Crackdown Puts 37,000 in Chinese Labor Camps
China has condemned 37,000 men to forced labor at camps in the remote northwestern region of Xinjiang since Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping began a sweeping anti-crime campaign in 1983, the official New China News Agency said Wednesday.
The influx of prisoners into the large, isolated camps, known in China as “reform-through-labor farms,” is one of the major offshoots of Deng’s nationwide drive to “crack down harshly and swiftly on serious crime,” launched in August 1983.
Deng’s anti-crime campaign, bolstered by an extension of the death penalty to cover dozens of crimes ranging from murder to theft and “hooliganism,” has seen thousands of Chinese executed, according to Western diplomats and human rights organizations.
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