Tibetans Launch International "Boycott Made in China" Campaign
CTC, November 27, 2002

Advocacy Groups Vow Economic Pressure on China to Free Tibet

Toronto - On Saturday, December 7, 2002, Tibetans and supporters launch an international Boycott Made in China campaign designed to level economic pressure on the Chinese government to end its occupation of Tibet. Simultaneous demonstrations in front of toy stores and shopping malls in cities across Canada, the United States, New Zealand, Europe and India will mark the beginning of long-term and coordinated efforts to urge people to stop buying goods made in China.

In Toronto, the launch is taking place in front of the Eaton Centre at Yonge and Dundas, from 10:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Senator Con Di Nino, a long-time supporter of Tibet, will be present for the launch.

The campaign seeks to make consumers aware that many of the holiday presents and Christmas decorations they buy are manufactured under horrendous conditions in the world’s largest system of forced labor camps; that Catholic bishops, Protestant pastors, Buddhist lamas and Falun Gong practitioners are being jailed, tortured and sometimes executed for their religious beliefs even as the rest of the world goes about celebrating its religious holidays.

"Not only are Chinese products made by a disenfranchised labour force where trade unions do not exist, but millions of Chinese work in forced labour camps to produce the export goods that help sustain China’s economy and keep its ruthless, totalitarian leaders in power," says Harry Wu, a survivor of Chinese prisons and labour camps and author of Laogai: The Chinese Gulag.

Sales of "Made in China" products have given the leaders in Beijing the financing to implement its massive population transfer of Chinese people to Tibet, expand its all-pervasive and brutal apparatus of control and repression, systematically undermine Tibetan language, religion and way of life, and maintain a vast army of occupation and nuclear weapons inside Tibet.

The Boycott Made in China campaign, representing a worldwide coalition of Tibetan and Chinese organizations and human rights and labour advocates, plans to put the brakes on China’s crimes through the power of the individual consumer. Campaign organizers believe that, more than any other force that could be bought to bear against China, the latent power of the free, informed and responsible consumer can pressure the world’s last surviving giant Communist dictatorship to allow the Tibetan nation and the Chinese people the freedom they have been long denied.

Ontario Boycott Member Organizations: Canada Tibet Committee-Toronto, Canadian Tibetan Association of Ontario, Chushi Gangdruk, Tibetan Culture Preservation in Canada, Tibetan Youth Congress-Belleville, Tibet’s Independence Movement-Lindsay, Tibet’s Independence Movement-Peterborough

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