Word: pasqualini
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...Pasqualini notes that some Sinologists shrug off the very idea of labor camps, while others have arrived at an extreme estimate of 20 million detainees. He cites a concession often made by party propagandists that perhaps five per cent of the population is "being forced to build socialism," and notes that if you take two per cent as a reasonable figure for those who undergo "reform through labor" alone, this translates into about 16 million people. According to Pasqualini, no one who defies the government can stay out of jail, but there aren't any firm statistics by which...
...What Pasqualini has to say doesn't diminish the success of the Chinese in eliminating hunger, improving health, and accomplishing a spate of other feats that foreign visitors have admired, but it affirms the disturbing fact that they have had to cause deliberate suffering to reach these goals. Maybe the less complementary side of the Communist effort, which Pasqualini opens to view, has been neglected here because it deflates the natural and popular hope that an ideal society is possible and in-the-making somewhere in the world. This hope presupposes a society we could emulate if we were worthier...
...Pasqualini doesn't show any overt resentment toward his jailers in the book, either. His reaction to the first ideological supervisor he meets in the camps is typical of his later opinions of encounters with party representatives: "I was beginning to like this odd man more and more. Beneath his portentous manner he was human and generous. He just happened to take his job as cell monitor very seriously." The cell monitors are also prisoners, but they are handy with the Communist catechism and able to patiently lead the study sessions in which the members of a cell bring...
When a prisoner is particularly stubborn about admitting his "mistake" or "crime," he is "struggled" or put into solitary confinement as a last resort. No one is ever beaten or tortured, however, and it is, as Pasqualini says, fascinating to see how far the Chinese get by talking alone. Yet "struggling" is a pretty exhausting process mentally, if not physically. The victim sits surrounded by his fellow inmates, head bowed, as they hurl phrases like "Down with the obstinate prisoner" or "Confess or face the consequences." Sometimes forbidden words, "liar," "scum" or "son of a bitch" slip...
...nothing else, Pasqualini's captors insist on form. The inmates are kept near starvation and Pasqualini is horrified by the sight of his body in a mirror: His skin sags slack and bruised from contact with the communal plank bed. Nonetheless, when someone filches food, it cannot be from hunger, and he is "struggled." After three days of hooting, Pasqualini begs relief from the warder for everyone involved: "He admits he stole the bread. He was hungry. Isn't that enough? Do we have to make him say he is a dirty bourgeois because he was hungry?" The warder responds...