Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures, Barnard College, 321-A Milbank Hall, 3009 Broadway, New York, NY, 10027, USA.
Cult Med Psychiatry. 2018 Mar;42(1):49-68. doi: 10.1007/s11013-016-9512-9.
The Chinese government has come under attack by international critics for forcing drug users to labor in the name of treatment. While joining these activists in criticizing conditions in compulsory labor centers, former detainees who congregated at a drop-in center in southern Yunnan also defended the therapeutic potential of socialist legacies of laboring. Shuttling between laboring in state compulsory centers and idling in a market economy, long-term heroin users saw their difficulties in recovering from addiction as inextricably linked to their inability to find suitable work opportunities. Certain drop-in center attendees maintained that earlier Communist laboring projects had helped wayward citizens, including drug addicts, "merge into" society as productive workers. This group evoked the stable long-term jobs and benefits once provided by local state-owned enterprises and the radical revolutionary power of "remolding through labor" they imagined to have existed in the first years of the People's Republic as powerful alternatives to their recent crisis of idling. The nuanced ways that drop-in center regulars revisited the potential healing power of earlier traditions of socialist laboring as remedies to their contemporary struggles complicates long-standing debates about coercion in treatment and the responsibility of the postsocialist state towards marginalized workers.
中国政府因强迫吸毒者劳动治疗而受到国际批评。在与这些活动人士一起批评强制劳动中心的条件的同时，聚集在云南南部一个中途之家的前被拘留者也为社会主义劳动传统的治疗潜力辩护。长期吸食海洛因的人在国家强制中心劳动和在市场经济中游荡之间穿梭，他们认为自己在戒毒过程中遇到的困难与他们无法找到合适的工作机会密不可分。一些中途之家的参加者坚称，早期的共产主义劳动项目帮助了迷途的公民，包括吸毒者，使他们成为有生产力的工人，“融入”社会。这群人回忆起当地国有企业曾经提供的稳定的长期工作和福利，以及他们想象中的“劳动改造”的激进革命力量，认为这些是他们最近失业危机的有力替代方案。中途之家常客重新审视社会主义劳动传统的潜在治疗力量的细微方式，将其作为治疗他们当前斗争的方法，使关于治疗中的强制和后社会主义国家对边缘化工人的责任的长期争论变得复杂。
