![]() ![]() In letters to family members, the cause of death was attributed to all manner of illnesses except starvation, a word that was never mentioned. After Jiabiangou was shuttered, a doctor assigned to the camp spent six months fabricating the medical records of every inmate. In October 1961, the government ordered Jiabiangou closed and subsequently mounted an exhaustive cover-up. When word of the soaring death toll reached the capital, Beijing began an investigation. All but 500 of them would perish in Jiabiangou, mostly of starvation. In his introduction, the translator, Wen Huang, explains that the camp, which was built to hold just 40 or 50 criminals, came to hold roughly 3,000 political prisoners between 19. Yang’s stories, which he painstakingly collected over a three-year period a decade ago, are the recollections of people the Chinese state branded as “rightists” in the late 1950s and sent to Jiabiangou (夾邊溝), a camp notorious for “re-education through labor” in the northwestern desert wastelands of Gansu Province. ![]() Xianhui Yang’s (楊顯惠) Woman From Shanghai: Tales of Survival From a Chinese Labor Camp (上海女人-中國勞改場幸存者的故事), a newly translated collection of firsthand accounts that the publisher deems “fact-based fiction,” centers on what might be called the Gulag Archipelago of China. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |