cover image New Ghosts, Old Ghosts: Prison and Labor Reform Camps in China

New Ghosts, Old Ghosts: Prison and Labor Reform Camps in China

James Seymour. M.E. Sharpe, $59.95 (336pp) ISBN 978-0-7656-0097-4

This book's subtitle is misleading because only the prisons of China's northwest are considered here. The authors state that they have the most data on this region, which is reputed to be the land of China's gulag. The country's notorious prisons and labor reform camps have become favored targets for Westerners decrying the Communist regime's dismal human rights record as an argument against continued economic assistance. One might have expected anti-China rhetoric from Seymour, executive director of the Society for the Protection of East Asian Human Rights, but this lifeless book is mostly concerned with presenting raw data on Chinese prisons in an evenhanded manner. The authors (Anderson is the pseudonym of a journalist) have collected official information and checked it against their own interviews with former prisoners and others close to the system. They argue that prison enterprise is not a vital part of China's national economy and that conditions at many prisons are actually improving. This is mostly a numbers-heavy ""white paper"" that will be of interest mainly to scholars. (Oct.)