The Nazi concentration camps and the Stalinist gulag are infamous, but until now the West has known almost nothing about China's brutal network of prison camps. The goal of this "Chinese Archipelago" is not the extermination of an unwanted population, but the destruction of the human spirit of resistance through a process of "thought reform" and enforced labour aimed at creating a "new man". The author of this book traces the roots of this ideological effort to a perversion of the Confucian belief in moral re-education, and follows its cruel logic to the 20th-century creation of state-enslaved workers who cannot escape an omnipresent government. As China struggles to gain the respect of the world community today, and is poised to take over the British territories in Hong Kong, the persistence of its political prisons remains a moral outrage and an inescapable challenge to the conscience of all nations who seek cultural and economic exchange with China.
- ISBN10 0029077958
- ISBN13 9780029077955
- Publish Date 4 July 1994
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 28 October 2015
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Simon & Schuster Ltd
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 600
- Language English