Surviving Bo Xilai's reign of red terror

On a two-hour flight from Beijing to Chongqing early this month, Ren Jianyu spent most of the time with his face pressed against the window, watching the clouds streak past. At one point he murmured: "This is freedom."

The 25-year-old former village official was freed late last month after serving 15 months in a Chongqing labour camp for reposting numerous microblog comments criticising the policies of the southwestern municipality's former Communist Party boss, Bo Xilai .

In his more than four years in Chongqing, the now disgraced Bo introduced a series of political campaigns echoing Mao Zedong's 10-year-long Cultural Revolution, which began in the mid-60s.

Under Bo, Chongqing's police, headed by Wang Lijun , relied heavily on an old system of punishment known as or re-education through labour, to incarcerate petty criminals and activists without trial.

Ren and many others thrown into labour camps as the authorities tried to muzzle dissent remember those years of "red terror" with loathing.

The police at first wanted to charge Ren with inciting subversion after he posted a photograph online showing him wearing a T-shirt bearing the words "Give me liberty or give me death".

"That was ridiculous," Ren said. "It was just a normal T-shirt from an online store."