The Alarming Human Toll of Cheap Stuff ‘Made in China’
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Workers at a textile factory in Huaibei, China, in July 2020. “When we
are standing … in front of the gentle glow of a computer screen,” Amelia
Pang argues, “we don’t feel the agony of the workers who made our
products as deeply as we feel our desires.”
Workers at a textile factory in Huaibei, China, in July 2020. “When we
are standing … in front of the gentle glow of a computer screen,” Amelia
Pang argues, “we don’t feel the agony of the workers who made our
products as deeply as we feel our desires.”Credit...Agence France-Presse
— Getty Images
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ByLauren Hilgers
* NYT, Feb. 2, 2021UpdatedFeb. 5, 2021
阅读简体中文版
<https://cn.nytimes.com/culture/20210204/made-in-china-amelia-pang/>閱讀繁體中文版
<https://cn.nytimes.com/culture/20210204/made-in-china-amelia-pang/zh-hant/>
*MADE IN CHINA
**A Prisoner, an SOS Letter, and the Hidden Cost of America’s Cheap Goods
*By Amelia Pang
278 pp. Algonquin Books. $27.95.
Five chapters into “Made in China,” Amelia Pang’s investigation of
forced labor practices in China, her main subject — a Falun Gong
practitioner named Sun Yi — is tasked with making decorative paper
mushrooms for export, it is rumored, to Europe. It is early during his
stay in a forced labor camp called Masanjia, and the assignment is
supposed to be a cushy one. How difficult can it be to make paper
mushrooms? Sun, however, soon scrapes his fingers rubbing the paper
together to get the desired fake-mushroom feel. His cuts grow infected,
but he keeps working, trying to fill an impossible quota of 160
mushrooms per day. Other inmates steal mushrooms from one another in
desperation, growing thin on a diet of poisonous-smelling vegetable
soup. “Sun regularly slept just two to four hours,” Pang writes. “Only
to dream of the repetitive creasing motions of folding paper mushrooms.”
In the aftermath of 2020 — a year that saw both theexpansion of a vast
detention and forced labor system
<https://xjdp.aspi.org.au/explainers/exploring-xinjiangs-detention-facilities/>in
the western Chinese province of Xinjiang and a homebound global
population increasingly reliant on goods delivered anonymously to their
doorstep — Pang’s book feels timely and urgent. Her argument starts
here, in the room with the mushrooms, and goes like this: that the way
we consume is unsustainable; that things as seemingly trivial as paper
mushrooms and Halloween decorations are entangled in a system that hides
atrocity by design and makes complicity — with authoritarian
governments, with dangerous working conditions and even with religious
persecution — part of modern life. Pang, a freelance journalist who grew
up in a Mandarin-speaking household, is most effective when she is
drawing out these juxtapositions, putting production and torture
matter-of-factly side by side.
“Made in China” gets off to a rocky start; Pang does not hit her stride
until a few chapters in. She opens the book with a mystery, involving
the discovery, by a woman living in the suburbs of Portland, Ore., of a
note that Sun Yi hid in a package of Halloween decorations headed to the
United States. The woman opens the package, the note falls out and, it
seems, the hunt is on. “If you occasionally buy this product, please
kindly resend this letter to the World Human Right Organization,” the
note read, in English.
Identifying Sun Yi, however, turns out not to be much of a puzzle. He
had been released from Masanjia in 2010, two years before his letter was
discovered, well before Pang began researching his case. In fact, he was
the subject of a 2018 documentary, “Letter From Masanjia
<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/13/movies/letter-from-masanjia-review.html?searchResultPosition=1>.”
This opening conceit dissolves quickly and the early pages of Pang’s
book race through Sun’s childhood and, at the same time, survey decades
of Chinese history in passages that are sometimes sweeping and
reductive. “The Cultural Revolution killed millions and mangled China’s
economy,” she writes. “This is why modern mainland Chinese ideals tend
to place higher value on social stability than human rights.”
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Once she has dispensed with this preamble, and Sun Yi arrives in
Masanjia, Pang’s narrative slows down and her argument starts to take
shape. She details the living conditions and social hierarchy within the
prison, the grueling work and rumors about a shadowy “ghost” unit. And,
outside the prison, Pang is a dogged investigator. She follows trucks
from reform-through-labor prisons near Shanghai to the factories that
dot the surrounding region. Pang talks to activists and laborers,
combing through Chinese media accounts, and making a convincing case
that brands from H&M to AmericanGirl have reaped the benefits of
cheap/laogai/, or forced labor. Supply chains and corporate malfeasance
are not only to blame, she contends; our own consumption patterns
contribute to the system that had Sun working endlessly and against his
will.
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Image
“Our spending habits put brands on a perpetual search for ways to
shorten the time between design, manufacturing and distribution,” Pang
writes. “Our current pressure on companies to endlessly optimize is
fundamentally unsustainable.” She names online retailers like ASOS and
Fashion Nova, which introduce new styles at a furious pace, as examples
of this hyper-speed trend. This, in turn, increases the pressure on
Chinese factories to deliver flexibly and cheaply, driving them to look
for money-saving labor solutions, like those found in/laogai/prisons.
And, although many brands regularly audit some of the factories in their
supply chain, it would take a significant increase in spending to make
those audits meaningful. Two factories in the Bangladesh building
complex thatcollapsed in 2013
<https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/02/world/asia/bangladesh-rana-plaza-murder-charges.html?searchResultPosition=3>,
killing more than 1,000 workers, for example, had recently been deemed
safe by auditors.
“It is common for a major brand to have over 100,000 suppliers at the
first level,” she writes. “But when 100,000 suppliers are subcontracting
to factories that are subcontracting to other factories, even the
cheapest audits can quickly become expensive.”
While Pang is explaining the tangle of sourcing and consumption that tie
U.S. consumers to places like Masanjia, Sun Yi’s story continues to
unfold. He starts contemplating writing an SOS letter to include in the
packaging of some decorative Halloween gravestones he is working on. He
is hiding notes in the metal bed frame where he sleeps, courting
disaster as his letter-writing campaign expands to include other
inmates. Meanwhile, in the United States, Pang explains, consumers are
hard-pressed to hold the means of production in our heads while making a
purchase. “We feel pleasure if the price is low. We feel pain if the
price is too high. When we are standing … in front of the gentle glow of
a computer screen, we don’t feel the agony of the workers who made our
products as deeply as we feel our desires.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/books/review/made-in-china-amelia-pang.html?searchResultPosition=1#after-story-ad-2>
Sun Yi’s sister and mother struggle to secure his release. He suffers
torture and illness and, by the time Pang finishes the book, has died in
exile. His story ends in Indonesia in 2017, before Pang had a chance to
meet him in person. Her final chapters are an argument that his
imprisonment, while years in the past, is still relevant. The camps in
Xinjiang, she maintains, are a means of eliminating a culture as well as
turning a profit. China’s West is an important link in China’s Belt and
Road Initiative, a profusion of development and investment projects
around the world. The Xinjiang government has offered incentives to
textile companies willing to open factories near the camps. One recent
report estimated that 80,000 ethnic Uighurs have beenforcibly sent
tofactories <https://www.aspi.org.au/report/uyghurs-sale>in other parts
of China.
Pang leaves us with a question that she herself has trouble answering.
How do you square China’s economic might with its human rights record?
Despite a trade war between China and the Trump administration,trade
with China broke records in 2020
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/14/business/economy/us-china-trade-covid.html?searchResultPosition=1>.
The European Union signed afavorable new trade agreement
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/world/europe/eu-china-deal-biden.html>with
the country in December. Pang concludes her book with a list of actions
readers can take to help ensure companies are scrutinizing their
suppliers more closely. “We need to ask our favorite brands: If you are
still sourcing from Xinjiang, are you willing to pull out?” she writes.
Consumers can contact corporations. They can appeal to corporate social
responsibility divisions. They can use social media platforms like
Twitter. But in the face of ongoing trade deals and opaque systems of
manufacturing, this comes as a tall order. If governments and
corporations can’t resist a good deal in the name of human rights, can we?
Lauren Hilgers is a journalist and the author of “Patriot Number One: A
Chinese Rebel Comes to America.”
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