Is this really the end of re-education through labour?

Much ink has been spilled during the past week over the informal announcement that China's police-imposed long-term punishment of "re-education through labour" would, by the end of the year, "cease to be used". The newly appointed head of the Communist Party's all-powerful political-legal commission, Meng Jianzhu , made this announcement at a national judicial conference. Understandably, since nothing less than the constitutional protection of 1.3 billion people against arbitrary imprisonment is at stake, Chinese and foreign commentators have been scrutinising the inscrutable.

What did Meng mean? There are many possibilities. Did he simply mean that, in the exercise of its discretion, the police would at least temporarily suspend sending a couple of hundred thousand defenceless people to labour camps each year? Did he also mean that, in the coming months, the more than 300 existing re-education through labour sites would be emptied of their current occupants.

Or did he mean even less - that the government would only change the name of this notorious punishment but keep it in substance? Ever since its formal establishment in 1957, the police have lobbied tenaciously to retain this instrument of control, which subjects individuals to long-term detention in the name of social "harmony" without bothering to seek their indictment by prosecutors and trial, conviction, sentencing and appellate review by courts.

One thing Meng's statement plainly did not foreshadow is the end of labour camps. Contrary to some media reports, he dealt solely with the "non-criminal" or "administrative" punishment known as "re-education through labour" dispensed by the police alone, not with the criminal punishment to which many offenders are sentenced by courts. Many convicted criminals will continue to be sent to labour camps or conventional prisons.

Until two decades ago, criminal punishment in a labour camp was formally known as "reform through labour", which created confusion with the "non-criminal" punishment of re-education through labour, especially since the two types of offenders were often confined together.

It is possible, of course, to interpret Meng's statement to mean that re-education through labour might soon be abolished, not suspended or perpetuated under another name. Indeed, a decade ago, during a brief period of popular pressure for political-legal reform, some influential Chinese experts flatly predicted that the National People's Congress was about to abolish it. Yet that did not happen, and there was so little agreement about the content of the proposed legislation that no draft was made public. A similar attempt failed in 2010.

Today, the demand for a law to eliminate re-education through labour appears to be stronger. It is based on two claims supported by the constitution and recent legislation. The first is that all official detentions, whether called "administrative" or "criminal", must be authorised not by executive regulation alone but by a formal enactment of the NPC.