Guangzhou announced yesterday that it would set up two new detention centres for petty criminals, but stressed that they were not simply a substitute for re-education through labour camps – a practice that was abolished last year, South China Morning Post reports.

The centres will be part of an experiment to introduce speedy trials for cases involving lighter sentences. Wan Yunfeng, presiding judge of the Guangzhou Intermediate People’s Court, said the provincial capital would be the testing ground for this new system.

The paper has more:

According to the city’s politics and law commission, cases that are eligible for speedy trials involve crimes punishable by less than three years in jail, including dangerous driving, theft, fraud, robbery, extortion, blackmail and troublemaking.

The new system is only applicable to cases in which defendants have been charged with only one offence and pleaded guilty.

Under the new system, the judiciary procedures would be simplified and there is a time limit for courts to finish trials – seven days if the defendant is not detained by police, and 15 days if the defendant is in custody.

The first speedy trial was held on Friday in Nansha district and it took just 10 minutes. The defendant was sentenced to one month in detention for drink-driving.

The Maoist era practice may be coming to an end, but the use of prison labour is unlikely to go away.