Individual miscarriages of justice have helped to turn Chinese public opinion against the decades-old form of administrative detention known as reeducation through labor RTL or laojiao. Most scrutiny has been focused on the arbitrary manner in which police determine sentencing.
Considerably less attention has been paid to the myriad problems inside RTL facilities. Domestic censors quickly attempted to minimize the impact of the article that revealed torture, frequent hunger strikes, and exploitative labor practices. Coercive labor got fuller exposure in May in an article published by Southern Weekly translated below.
Stamping out low-level corruption is one of many reasons for central authorities to thoroughly reform RTL, but the abundance of licit and illicit economic opportunities for local authorities also helps explain why there has been longstanding resistance to reform.
Chai Huiqun Southern Weekly , May 2, Southern Weekly found three of the officers and conducted separate interviews with them, cross-checking their accounts against each other and verifying those accounts against the relevant legal documents. This idea clearly violates RTL policies but everyone thinks this way. All six RTL officers appealed. Three officers involved confirmed the facts of the case to Southern Weekly and said that, to a certain degree, the problems involved were universal.
The incident came about because of the death of an RTL detainee. The person was named Hu Minghong; he died after drinking industrial alcohol. Perhaps you might find it odd: how does a person in RTL come upon industrial alcohol? There are clear regulations strictly forbidding alcohol from being brought into detention facilities. At the time, the facility was processing liquor boxes for a company. At first, they used sparkling wine as a cleaning agent, but later they felt that was too expensive.
