Made in China: A Prisoner, an SOS Letter, and the Hidden Cost of America's Cheap Goods

An eye opener. China has prisons, detention centers, re-education camps, some of which are essentially gulags, where inmates are forced to work long days, without days off, with meager rations, getting beaten and tortured to meet production goals. Granted, some inmates are true criminals in the sense of our own criminal statutes. Other inmates are drug addicts or drug dealers. But then there are the political prisoners, incarcerated for their beliefs and practices, such as Tibetan monks, Christians who stray from what the Chinese Communist Party allows, members of the quasi-religious organization Falun Gong, and Uighurs. Chinese factories sometimes contract labor tasks to the incarceration facilities, which are functionally labor camps. Cheap labor. It keeps the costs down for the factories which are producing goods for foreign markets, including the United States. One inmate doing forced labor in one of the gulags is named Sun. He surreptitiously sends an SOS letter out in a package he had to work on. The letter was read by Julie in Oregon when she opened a Halloween decoration package she bought at K-Mart. At first she thought the letter, written in English and Mandarin, was a prank. But further investigation led her to believe it was a genuine plea for help from a tortured inmate doing forced labor. Sun after serving time in the gulag eventually sneaks out of China and gets to Indonesia. He contacts Julie, who then flew to Jakarta to meet him. Sun unfortunately died soon thereafter, at middle age, of pneumonia. The author indicates that China still has these forced labor facilities, though they are sugar coated as re-education camps or some other innocuous designation. She also touches on forced human organ donations, and not just from convicted and executed criminals. But also from inmates who are forced to provide an organ on demand. A tourist organ transplant industry developed. This is a must-read book to get up you up speed on these gulags. It may also change your thinking about buying certain goods that are made in China.

I watched a documentary on Sun Yi’s story back in our local community center. I am glad to find a book on this topic. It sheds light on the Chinese Communist Party’s torture apparatus. I wish the mainstream media and the big corporations like NIKE will be more aware of the issues in forced labor in China. Or maybe they know but ignoring the issues

This book covers an important topic that people should know about and the author clearly did amazing research to uncover the information presented in this book. However, I found the book almost impossible to read because it is boring and not well written. Parts of it are like reading a textbook. Even the part about the man imprisoned in China did not hold my attention because the writing was plodding and elementary. I ended up skimming the last half just to find out what happened to him and to get the main points. The book simply did not hold my attention no matter how hard I tried to like it.

"There is a darker side to China's rags-to-riches transformation - and our own pleasure in the cheap products that we consume daily. During our endless search for the newest trends and the lowest prices, we become complicit in the forced labor industry." - Amelia Pang Amelia Pang's new book, Made in China, has an almost-irresistible hook: A middle-class American woman, opening Halloween decorations, finds a folded piece of paper. It is a note. More accurately, an SOS letter. A man from the other side of the world was being forced to work in a labor camp making cheap decorative tombstones for Halloween parties. He wrote so that whoever found the letter could contact a human rights organization. But Made in China is so much more than just a hook. It has everything one could want in a nonfiction book: a crisp, well-told narrative, relatable people at the center, a strong message for the reader, and action steps you can take. And as a whole, those aspects are so fantastically done that Made in China could be a dark horse among the best books of 2021. The problem: the Communist Party of China has abusing practitioners of religion for decades. Any religion that they determine is potentially subversive or dangerous to the goals of the Party, they go to great lengths to squash. It's true of Muslims, especially Turks such as the Uyghurs of Xinjiang (Pang is of Uyghur descent). It's also true of practitioners of Falun Gong, a meditation religion to which Made in China's central figure, Sun Yi, belongs. Falun Gong is the focus of the book, but Uyghur Muslims are always on the periphery of the discussion when they are not at the center, given the enhanced microscope China has recently been put under for its actions in Xinjiang. And while I always knew Christians were persecuted in China, I also knew there were some approved churches and didn't understand how that worked exactly. But Pang provides the best explanation I have read anywhere: The state-approved Christian churches in China are political institutions first and foremost. They refute some of the defining features of Christianity, such as a belief in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Instead, most are affiliated with the government-run Three-Self Patriotic Movement, which espouses self-governance, self-support, and self-propagation, and rejects foreign funding and foreign missionaries. For this reason, many Chinese Christians prefer to worship in informal house churches like Dong's. This is troubling for the Chinese regime, which sees independent churches as a fountainhead of dissent - and indeed, several prominent Chinese human rights lawyers are Christians. The massive lengths to which the Chinese government goes in order to lessen any chance of subversion is just mind-blowing. It's stuff from Stalin and Hitler stories. Pang writes about May (Sun's wife) in the followin...