Today's Vocabulary Word

From Jay Nordlinger's Impromptus:

My friends in the China-freedom community are quite happy because the word laogai has now entered the Oxford English Dictionary. If the word gulag is known, so should laogai be: "(in China) a system of labour camps, many of whose inmates are political dissidents." Laogai is the Chinese expression for "reform through labor." (Reminiscent of Arbeit Macht Frei, no?)
We at NR once published a piece by the grand dissident Harry Wu on Laogai, and why the word should be as familiar and notorious as gulag. It was Wu's conviction that the growing awareness of Gulag -- both as a thing and as a word -- helped shift or harden world opinion against the Soviet Union. It is to Solzhenitsyn that we owe thanks for the understanding of Gulag -- again, as both a thing and a word -- and it is, of course, to Solzhenitsyn that we owe thanks for so much.
We owe Harry Wu, too. Indeed, because of him, a lot of us don't need the OED to define laogai.