In China's Siberia, Prison Means Business

----------------------------------------------------------- U.S. officials on June 19 reported a preliminary agreement had been reached with China to ban trade in goods made by Chinese prison labor. The draft must be approved by both governments but, as the following reports suggest, it will be difficult to reform China's "reform" system. -----------------------------------------------------------

ON THE QINGHAI-TIBET HIGHWAY, China - Mile after mile, one of the world's highest roads cuts a swath through a windswept plateau, punctuated occasionally by the barbed-wire-topped walls of prison camps.

"Those walls were built by the prisoners themselves," says a resident of this remote region in northwestern China, chatting in the privacy of a car parked a dozen yards from a watchtower manned by an armed soldier.

In front of us is one of the biggest prison camps in Qinghai province; on its north side alone, the two-story brick wall stretches for almost 2 miles.

Two signs at the main gate blandly proclaim it to be the Plateau Electrical Switch Factory and the Qinghai Hydroelectric Equipment Factory. In fact, it's the No. 5 Labor Reform Detachment.

When you mention Qinghai to ordinary Chinese, they shudder, for it's a central component of China's gulag - the penal system that houses millions of criminals and political dissidents. Their forced labor, in prison farms and factories, produces revenue for police and government ministries which have been exhorted by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping to create wealth.

"I call Qinghai China's Siberia," said Harry Wu, who survived 19 years in Chinese labor camps and describes the prison system in a just-published book.

For centuries, Chinese emperors exiled traitorous officials to a living death in Qinghai (pronounced "Ching-high") Today, a little-known policy of "forced job placement" means that many are doomed to remain in Qinghai after their prison terms end. Stripped of their urban-residence permits, prisoners from cities such as Beijing and Shanghai are unable to return to their former homes.

Upon "release," they may be assigned work here - in the same prison factories under the same police overseers - for the rest of their lives.

"They never get out. They never go back to their homes," said Wu, 55, who left China in 1985 and is now a researcher at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, Calif.

Wu's prison term began in 1956 when, as a 19-year-old geology student, he was arrested as a "rightist" after criticizing the Soviet invasion of Hungary.

PROVINCE OF PRISONERS

The gulag permeates Qinghai more than any other province. Because many convicts can never leave, one-quarter of its 4.3 million people are prisoners, ex-prisoners and their families, Wu said.

In Xining, the provincial capital, truckloads of condemned criminals, with shaved heads and dressed in tattered black-and-blue prison garb, are sentenced to death before huge crowds.

"When I was in middle school, we had to attend every single one," said a television producer who grew up in Qinghai. "It was revolting."

All but seriously ill prisoners must work. Xining's downtown shopping street, Nanda, is lined with prison-factory outlets selling toys, jade carvings, foam-rubber mattresses and machine tools.

Official Chinese figures put the national total at 1.26 million people in prisons, "laogai" (reform through labor) camps and re-education-through-labor camps. But in his book "Laogai, the Chinese Gulag," Wu estimates the actual figure is more than 10 times that.

China has jailed more than 30 million people in the past 40 years, and Wu says that at least 15 million are still in the camps, including in forced job placement. Of these, he estimates that one in 10 are political prisoners, although some investigators believe the percentage is lower.

NO ESCAPING `ROOF OF THE WORLD'

In Qinghai, common criminals serve their time in urban prison factories. Counter-revolutionaries - Beijing's term for political prisoners - often are banished to remote prison camps such as Gandu and Tanggemu.

Gandu, about 120 miles southeast of Xining, is the site of Qinghai Prison No. 1. Its inmates include ethnic Tibetans from Qinghai who rebelled in the late 1950s against Chinese rule.

Tanggemu, 180 miles southwest of Xining, is Qinghai's most notorious penal farm.

Tanggemu's 20,000 prisoners raise wheat and Tibetan barley. Those who fail to meet production quotas may be beaten or handcuffed or lose parts of their rations. Those who disobey orders or try to flee may have their sentences lengthened or face solitary confinement.

Few escape. The windswept Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, sometimes romantically called the "Roof of the World," is in reality a barren death trap. A runaway has almost no chance of finding food or shelter. Prisoners are easily identified; as under the Qing Dynasty, their heads are shaved.

Although Tanggemu stretches for 42 miles, few Chinese maps show it.

`OUR PRISONS ARE OUR SECRET

"Every country has its secrets. Our prisons are our secret," said Dong Maicang, deputy chief of Qinghai's Labor Reform Bureau, which operates the province's prison factories and labor camps.

Requests to visit a forced-labor site were denied but, in what provincial officials described as a major breakthrough, the bureau gave its first interview to two foreign reporters.

For 50 minutes, Dong and two colleagues sidestepped questions and described a benign system in which prisoners receive cash bonuses for meeting production quotas and watch television while in solitary confinement.

Qinghai residents, however, tell of prisoners standing waist-deep in toxic tanning fluids at a prison leather factory. Nearby, at the brick factory, convicts are forced to enter hot kilns to remove bricks - a job ordinary workers refuse to do.

Rev. Meng Zhaohan, a cheerful 83-year-old who heads Xining's Protestant Society, spent 25 years in the gulag system. Arrested for his evangelical activities, he spent nine years in prison and 16 in "forced job placement" as a construction worker.

Meng, who was released in 1980, said prison conditions have improved. "We used to sleep on straw scattered on a mud floor," he said. "Now prisoners have real buildings, more space, a concrete floor. They sleep 10 to a cell, on wooden boards on the floor."

At Tanggemu, though, the solitary-confinement cell is nicknamed "xiao hao" ("the little number"). It's a metal, coffin-like box so small that its occupants must crouch, said a Qinghai resident whose friend was sent to the prison.