Even a partial review of China's myriad crimes against humanity should be sufficient reason for any morally conscious person not to buy products Made in China. But in this long unhappy list, three offenses take on special significance as they are directly tied to the manufacture of the products themselves.

All Made in China (MIC) products can be divided into three categories: those made in prisons and forced labor (laogai) camps, those manufactured by the Chinese military and those made by a disenfranchised labor force.

Products made in forced labor camps

The fact that a significant part of China's export of manufactured goods originates from prisons and Laogai forced labor (or "Reform Through Labor") camps is well known. Less well know is the exact extent, mainly due to the near impossibility of obtaining statistics on these camps and their productivity. But because of the dedicated and courageous work of one former-prisoner, Harry Wu, we now know that the scale of labor-camp manufacturing is not only huge but plays a significant role in China's economy. In several thousand forced labor camps an estimated 16-20 million Chinese, perhaps ten percent of them political offenders, work on prison farms, factories and workshops, in a harsh atmosphere permeated by sadism, torture and malnutrition. In his book, LAOGAI: THE CHINESE GULAG, Harry Wu maintains that "armies of low-paid, forced, highly efficient working prisoners play a very important role in the Communist government's socialist construction'& Never before has there been a nation with a prison system so extensive that it pervades all aspects of national production, has such careful planning and organization, and composes such an integral part of a people's economic and productive system."

It has been argued by China's apologists that prisons in the free world also make their inmates work, often in manufacturing goods that are sold on the free market. The difference is, of course, that first and foremost, people in the free world are not incarcerated for merely expressing their political opinions or practicing their religion in a peaceful and law-abiding manner. Secondly, prisons in the free world are unable, because of laws or public opinion, to exploit their prisoners' work to the necessary inhuman degree where it becomes profitable. Prisons in the West are, because of this, and also because of the relatively high standard-of-living of prisoners, invariably, economic burdens on the state. In China, forced labor manufacturing is a thriving and profitable economic enterprise.

This efficiency is achieved through a harsh system of motivation and punishment. Prisoners' food rations are linked to their productivity. Even sickness is often taken as evidence of poor work attitude and such "work avoiders" may have their rations cut off or decreased. "No work, no food" and "Light work load, light rations" are the rationale of the system. Other measures to ensure productivity are revocation of letter writing privileges and visiting rights, solitary confinement, mass criticism, prolonged shackling of legs and hands, and often beatings and torture. Prisoners who are slack, or accidentally damage tools or machinery are often charged with "sabotage of state property" and face punishment or fresh charges.

Prisoners often work under horrendous conditions as revealed in video footages obtained by Harry Wu, which were shown on American network television in 1992. In one sequence, in an animal-skin processing plant, naked prisoners waist deep in vats of tannic acid are shown handling animal hides. Prisoners in forced labor camps are often not only undernourished but are often suffering from tuberculosis, hepatitis and other diseases. Inmates in Manchuria and Amdo (Qinghai) face sub-arctic conditions where unwary prisoners often die of a frozen lung merely from breathing in the open.

A latest confirmation of China's brutal forced labor practices appeared in The NEW YORK TIMES (22, May 2001). Local officials in Sichuan province admitted to Reuters that 39 miners trapped in a flooded coal shaft and feared dead, were convicts who were working in a prison-run-mine. The officials said they had little hope of finding the men alive. Chinese news reports on the accident4 have not mentioned that the victims were convicts, and the government denies the existence of forced labor.

Among the welter of Made in China products flooding the free world, it is a major problem to identify those products made in forced labor camps. One reason for this is that prisons and labor camps exporting manufactured goods have created separate and innocent-sounding corporate identities for themselves. This is probably why efforts to boycott only products made in prisons and forced labor camps have never had much success. In February this year The New York Times reported that fully one third of paper clips used in the United States (and distributed by Staples) were manufactured in a prison in Nanjing by female inmates "who were not paid, and worked so many hours that their fingers were sometimes bloodied." The manufacturing company, AIMCO, was owned by Peter Chen, a U.S. citizen. We should bear in mind that this discovery is an exception, just the exposed tip of a very dark and inhuman system that feeds on the Western public's ignorance, and appetite for bargains.

A WASHINGTON POST article of June 14, 2001, by Philip Pan, reported a new development in prison labor in China which compounds the problem of identifying prison manufactured products. In recent years, increasing competition has made it difficult for prison factories to sell their own products on the open market. As Chinese prisons depend on their factories for funding, this has caused conditions to worsen for inmates. Prison authorities now contract with private companies to manufacture an assortment of such labor-intensive products as wigs and Christmas lights. And they are pressing prisoners to work longer hours.

"On occasion, inmates work throughout the night without sleep. It's very common to see inmates spitting blood and fainting from exhaustion in the workshops," wrote a prisoner in a smuggled letter, a copy of which was obtained by the New York-based group Human Rights in China. "After laboring for long hours under bright lights, some inmates sustained serious retinal injuries that have affected their vision. But the guards accuse them of faking it and force them to work until they go completely blind."

One inmate who was released recently said prison guards have a personal interest in pushing inmates to work harder because budget shortfalls mean they do not get paid, sometimes for months at a time. "They set a quota for you, but if you meet the quota, then they raise it. You work harder to meet it, and then they raise it again," the former inmate said. "It's torture to meet these quotas, but it's torture if you don't meet them, too." Several former inmates said prisoners who fail to meet quotas or otherwise upset the authorities are handcuffed to basketball hoops in the prison yards, or to high railings in the workshops, their feet barely touching the ground. "We'd be working, and these people would be just hanging there next to us," said one inmate. "It was like a warning."

Another inmate said guards force prisoners to prop up heavy doors for days at a time, or torture them by binding their hands tightly with ropes. Guards also put troublesome inmates in six-foot-square solitary confinement cells infested with mosquitoes in the summer.

> Next: Three direct reasons not to buy Made in China : Part 2