At the end of the 1950s, the Chinese government condemned thousands of citizens - considered 'right wing dissidents' due their past activities, criticisms of the Communist Party or simply their middle-class backgrounds and families - to forced labour camps. Deported for re-education to the north-west of the country, in the middle of the Gobi Desert, thousands of miles from their families, they encountered conditions of absolute destitution. As a result of backbreaking physical labour, an unrelentingly extreme climate and the most meager of provisions, many of them perished.

THE DITCH recounts their fate - an unflinching account of the very extremes of the human condition.