Senior Chinese government officials have pledged to abolish the country's hated re-education-through-labour prison camps.

The system involves extra-judicial detention in which dissidents, underground Christians and minor criminals are sent away to remote labour camps for many years at a time, often without their families even being notified.

At the end of this week China's annual session of parliament, the National People's Congress, will endorse a group of leaders who will immediately become some of the most powerful people in the world.

While analysts are still watching for any signs of the direction the incoming administration of Xi Jinping may take the Asian giant, it appears they are already on the record with the key promise.

In freezing and remote parts of China there are about 350 labour camps holding about 160,000 prisoners who did not step into a courtroom before their detention.

They have been judged by the local police or other officials to be in need of re-education through labour - often for being troublemakers or dissidents - and face up to four years of deprivation, arduous work and physical abuse.

China's legal fraternity has been increasingly critical of the system. Some say it is unconstitutional.

But the security authorities have until now guarded their power to lock away whoever they want without the aggravation of going to court.

The potential for the system to be abused is clearly enormous and even the Communist Party's mouthpiece, The People's Daily, has described re-education through labour as having become a "tool of retaliation" for unscrupulous local officials.

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Some delegates to the National People's Congress have called for its immediate end and now several senior legal officials have promised that by the end of the year Laojiao, as it's called in Chinese, will be abolished.

Pu Zhiqiang is a lawyer whose clients include those who have been sent to the labour camps.

He has told the ABC he thinks the system is indeed about to be scrapped.

"I believe to abandon Laojiao is not hard for the party, the government and the new leaders and they'll be highly praised for doing it," he said.

He also believes the government could be considering abandoning the system because of the pressure it is receiving from many quarters.

"There is pressure from both inside and outside China," he said.

"Within China there are a lot of people who want to abandon Laojiao and build a society built on the rule of law."

If China does abolish Laojiao, human rights groups say it will be quite an achievement for the incoming government.

It will also be a huge put-down for China's powerful security establishment which under Xi Jinping has already lost a seat on the seven-man Politburo Standing Committee.

The fear though is that the administration may axe re-education through labour while retaining some other form of similar extra-judicial detention.