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THE BAMBOO GULAG: Human Rights in the People's Republic of China 1991-1992. By Ta-ling Lee and John Copper: Baltimore: University of Maryland School of Law (Occasional papers/Reprints Series in Contemporary Asian Studies). 1994. 303 pp. US$20.00, paper. ISBN 0-925153-35-4.
THIS STUDY constitutes a substantial addition to the growing literature on human rights in China. It documents the horrific living conditions, treatment, and torture inflicted upon the twenty-odd millions of slave labourers detained in the prisons and camps of China's Gulag. Lee and Copper depict, against this background, the extent of the repression which, two and three years after the June 4, 1989 massacre on Tiananmen Square, continued to be inflicted on the population of Beijing, and on students and intellectuals everywhere. Since 1992 neither the relaxation of the party-state's grip over the economic and cultural domains, nor international condemnation have improved the practice of a regime rendered fearfully insecure by internal challenges to its legitimacy and the collapse of world communism. Now that labor camps are expected to turn out profits for the market, the exploitation of the inmates has become...