondary, as prisoners should be “reformed” (zixin)tobecome disciplined members of a communist society.
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