• Director(s):

    RAKHMANOVA (Tania)

  • Producer(s):

    ARTE FRANCE, YAMI2, NICK (Christophe)

  • Territories:

    Worldwide.

  • Production year:

    2022

  • Language(s):

    German, English, French

  • Rights:

    NON-THEATRICAL, TV, VOD, DVD, INTERNET

Established by Mao Zedong in the late 1940s, the laogai system, which means "reform through labor," is the Chinese concentration camp system. Like its Soviet equivalent, the Chinese gulag is a political space integrated into the economy, embedded in the social landscape and highly organized. But unlike the gulag, the laogai aims at the "thought reform" of the deportees by using forced labor, physical and psychological torture. A global brainwashing system, both total and intimate, which soon extended to schools, workplaces, homes and streets.

Under the reign of Mao Zedong, a series of terror campaigns was carried out for over 25 years. Deviants, rebels, dissidents, the educated, the middle class, but also believers, democrats and ethnic minorities all lived under a specific threat: to disappear into the Chinese concentration camp hell, an archipelago of thousands of camps. This concentration camp system is a vortex that haunts the Chinese nation
Every Chinese family knows at least one relative who has been a victim of the laogai.
  In 1976, when Mao died, Maoism died, but the system of terror didn't. A new generation came                            to power: it would benefit greatly from it.