Labor
Prisoners at Qincheng Prison are tasked to perform manual labors instead of being executed in accordance with Mao Zedong's order given in 1957 in one of his speeches in which Mao explained why political prisoners must not be executed:
- 1st: If one was executed, the more would have to be executed for the same crime later on for equality, and it would difficult to spare the lives of future prisoners who committed the same crime, because justice system would be criticized as unequal, giving preferential treatments
- 2nd: Wrong people and even innocent people might be executed by mistakes
- 3rd: Executing prisoners could mean the vanishing of evidence
- 4th: When prisoners were executed, it could not increase production output, could not improve scientific research, could not strengthen national defense, and could not liberate Taiwan
- 5th: You (the Communist regime) would be accused of excessive killings
Reactionaries are evil but once captured, they could be turned to something useful for the people.
As result of this speech of Mao, prisoners at Qincheng Prison are put to work instead of being executed, and they are subjected to be assigned to tasks other than that of the Qincheng Prison to help out outside the prison. Heavy manual labor was performed only by the nationalist war criminals classified by the communists, but since the release of the last group of this kind of prisoners in 1975, there are no longer any such duties. However, light manual labors continues such as making straw hats and making boxes for matches. Jiang Qing requested and was permitted to make dolls. These light manual labor is often conducted in their own cells.
Read more about this topic: Qincheng Prison
Famous quotes containing the word labor:
“When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop. It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans; and I remembered with as much pity as pride, if I remembered at all, my acquaintances who had gone to the city to attend the oratorios.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Labor came to humanity with the fall from grace and was at best a penitential sacrifice enabling purity through humiliation. Labor was toil, distress, trouble, fatigue—an exertion both painful and compulsory. Labor was our animal condition, struggling to survive in dirt and darkness.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“... feminism is a political term and it must be recognized as such: it is political in women’s terms. What are these terms? Essentially it means making connections: between personal power and economic power, between domestic oppression and labor exploitation, between plants and chemicals, feelings and theories; it means making connections between our inside worlds and the outside world.”
—Anica Vesel Mander, U.S. author and feminist, and Anne Kent Rush (b. 1945)