The prisoner is Sun Yi, an activist arrested for practicing meditations forbidden by the government; he was a member of Falun Gong, which eventually became a forbidden movement in China. The book's author spent three years at least tracing Sun Yi and learning the story we get in the book. Along the way, we learn about Chinese labor camps, which are basically gulags, that produce many of the cheap products Americans love to buy in the U.S. These are products you can find in major retailers including Walmart, Target, and other well known corporations. If you wonder why products made in China are so cheap it's because many are made in labor camp factories by unpaid exploited workers kept in inhuman conditions. American companies are glad to do business with these Chinese companies, often turning a blind eye to the exploitation. American consumers mostly care to get their stuff as cheap as possible; these consumers are mostly ignorant or indifferent to the horrifying human cost in many of the products they buy.
The book is arranged into 19 chapters with a prologue and epilogue. The narrative alternates between Sun Yi's life story and the story of China's politics and policies including some history as well. Sun Yi's experience is quite horrifying and gruesome at times. The story is also a bit of a thriller as we wonder whether Sun Yi will be able to survive and escape. Along the way, we learn about the feeble efforts of the United States to stem the flow of labor camp products, efforts often thwarted by indifference, lobbying, and weak enforcement of what little laws are available.
The story draws readers in, and the pace keeps going to the end. This is a book that has potential to make many who read it aware of the situation. In the author's epilogue, they offer some solutions, but given American addiction to cheap products and their unwillingness to pay what things really cost, not to mention the overall bad economy, I doubt any change is possible. The book presents an important story, but I am not sure many will bother to listen.
The book includes a good set of notes to document its sources. It also has a bibliography that may be of interest for readers who may want to learn more.
This is a moving book that draws you in. It tugs at the heart at times. I will add it may not be for some sensitive readers, but I think as many people as possible need to read it, more so if it makes them uncomfortable. This is a good selection for public and academic libraries.
4 out of 5 stars.
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Additional reading notes.
Sun Yi's letter's journey:
"The letter had slipped past armed guards at a Chinese gulag, elude managers at all stages of the supply chain, and traveled more than five thousand miles across the Pacific Ocean before landing on Julie's forest-green rug" (16).
And that was not the first S.O.S. letter; there had been others before found in products from places like Walmart and Saks Fifth Avenue. The news media had reported on such letters before.
The author spent three years on this story, a dark story:
"Over the course of three years, I immersed myself in Sun's story and the accounts of other labor camp survivors. As I speak with the wholesalers who serve as middlemen between labor camps and big international retailers, the people who audit Chinese factories for multinational corporations, and the sales managers at the factories who respond to U.S. consumer demands, it became clear this was more than a story about Chinese human rights.
There is a darker side to China's rags-to-riches transformation-- and our own pleasure in the cheap products that we consume daily" (32).
Some consumers are willing to change their habits:
"Whether it's supporting companies that have reduced their carbon footprint, or ones that appear to have ethical factory conditions, we are seeing a new willingness among consumers to select, or reject, brands for the express purpose of making a positive impact in the world" (34).
The keyword above is "appear" when it comes to being ethical. What little auditing of these factories there is turns out to be toothless, and often on China's terms. As for those consumers, the catch is these are mostly privileged consumers. Most poor consumers can't afford to be too selective to worry about the ethics of who makes their cheap goods.
"And consumers around the world are allowing the Chinese government to profit from this forced labor by buying products made at these camps" (49).
Speaking of those audits:
"The issue is, not all audits are created equal. The price of an audit often limits its thoroughness. A standard audit, which costs a couple hundred dollars, usually means a cursory inspection that might check the cleanliness of the factory, the quality of merchandise, and efficacy of the equipment. It is unlikely to detect something structural like a building's stability-- and incapable of finding something as complex as a secret subcontract to a labor camp" (94).
Plus often certain data just goes missing:
"It is striking that in the era of big data, when corporations can store our emails, photos, and web searches for eternity in the cloud, data centers, and blockchains, they do not retain their factories' production records" (96).
It is not that striking. It is a "playbook" kind of move. You cannot prosecute what there is no evidence for. Plus as the author later writes:
"From the beginning, audits were created to protect corporations rather than workers" (97).
In this day and age consumers are not ignorant when it comes to how cheap goods are made:
"At this point in the information age, most consumers are aware to some degree there is a profound hidden suffering behind the abundance of cheap products. Stories about sweatshops and child labor have been extensively covered in books, documentaries, and lifestyle magazines, and on late-night talk shows. But it has not stopped us from shopping brands that likely use this type of labor" (104).
Awareness does not mean said consumers read those books, articles, and tune in to those documentaries, less so in the age of getting the news from social media. In addition, it does not help that in many places like Bumfuck, USA the only games in town are Walmart and/or Dollar General; they are local monopolies. You can try to be virtuous all you want but certain goods have to be bought. To the poor, that virtue is not even on the radar.
In the end, as I stated earlier, no real change will happen:
"And still, after all of this-- the congressional hearings, exposés in national and international papers, and sacrifices of dissidents to make the horrors of forced labor known to the public-- the world at large remains oblivious of China's gulags" (223).
And finally, a few boos from the bibliography I am adding to my TBR list (record links to WorldCat):
- Allen, Michael Thad, The Business of Genocide: the SS, Slave Labor, and the Concentration Camps.
- Applebaum, Anne, Gulag: a History.
- Baptist, Edward, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.
- Gutmann, Ethan, The Slaughter: Mass Killing, Organ Harvesting, and China's Secret Solution to Its Dissident Problem.
