Orville Schell’s 30-Year Secret: Exposing China’s Secret Prisons

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Mina Kim (1:36)

Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. Orville Schell has been a leading scholar on China for more than 50 years, visiting the nation since the 1970s. He's Asia Society's Director of the Center on US-China Relations and former Dean of UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.

In 1991, Schell helped CBS's 60 Minutes conduct an exposé into China's forced labor camps, where prisoners were making products that were being secretly exported to American markets. But he shelved the written account he'd promised then to the New Yorker until now. Schell's new book called China's Secret Prisons recounts the making of the 60 Minutes episode and how forced labor, despite its illegality, still supplies US and other global markets today. Orville Schell joins me now. Welcome to Forum.

Orville Schell (2:25)

Pleasure.

Mina Kim (2:26)

So Orville, help me understand, first of all, just the origins and theory behind the state-imposed forced labor system in China.

Orville Schell (2:35)

Well, you know, when China became the People's Republic of China in 1949, after Mao Zedong defeated Chiang Kai-shek and he fled to Taiwan, they adopted sort of wholesale the Soviet system of government.

You know, all of the relationship between the party and the state, all of the structures were just adopted wholesale. And part of that, of course, was Russia's system of penal institutions. But interestingly, China added a dimension to what Russians had long used in Siberia, which is namely just imprison people and you make them work and it's punishment. But Mao Zedong had a kind of a new element he threw into the pot, and that was that trying to follow the dictum of Stalin, that part of socialist revolution was to re-engineer the human soul.

He thought, okay, it's not just enough to put people in prison. We need to add a new, another element, and that was thought reform, what we have referred to in this country often as brainwashing. So the idea was that if you could help people understand their political incorrectness, the incorrectness of their thinking, that was as crucial as to make them pay penance for their so-called political crimes. So they added that element. So reform through labor camps meant that you got reformed by working for the state at no pay, or extremely low pay in rare cases. But you also had to reform yourself politically, and also, although Mao never wrote about this psychologically.

Mina Kim (4:36)

So then if it was about thought reform, the people that were there were there because they were political prisoners, essentially, because they said and quote unquote thought things that were wrong according to the government.

Orville Schell (4:47)

Yes, there's this sort of wonderfully quaint term in Chinese, incorrect thought, and that that thought needs to be quote rectified.

And it can be rectified if the party compels people while in prison or even out of prison to go to all these struggle sessions and study meetings. And I went to a bunch of these when I was first in China when Mao was still alive and the Cultural Revolution was still going on. I mean, these headbangingly boring meetings where you had to read some document and you had to deliver self-criticisms about your own thinking and even confessions. And these were sort of exercises that really did undermine, I think, people's belief in themselves. Because if in fact there's a punishment and you're in prison, shouldn't there logically also be a crime?