Comparison of United States incarceration rate with other countries
The incarceration rate of the People's Republic of China varies depending on sources and measures. According to the World Prison Brief, the rate for only sentenced prisoners is 118 per 100,000 (as of 2015). The rate for prisoners including estimations for the number of pre-trial detainees and those in administrative detention is 164 per 100,000 (as of 2015). In a 2010 interview Harry Wu, a U.S.-based human rights activist and ex-Chinese labor camp prisoner, estimates that "in the last 60 years, more than 40–50 million people" were in Chinese labor camps, but that period includes the mass incarcerations of the 1950s or the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and is not representative of modern China.
Authoritarian capitalism
It is generally agreed that China is an authoritarian regime, with the Fraser Institute ranking them 136th for personal freedom and the Humans Right Watch's 2018 report describing a "broad and sustained offensive on human rights" within China due to the treatment of activists, restrictions to freedom of information, political expression, religious freedom and minority rights as their core reasons. Moreover, while recognising the limited scope and reducing pace of capitalism within China, with the Heritage Foundation ranking them 110th for economic freedom in 2018, Michael Witt argues that China broadly displays capitalist traits with a significant number of companies either being private or shared between private and public owners alongside a strong entrepreneurial presence despite a continued predominance of indirect state control.