Established in 2008 through the support of the Yahoo! Human Rights Fund, the Laogai Museum is the first museum in the United States to directly address human rights issues in China. The museum preserves the memory of the Laogai’s many victims and educates the public about the atrocities committed by China’s Communist regime. However, due to various constrains in the past, this museum has not been able to attract as many as visitors as possible.
This virtual museum is a major project initiated by the new board of directors of the Laogai Research Foundation in 2018. It is an open, multimedia Internet exhibition that enables visitors from all around the world to learn about the crimes of the Chinese Communist Party and its Laogai system. Though what is presented here is in a virtual space, all of the exhibits from the original Laogai Museum, including photos, videos, and artifacts, have been digitized, organized and contextualized for visitors to discover the complete history of the forced-labor camps that the Chinese Communist regime has long tried to cover up. We hope that more and more people interested in China, especially the younger generation of Internet users, will benefit from this museum and find it a unique window to the historical truth of Communist China.
