China's most prominent dissident, Wei Jingsheng, was detained for 24 hours by police at the weekend, barely six months after being released from 14 years in labour camps. His detention just five days after his meeting with United States human rights officials is bound to provoke another round in the Washington-Beijing trade dispute over China's use of forced labour in its booming economic exports. Hans Vriens reports on life in the Chinese gulag.
IF Alexander Solzhenitsyn had been Chinese, we would call this kind of vast, scattered network of forced-labour camps a laogai rather than a ''gulag''. Its most prominent former inmate, Wei Jingsheng, might be as famous as Nelson Mandela or Andrei Sakharov.
Outside China, virtually nothing is known about the world's largest ever gulag, nor about the conditions in which an estimated 20 million forced labourers - thousands of them political prisoners - struggle to survive. Beijing has successfully kept the scale and significance of its ''bamboo gulag'' hidden. Wei Jingsheng was concealed from the outside world for 14 years, an achievement unequalled by either Moscow or Pretoria.
On May 29, 1979, Wei, an electrician at Beijing Zoo, was labelled a ''counter-revolutionary'' and spirited away to the laogai - a euphemistic term for ''rehabilitation through labour''. His crime: openly promoting the idea of a democratic China - the so-called ''fifth modernisation''. Patriarch Deng Xiaoping had launched the first four reforms earlier the same year. Wei expressed his reaction on a large poster, which he pasted on the so-called ''democracy wall'' in Beijing.
In the poster, Wei pleaded for the introduction of the fifth reform, ''as a protection against Deng, the dictator''. The police had little trouble tracking him down. The young electrician had added his address to the bottom of the poster to encourage sympathisers to continue the discussion at his home.
Until recently, however, Wei had little chance to discuss anything. For most of the past 14 years, the ''counter-revolutionary'' has been held in solitary confinement, in a cell measuring just two metres by three metres. When his health permitted, Wei was forced to work. He panned salt near the city of Tangshan and herded sheep among the high peaks of the northern Qinghai mountains, formerly part of Tibet.