Location of Jiuquan Prefecture within Gansu (China)

Jiabiangou Labor Camp () is a former farm labor camp (laogai) located in the area under the administration of

Jiuquan Jiuquan, formerly known as Suzhou, is a prefecture-level city in the northwesternmost part of Gansu Province in the People's Republic of China. It is more than wide from east to west, occupying , although its built-up area is mostly located in i ...

in the northwestern desert region of

Gansu Gansu (, ; alternately romanized as Kansu) is a province in Northwest China. Its capital and largest city is Lanzhou, in the southeast part of the province. The seventh-largest administrative district by area at , Gansu lies between the Tibe ...

Province.Howard W. French (2009): Survivors' Stories From China, New York Times, New York Edition, August 25, 2009, page C1
/ref> The camp was in use during the

Anti-Rightist Campaign The Anti-Rightist Campaign () in the People's Republic of China, which lasted from 1957 to roughly 1959, was a political campaign to purge alleged "Rightists" within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the country as a whole. The campaign was ...

in the years from 1957 to 1961. During its operation, it held approximately 3,000 political prisoners, of whom about 2,500 died at Jiabiangou, mostly of starvation.Wen Huang (2009): I hope to be remembered as a writer who speaks the truth, guest post at Three Percent - a resource for international literature at the University of Rochester
/ref>
/ref>

History

Jiabiangou was a camp for "

re-education through labor Re-education through labor (RTL; ), abbreviated ''laojiao'' () was a system of administrative detention on Mainland China. Active from 1957 to 2013, the system was used to detain persons who were accused of committing minor crimes such as pe ...

" that was used to imprison intellectuals and former government officials who were declared to be "rightist" in the

Anti-Rightist Movement The Anti-Rightist Campaign () in the People's Republic of China, which lasted from 1957 to roughly 1959, was a political campaign to purge alleged "Rightists" within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the country as a whole. The campaign was l ...

of the

Chinese Communist Party The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), officially the Communist Party of China (CPC), is the founding and sole ruling party of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Under the leadership of Mao Zedong, the CCP emerged victorious in the Chinese Ci ...

. The camp is located to the northeast of

,James D. Seymour, Richard Anderson (1998): New ghosts, old ghosts: prisons and labor reform camps in China, And East Gate Book, p. 179, footnote B
/ref> on the edge of the

Badain Jaran Desert The Badain Jaran Desert () is a desert in China which spans the provinces of Gansu, Ningxia and Inner Mongolia. It covers an area of . By size it is the third largest desert in China. This desert is home to some of the tallest stationary dunes o ...

. Some inmates were sent to Jiabiangou on the grounds that they had relatives who had owned a business or held a position in the

Kuomintang The Kuomintang (KMT), also referred to as the Guomindang (GMD), the Nationalist Party of China (NPC) or the Chinese Nationalist Party (CNP), is a major political party in the Republic of China, initially on the Chinese mainland and in Ta ...

government. Originally designed as a prison to hold 40 to 50 criminals, the camp was overcrowded with 3,000 political prisoners. As a consequence, agriculture in the camp area was limited to small patches of grassland in an oasis surrounded by salt marshes and desert. Yet, no external food supplies were offered to the prisoners. The starvation at Jiabianguo took place during the

Great Leap Forward The Great Leap Forward (Second Five Year Plan) of the People's Republic of China (PRC) was an economic and social campaign led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from 1958 to 1962. CCP Chairman Mao Zedong launched the campaign to reconstr ...

(1958-1961) and the

Great Chinese Famine The Great Chinese Famine () was a period between 1959 and 1961 in the history of the People's Republic of China (PRC) characterized by widespread famine. Some scholars have also included the years 1958 or 1962. It is widely regarded as the dead ...

(1959-1962), which is estimated to have caused many millions of excess deaths. The result was a famine in Jiabiangou that started in the fall of 1960. In order to survive, prisoners ate leaves, tree barks, worms and rats, human and animal waste, and flesh from dead inmates. The bodies of the dead were left unburied on the sand dunes surrounding the camp as the surviving prisoners were too weak to bury them. In December 1960, senior officials of the Communist Party learned of the situation in the camp and launched an investigation. As a result, amnesties were issued to the survivors and the camp's remaining population evacuated early in 1961. In October 1961, the government ordered the closure of Jiabiangou as well as a cover-up. Authorities in GansuN.N. (2007): The Unknown Gulag, PRI's The World, December 4, 2007
/ref> assigned a doctor to the fabrication of medical records for every dead inmate stating various natural causes of death, but never mentioning starvation.

Memorial

Partially fictionalized accounts of firsthand recollections from 13 survivors of the camp have been presented in the book ''Woman from Shanghai: Tales of Survival From a Chinese Labor Camp'' by

Yang Xianhui Yang Xianhui (; born 1946) is a contemporary Chinese novelist. His fiction portrays life during the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Great Chinese Famine The Great Chinese Famine () was a period between 1959 and 1961 in the history of the Pe ...

Xianhui Yang (2009): Woman from Shanghai, published by Pantheon, a division of Random House, Inc.
/ref> (originally published as "Farewell to Jiabiangou", , translated into English by Wen Huang with support from a 2007 PEN Translation Fund Grant. The book was adapted into Wang Bing's 2010 film '' The Ditch''.La Biennale di Venezia: ''The Ditch'' by Chinese director Wang Bing is the Surprise Film
/ref> Another account based on interviews with survivors is given in ''The Tragedy at Jiabiangou'' by Xu Zhao (2008), Laogai Research Foundation Publications . Remains of the camp, including the graveyards, are unmaintained and heavily guarded to prevent people from visiting. In November 2013, a new monument dictated by families and social workers was quickly destroyed by local authorities. Ai Xiaoming, a professor of

Sun Yat-sen University Sun Yat-sen University (, abbreviated SYSU and colloquially known in Chinese as Zhongda), also known as Zhongshan University, is a national key public research university located in Guangzhou, Guangdong, China. It was founded in 1924 by and nam ...

, was briefly detained before released and prevented from photographing in May 2014.艾晓明：夹边沟遗址遭破坏令人痛心
/ref>

History

Memorial

See also

References

Further reading