While I haven’t seen it on the streets here in China, if this book is as explosive as it looks, I expect pirated copies to be available soon. ‘A Thousand Miles of Prison Walls: an Interdisciplinary Analysis of the Contemporary Chinese Labour Camp’ has just been published in Taiwan. It’s authored by Professors Philip Williams, Head of the School of Language Studies at the Palmerston North campus and Professor Yenna Wu from the University of California at Riverside.

China’s prison system is certainly one of the world’s cruelest, and not coincidentally one of the world’s most secretive. While the official incarceration rate is 118 per 100,000 people, this is based on the official numbers. Some human rights officials believe the number is ten times this. Of course, we won’t know until China does a huge amount of reforming and their official statistics can be verified.

I’m trying to track down some credible reports from former political prisoners, but from the anecdotal stories I’ve heard, existence in China’s prison system is a nightmare.

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Posting has been non-existent for the past month because of the simple reason that both at work and at home, I was unable to visit the New Youth website and the administration page that allows me to post. The Great Fire Wall of China is, at times, very ineffective, but as far as I’m concerned, the folks who spend their days blocking websites showed me their mettle last month.

Some friends here have worked some magic on my computer and it now appears as though I’m back to normal. Posting should take on a regular form, and I hope to have some interviews up in the next few weeks with folks either involved with the case, or who can shed some light on China’s prison and judicial system.

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