Prison slaves

Once an isolationist communist state, over the last 20 years China has become the world's biggest exporter of consumer goods. But behind this apparent success story is a dark secret - millions of men and women locked up in prisons and forced into intensive manual labour.
China has the biggest penal colony in the world - a top secret  network of more than 1,000 slave labour prisons and camps known  collectively as "The Laogai". And the use of the inmates of these  prisons - in what some experts call "state sponsored slavery" - has been  credited with contributing to the country's economic boom.
In this episode, former inmates, many of whom were imprisoned for  political or religious dissidence without trial, recount their daily  struggles and suffering in the "dark and bitter" factories where sleep  was a privilege.
Charles Lee spent three years imprisoned for  religious dissidence. He says: "For a year they tried to brainwash me,  trying to force me to give up my practice of Falun Gong. They figured me  out ... so they changed their strategy to force me to feel like a  criminal ... because, according to their theory, a prisoner should be  reformed through labour .... So they forced me to do slave labour."
@'Al Jazeera'