Brown Bag Lunch Series

The government of China’s new president Xi Jinping announced earlier this year that China will “reform” its notoriously abusive “Re-Education Through Labor” or lao-jiao (劳教) administrative detention system. That system, which allows police to arbitrarily impose custodial sentences of up to three years while depriving detainees of due process and judicial oversight, has been a target of increasingly vocal criticism by Chinese lawyers, human rights defenders and civil society activists in recent years. But is the government of President Xi Jinping really willing and able to claw back from the country’s security services, a convenient tool for stifling dissent and detaining individuals who challenge China’s often abusive status quo?

The government’s success – or lack thereof – in tackling the discriminatory household registration or hukou system as well as China’s network of secret, unlawful detention facilities known as “black jails” give useful clues to what government “reform” of the “Re-Education Through Labor” system might or might not really mean. Phelim Kine, a long-time China researcher and deputy director of the Asia division at Human Rights Watch, will provide insights.

Phelim Kine is a deputy director in Human Rights Watch’s Asia Division. A former news wire bureau chief in Jakarta, he worked as a journalist for more than a decade in China, Indonesia, Cambodia, and Taiwan prior to joining Human Rights Watch in April 2007. He has written on human rights, military impunity, corruption, child sex tourism, human trafficking, and illegal land confiscation. Mr. Kine’s opinion pieces on China’s human rights challenges have appeared in numerous international media outlets including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Forbes, The Guardian, and the Far Eastern Economic Review. Mr. Kine has spoken publicly on China’s human rights challenges at venues ranging from the European Parliament and the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong to the Council on Foreign Relations and a hearing of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC).  He is a graduate of Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.

Kosher Pizza will be served 

Brown Bag Lunch Series