Jean Pasqualini

Jean Pasqualini (; 1926 – 9 October 1997) was a French and Chinese journalist who wrote a memoir of his experiences as a political prisoner in the laogai labor camp system. Born in Beijing, Jean Pasqualini was the son of a Chinese mother and a Corsican French father. His Chinese name is rendered as Bao Ruowang, with "Bao" representing the first syllable in Pasqualini and "Ruowang" being a phonetic rendering of Jean.

Biography As a child, Jean Pasqualini attended school in Tianjin and Shanghai. During the Second World War and after, he worked as a translator for the U.S. military and the British Embassy in Beijing prior to the Communist Party takeover in 1949. He died in a Paris hospital in 1997. His book has been translated into several languages, and was made into a French-language movie in 1977. It has been described as the first autobiographical account of life in China's labor camp system.

When Pasqualini's book was initially published, he was criticized and denounced by French supporters of the Communist Revolution who, according to Seth Faison, "refused to believe that the seemingly utopian nation of happy peasants and workers ... could have such a dark side." In 1978, Belgian sinologist Pierre Ryckmans described Prisoner of Mao as the "most fundamental document on the Maoist ‘Gulag’ and, as such, the most studiously ignored by the lobby that maintains that there is no human-rights problem in the People's Republic." Criticism subsided years later as more information emerged to corroborate Pasqualini's account, and Chinese authorities admitted to the excesses of the period.