The Mao-era policy of "re-education" seems to have stopped. Picture / AP
China appears to have fulfilled a promise to dismantle hundreds of labour camps and release tens of thousands of people who were imprisoned in them without trial.
A series of visits by the Daily Telegraph to six enormous labour camps on the outskirts of Beijing suggested that four had been shut down, with their signs removed. Staff said all their prisoners had been released and they were waiting for further orders. The other two camps had been converted; one into a drug rehabilitation centre and the other into the second cell block of a local prison.
Interviews with former labour camp prisoners across China also confirmed the system has been disbanded and that they had not been placed in any other type of detention.
The Communist Party has promised since 2007 to end "re-education through labour", a relic of Chairman Mao's era which allowed the police to imprison offenders - including political and religious dissidents - for up to four years without trial, often forcing them to work in mines, factories or farms.
The labour camp system was criticised as an "urgent human rights concern" by the United Nations in 2009.
However, for years there appeared scant progress and the future of the camps was kept a tight secret.
Human rights campaigners expressed concern the camps might survive under a different name, or that prisoners would be moved to other facilities such as mental hospitals or secret jails.
At the start of 2013, there were roughly 160,000 people in labour camps, according to Human Rights Watch.
An official at Beijing's Labour Camp Bureau, who only named himself as Zhang, insisted a new government vote at the end of December had proven decisive, and that all prisoners had been released and allowed to return home.
"I can be very sure there is no one left inside," he said. However, he declined to allow access to the camps and would not say how many there were.
Several dissidents who served time in labour camps confirmed they had been abruptly released in the past year, had been allowed to return home, and have not been the focus of other police restrictions.
Jiang Chengfen, a 40-year-old farmer from Sichuan who served a year in a labour camp for criticising the Government, said she had been released without finishing her sentence.
"They did not tell me I was being released, just to go downstairs as someone had come to see me. It was my husband. I had to change my clothes and they pushed me out," she said. "I was quite puzzled."
All of Beijing's recorded labour camps were in Daxing, a dusty grey suburb 50 minutes by car from the city centre.
Satellite photographs show the scale of the complexes, some of which had 30 different blocks within their high concrete walls.
Many were placed in "prison districts", next to high-security jails. Officials at the camps in Daxing declined to allow any access to their facilities, but claimed they were now vacant.
Guo Qinghua, 46, used to clean the lavatories at the offices of the Standing Committee of the Beijing People's Congress before an argument over her pay landed her in the Daxing Women's Labour Camp. Guo said she had been released last May and not placed under any other type of restriction.
Ma Liangfu, a 54-year-old man in Inner Mongolia, was sent to a labour camp for trying to prosecute the sons of some local politicians who blinded him in one eye when he intervened to stop them raping a girl. He said he was the last prisoner in the Tumuji camp before it was shut at the end of December.
In Daxing, the huge Tiantanghe labour camp has also been turned into a drug rehabilitation centre, an official at the site confirmed. "From a legislative point of view, the labour camp system has been abolished," said Li Fangping, a human rights lawyer. "But we need to worry about whether black prisons and mental wards will be used to detain protesters."
For a very long time now, China's huge network of labour camps have been an embarrassment.
They contradicted the Communist Party line that China is a country ruled by law.
Their 160,000 prisoners, who were forced to work in mines, factories and farms, were not sent there by the courts, but by the whim of the police.
And the process was often hasty. Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, was taken from his home by police on October 7, 1996. He was given a three-year sentence in a labour camp the following day.
But taking power away from the Chinese security apparatus is never easy, and the fate of the labour camps was argued over for many years.
Although the Government made regular announcements to say it planned to close the camps, nothing happened.
Even as late as last November, Reuters reported that the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, had made the closure of the labour camps a personal goal. He "loathes re-education through labour", one source said. But, the news wire added, Xi had been thwarted by the hardline elements of the party.
By the end of last year, Xi had overcome his opponents, it seems. But the tussle within the party has been fierce enough that even today, the staff at the camps do not know what will happen to them, or to the facilities.
Everything has been clouded with the Communist Party's usual secrecy, which has led some human rights campaigners to worry that some other cruel punishment will spring up to replace the camps.
"This important step will only be meaningful if the Government ensures what comes after it does not institute another system of detention without trial," said Brad Adams, Asia director of Human Rights Watch.
What appears to be at least a partial replacement is indeed a huge step forward. A system of "community correction" has been piloted since 2009 and last year, as the labour camps wound down, saw a huge increase in its use.
Unlike re-education through labour, community correction is administered by the courts and does not seem to involve detention; instead it restricts travel and forces those undergoing it to attend study sessions and do community service.
Although Zhao Dacheng, the Deputy Justice Minister, said last year that this new system was not a replacement for re-education through labour, the number of people in community correction in China has more than tripled from about 400,000 in May 2012 to 1.4 million last year.
Although lawyers hope that many of those who would have been sent to labour camps are instead diverted into community correction, they warned that the police may also expand their use of secret jails and mental institutes as places to lock up dissidents. What happens next is still far from clear.
Jiang Chengfen, a 40-year-old farmer in Sichuan, was sent to a labour camp for women in Zizhong county, Neijiang, in July, 2012 for repeatedly complaining to Beijing about her local government. She spent one year and three months inside.
6am: The alarm would go off in our dormitory. We slept 12 in each 9sq m room, in bunk beds. There was a small drawer underneath the bed in which we could put our water bottles and a cabinet in the corner for our toiletries.
6.10am: We had around 10 minutes to get washed and dressed. The bathroom was big, it could take around 100 to 200 people. Then we would walk to the cafeteria for breakfast, which was about a half-hour walk.
7am: We went to the canteen, where we would wait behind assigned seats until the guards let us sit down.
8am: We went to our factory jobs six days a week where we assembled gadgets and components for television and car companies. You had to remain seated throughout and not talk.
1pm: At lunch we might have soup made from Chinese yam with chicken bones. Sometimes pumpkin with no salt, sometimes scrambled egg and cabbage. We often found dirt in the meals.
1.10pm: After lunch we would return to the factory. There were 200 police officers running our camp, and a group we called "Du Jin", or "Gilded Ones". They gave inmates tasks that were impossible, and if you could not do it, they asked for bribes to make them stop.
8pm: After work we could watch television, but the guards chose the channel. We were not allowed to watch any news bulletins. Occasionally a policeman would come to give us a lecture about the law, such as what kind of laws you broke if you worked as a prostitute. I always found those lectures very interesting. We generally had prostitutes, drug addicts, pimps and thieves in the camp. There were only a few government petitioners like me.
9pm: We all had to return to our dormitories and sit on our beds. We were still not allowed to talk to anyone else.
10.30pm: Unless you were being punished, you could go to bed. But there was always a light on in the room so they could watch us.
• As told to Malcolm Moore and Adam Wu
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