For anyone interested in the Chinese revolution and the ascension of Maoism I recommend Carma Hinton's Morning Sun (2003) and the PBS documentary series China A Century of Revolution.

"In China, they want you to become [a] new socialist person, and that's the purpose of the labor camps," says Harry Wu, a survivor of the prison system known as "Laogai," which means "reform through labor."

The Tragic History of China's Secret Labor Camps (2015) "When the Communist Party of China

came to power in 1956, Mao invited Soviet state experts into the country to develop a Gulag-style prison network to suppress 'counter revolutionaries' and torture political opposition