Unlike the Russian acronym "gulag", the Chinese word "laogai" has not been incorporated into English, although the system of "reform through labour" that it describes functions on a far larger scale than the Soviet camps did and continues to thrive. So even if Liao Yiwu's memoir of his time as a prisoner in that system were a dry recitation of statistics, it would be performing a necessary service.
But Mr Liao is a poet - he was, in fact, jailed because two poems he wrote in reaction to the massacre of unarmed students in Tiananmen Square in 1989 offended the Communist Party - with a poet's observant eye and soaring imagination. As a result, For a Song and a Hundred Songs is a compelling and harrowing read, full of details about the laogai system and stuffed with portraits of those subjected to it, from politically naïve and idealistic students and Christians to murderers, rapists, thieves and embezzlers.
Mr Liao, now 54 and living in Berlin, makes clear that until his incarceration he had no interest in politics and was something of a bohemian, wastrel and womaniser. "I was influenced by the American Beat writers like Jack Kerouac and fantasised about aimless wandering," he writes, a fascination that led both to a penchant for one-night stands and a job as a truck driver on the Sichuan-Tibet highway.
But the Tiananmen Square massacre galvanised him, and trouble for which he was unprepared soon followed. Arriving at his first detention centre, he is shocked and apprehensive when handed a booklet that lists "108 Rare Delicacies", a menu of torture "dishes" that are "cooked" for recalcitrant prisoners. In "Noodles in a Clear Broth", for example, "strings of toilet paper are soaked in a bowl of urine, and the inmate is forced to eat the toilet paper and drink the urine".
The title of Mr Liao's book derives from a later act of highly personalised torture, one not included on that menu. After a particularly sadistic guard caught him singing quietly to himself without authorisation, Mr Liao was ordered to sing 100 songs as punishment; when his voice gave out before he could fulfill that quota, the guard sodomised him with an electric baton. To spite his tormentor, Mr Liao somehow summoned enough strength to sing a Communist Party anthem.
He repeatedly underlines the inhumanity of the situation prisoners face by using similes comparing them to animals. When the police arrested him, "they dragged me along in the mud like an eel"; his cellmates eat in a hurry, "stretching their necks like crowing roosters to help swallow"; one prisoner is so famished that he runs to a corner of a courtyard to gulp down glue, "hunching down like a big prawn lurking in coral"; a victim of a beating by a guard "wiggled his way into the crowd like a worm" to escape.
It is highly instructive to compare Mr Liao's account with earlier memoirs from China's prisons, like Harry Wu's Bitter Winds, about the 19 years he was jailed during the Maoist era. In some ways, the coercive essence of the laogai system has not changed at all: starvation, torture and psychological manipulation continue to be used to break down the prisoner's will.
Nor has the Chinese state's disregard for the rule of law abated. Mr Liao describes incident after incident in which prison officials, judges and prosecutors scoff mock and punish him or other prisoners when anyone dares to remind them that they are violating constitutional guarantees.
But by the time Mr Liao is jailed, Maoism has been abandoned, and the prisons have become just another outpost of state capitalism, with guards proudly announcing that "we are going to implement a market-oriented competitive mechanism", even as they continue to require prisoners to sing "Socialism Is Good". With time, Mr Liao comes to see the laogai system as mimicking basic features of everyday life in China. "In my cell, which was no bigger than 220 square feet for 18 men, the rulers had created an exact replica of the state bureaucracy outside," one in which "those in power enjoyed unlimited privileges," he relates.
But in Mr Liao's estimation, the reverse also holds true. "China remains a prison of the mind: prosperity without liberty," he writes. "Our entire country might as well be gluing medicine packets all day. This is our brave new world."
After release, Mr Liao also reports, many of his fellow political prisoners "abandoned their artistic and political aspirations, and joined the rest of the country in the relentless pursuit of money." But he proved more stubborn: when the Public Security Bureau minders who continued to watch him learned he had written his memoir and intended to have it published, he was invited to a teahouse for a frank talk.
If he didn't abandon his plan, he could easily be made to "disappear for quite a while," warns a police officer who simply can't understand why Mr. Liao refuses to be just like everybody else. "Why can't you write books about harmless romances, and we can get them published here and make you rich?" Fortunately for anyone interested in contemporary China, Mr Liao ignored that advice.
©2013 The New York Times News Service
FOR A SONG AND A HUNDRED SONGS
A Poet's Journey Through a Chinese Prison
Liao Yiwu
Translated by Wenguang Huang
New Harvest/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
404 pages; $26
