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The Horror of Special Economic Zones
From the Soviet Gulag, to the Nazi Concentration Camp, to China’s SEZs and the American Prison System.

Diametrically opposed, yet occurring parallel to, the perceived civility of modern society are places of such monstrous depravation and darkness that they practically defy the limits of human imagination.
These are spaces that haunt our collective consciousness; where wanton torture and cruelty become routine, where reason and logic give way to insanity and true evil prevails.
Special economic zones — districts outside the normative socio-economic paradigm for which they are constructed — have been and continue to be places that encapsulate the phrase man’s inhumanity to man, yet they also play a pivotal role in bolstering the economic order of the day.
Whether under communism, capitalism, or a strange mixture of both — as in the case of modern China — these zones are alien to the mainstream society alongside which they exist, yet in each case vital to the stability of that society, and to its corresponding political regime.