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After Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, it became a labour camp, where many inmates were worked to death.

In the past, minors who broke the law in this way would be sent to youth labour camps rather than put behind bars, and the punishment was usually less than five years.

Some people were even sent to labour camps for breaking Covid rules, he said.

He was born in Beijing in 1957, and grew up in labour camps in the north-west of China after his father, Ai Qing, an anti-establishment poet, was exiled.

Millions of people described as "enemies of the people" were sent to Soviet labour camps, known as the Gulag, and 750,000 were summarily murdered during Stalin's Great Terror in the 1930s.