Hands and feet were shackled, mouths were propped open with metal gags, nasal tubes were force-fed, and eyes were filled with chili sauce …… Amelia Pang’s new book Made in China: A Prisoner, an SOS Letter, and the Hidden Cost of America’s Cheap Goods Prisoner, an SOS Letter, and the Hidden Cost of America’s Cheap Goods) depicts the abuse suffered by the protagonist, Sun Yi, at the Masanjia Reformatory in Shenyang, China.
At a Time when the issue of forced labor in Xinjiang is gaining global attention, this book once again draws attention to the human rights costs that may lie behind cheap goods.
Amelia Pang is a Chinese-American freelance journalist of one-eighth Uighur heritage who graduated from The New School in New York City and now lives in Washington, DC.
The New York Times hailed Made in China as “timely and urgent,” while Publishers Weekly commented, “Focused and in-depth, the book reveals impressive events that will make readers think twice about their next purchase.”
A History of Forced Labor
Pang told Voice of America that the book was originally written because the issue of forced labor in China has not been addressed. She said, “There have been many such forced labor camps throughout history, and many instances of Chinese political prisoners or prisoners in labor camps writing letters of distress that were discovered by Western consumers, dating as far back as the 1990s, but nothing has changed until now. So I wanted to write a book that explored the problems in Western supply chains, the problems with the way Western companies are sourcing from Chinese factories, and how we as consumers can address these critical issues.”
In his book, Pang traces the history of forced labor in the Communist Party of China: a system borrowed from the Soviet Union’s “gulag” labor camp system, which was divided into “reform through labor” and “reeducation through labor,” respectively. The system was based on the Soviet “gulag” labor camp system, which was divided into “reform through labor” and “reeducation through labor,” which were penalties for criminals and administrative coercive measures for those who did not have enough criminal punishment.
During the civil war between the Communist Party of China and the Communist Party of China in the 1920s and 1930s, the Chinese Communist Party raised the slogan of “fight the landlords and divide the land” and began to force landlords and rich peasants to engage in forced labor. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the forced labor system escalated and spread, from the Land Reform to the Anti-Rightist Movement to the Cultural Revolution. The Washington, D.C.-based Labor Reform Research Foundation estimates that some 40 to 50 million people have been subjected to forced labor since 1949, suffering starvation, abuse, and mental torture, and many have died as a result.
In December 1994, the Chinese Communist Party decided to abolish the word “labor reform,” and all “labor reform and correctional teams” were subsumed under “prisons,” with “labor reform bureaus” at all levels renamed “prison bureaus. The “labor reform bureaus” at all levels were renamed “prison bureaus,” including those directly under the Ministry of Justice and those under the jurisdiction of the provinces and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps. However, the labor reform system has in fact continued unchanged, and its essence has not changed. To this day, the CCP government’s forced labor targets include ordinary prisoners, human rights activists, dissidents, religious believers, ethnic minorities, journalists, and others.
The Blood and Tears Behind Cheap Goods
Made in China centers on Sun Yi’s experience, showing readers the hellish Life at Masanjia Labor Camp and the inner workings of China’s forced labor system. Arrested in 2008 for practicing Falun Gong, Sun Yi was tortured and forced to work more than 15 hours a day during his two years at Masanjia Labor Camp. Sun Yi found a way to put a plea for help into some Halloween decorations he had made, and one of the letters passed to a woman living in Portland, Oregon, in 2012 and made news around the world at the time. Sun Yi, who has since been released, gave an interview to CNN in 2013 under the pseudonym “Zhang Liang.
He died in Indonesia, his first stop in exile, in 2017. The following year, his experience was turned into a documentary by a Canadian Chinese director, “Letters of Distress,” which received attention from the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the BBC and other media outlets.
In addition to Sun Yi, there are many other victims of the CCP’s forced labor system: In 2013, Lens Vision magazine in mainland China published a report, “Out of Ma Sanjia,” which revealed the inside story of torture at the Ma Sanjia Women’s Labor Camp, including sitting on the “tiger bench,” being locked up, and being subjected to electric shocks. “In 2019, a 6-year-old girl in London found a plea for help on a Christmas card, written by a man who identified himself as was a foreign prisoner at Qingpu Prison in Shanghai, China.
After telling Sun Yi’s story, Pang went on to point out that globalized trade and supply chains have become complicit in the forced labor system. Pang told VOA that the demand for lower costs and faster production by Western companies indirectly drives the use of forced labor in Chinese foundries. In doing research for my book, I found that many regular, ordinary Chinese factories secretly let labor camps do the work for them because they don’t have the means to produce at such a low cost and their regular contract workers can’t do it, so they have to let some unspeakable places do the work for them, like labor camps, like those that work for free or pay well below the minimum wage,” she said. The Chinese factory uses labor camps. Another reason Chinese factories use labor camps is that they don’t have the means to produce these goods in such a short period of time, and they face high fines if they miss delivery deadlines. So they let the labor camps do the work for them, and those prisoners had to work 15 to 20 hours a day, sometimes even 24 hours a day, to help those factories meet the deadline that Western companies demanded.”
Pon also believes that the contemporary consumer’s quest for cheap and trendy goods is also contributing to the problem. She said, “Many companies are profit-oriented; they want the lowest cost, a fast manufacturing process and to profit as much as possible from the latest fashions. Consumers also play a role in this, and we as consumers support companies that offer the latest trends at the lowest prices.”
A report by the Australian Institute for Strategic Policy Research, a think tank, in early March 2020 estimated that more than 80,000 Uyghurs were transferred from Xinjiang to forced labor in factories across China between 2017 and 2019, which allegedly involved 83 global brands, with fast fashion brands Abercrombie & Fitch, Gap, H&M, Uniqlo, Zara and others Abercrombie & Fitch, Gap, H&M, Uniqlo, Zara, etc. are among them. These brands are pushing out new products at a staggering rate, for example, ZARA’s website shows that it launches more than 12,000 items a year, with a complete retirement every three weeks, and fast-Food fashion consumption is based on its low prices.
Why did the audit and due diligence fail?
When Pang visited China’s Shanghai Qingdong Compulsory Isolation Drug Treatment Center (formerly Shanghai No. 4 Labor Correctional Administration Center) in early 2019, she pretended to be a businesswoman making purchases and was surprised to find that the guards made no secret of the fact that they were forced to work. In addition, during her visit, trucks carrying goods came and went from the facility every two hours. Pon followed some of the trucks and tracked down manufacturers in the surrounding area whose products included pet toys, leather collars, bicycle parts and school supplies, and most of them were in the export trade.
Pang told Voice of America that companies can easily investigate whether their factories are suspected of forced labor, but they turn a blind eye to it out of interest. If companies really want to investigate, the system is not very well hidden,” she said. If I an investigative journalist can go to a labor camp and follow their trucks and see which exporters they send their goods to, the connection between them is obvious, as long as you follow their trucks. If companies really wanted to, they could easily find these out.”
On the other hand, the CCP system’s lack of transparency and its heavy-handed policies toward its citizens also hinder auditing and regulation. Jewher Ilham, the daughter of Ilham Tohti, an ethnic Uighur scholar imprisoned by Communist authorities, is currently a researcher at the Worker Rights Consortium, a Washington-based nonprofit organization. She told VOA that in Xinjiang, where hundreds of thousands of Uighurs are forced to work, a normal auditing system is nearly impossible.
The mechanisms that brands, retailers and independent investigators typically use to investigate forced labor are impossible because of China’s heavy-handedness throughout the region, including surveillance and intimidation,” she said. Workers who are intimidated are unlikely to tell investigators the truth, so any efforts to conduct due diligence will not yield reliable results. There have been instances where factories in the Xinjiang region with clear signs of forced labor have passed audits and inspections, despite clear evidence to the contrary. These audits relied on testimony from workers in those problematic factories, as well as self-reports from management. Now, no company should conduct audits in the Xinjiang region because the results of these audits are faked due diligence, and the audits themselves could put workers in these regions at risk.”
“Rejecting Xinjiang”
Speaking about the current focus of the U.S. government on forced labor in Xinjiang, Pang said that whether it is the Masanjia labor camps or the re-Education camps in Xinjiang, they are all part of a large, nationwide system of forced labor. after the 1994 reforms, the labor reform system is still managed by the public security department. In Xinjiang, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a provincial and ministerial agency under the direct jurisdiction of the Communist Party, is also suspected of involvement in forced labor, and the U.S. government imposed sanctions against it in late 2020.
Pang noted, “The overall picture is that the incarcerated have no access to lawyers and no opportunity to be tried. They are forced to work for exporters, and if they don’t openly criticize their ethnic and religious beliefs, or if they don’t meet production requirements, they are abused. Abuse, violence, and sexual assault are common in all of these labor camps.”
A March 2020 study by the Congressional and Executive Commission on China (CECC) revealed that forced labor in the form of “re-education camps” is widespread in China’s Xinjiang region, with cotton, garment fabrics, shoes and other commodities being the most affected areas. on January 19, 2021, former U.S. Secretary of State On January 19, 2021, former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the Chinese government “genocide and Crimes Against Humanity” in Xinjiang, a statement echoed by his successor, Secretary Blinken. At a February meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Council, British Foreign Secretary George Raab said that torture, forced labor and forced birth control are occurring on an “industrial scale” in Xinjiang, China.
Pang argued that Xinjiang would be a better entry point for Western governments to address the forced labor that pervades China, for example by refusing to trade with companies in Xinjiang. The Chinese government has invested a lot in developing Xinjiang, which is also an important transportation hub along the Belt and Road,” she said. The key to the Belt and Road is trade, and if trade is taken away from Xinjiang, that’s powerful leverage that can force the Chinese government to rethink its policies against the Uighurs.”
In addition to government sanctions, Pang believes companies must also be more transparent about their sourcing and sustainability policies, avoid forced labor products from Xinjiang, and show the public where their foundries and sourcing originate.
There are a lot of labels that companies can use to advertise and make money, such as “Made with Conscience” and “Fair Trade,” she said. We should create a new label called “No Xinjiang,” which means the product does not include labor from Xinjiang. We should start a campaign to make companies more transparent and push them to be more transparent about their sustainability policies on Xinjiang.”
Pang also raises the responsibility of being a consumer in her book: contemporary consumers are often focused on their own interests and ignore the human rights issues behind cheap products. She writes, “If the price is low, we’re happy. If the price is too high, we are sad …… We don’t feel the pain of producers as deeply as we feel our desires.”
Pon told Voice of America, “We can go to the websites of our favorite companies and see what they say on their sustainability or corporate social responsibility pages. Do they state where they’re sourcing from, how much they’re paying these foundries and how much time they’re giving them to produce. If they don’t state that information, we can’t be sure they’re not using forced labor.”
For her part, Juer-Ilihamu believes that consumers can encourage brands that are far from Xinjiang by buying selectively. She said:- “Rather than calling for a consumer boycott, we are rewarding brands that are conscientious through their purchasing behavior, and criticizing those that have not yet committed to being ethical in Uighur areas.”
For nearly a year or so, several internationally known brands have made it clear that they will stay away from forced labor products in Xinjiang, including H&M, Zara, Calvin Klein, Adidas, Volkswagen and more.
At the end of the book, Pon presents a list of actions readers can take. In addition to the aforementioned questions about production cycles and costs, consumers can also email companies to ask questions such as: what is the minimum wage for workers at the foundry, how much does an audit cost, is the audit random, what problems have come up as a result of the audit and whether they have been resolved, etc.
She wrote: “Forced labor against dissidents and religious minorities will continue as long as the CCP is in power. As individuals, we cannot force the CCP to embrace democracy, but we can use our spending power to limit the benefits the authoritarian government reaps through the mistreatment of prisoners of conscience and minorities.”
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