In an important and bravely researched new book, “Made in China: A Prisoner, an SOS Letter, and the Hidden Cost of America’s Cheap Goods,” Amelia Pang argues that U.S. consumers, by our spending habits, may be able to curtail China’s barbaric system of forced labor in prison camps. I wish I were as sanguine about that as she is.
In “Made in China” (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2021, (278 pp.)) Pang details the forced labor and tortures the Chinese Communist Party inflicted upon the late Sun Yi, a Falun Gong practitioner, and millions of people like him. Pang’s brave research included driving rental cars to Chinese laogai, or forced-labor prisons, then following trucks that left the prisons to the distribution centers of the corporations that export products of forced labor to the United States, the European Union and elsewhere.
In addition to her good old-fashioned street reporting, Pang, a fluent Mandarin speaker, cites more than 500 sources in 47 pages of footnotes, and her bibliography cites 45 books on related subjects, a valuable contribution in itself.
Anyone who pays attention knows that China is trying to exterminate Uighur culture, as surely as it is exterminating the culture of Tibet. Reuters and the Council on Foreign Relations, citing U.S. government estimates, report 1 million to 3 million Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in laogai camps, out of an Uighur population in Xinjiang of about 11 million. The Financial Times has detailed China’s “war on Uighur culture.” And China specialist Adrian Zenz reported on China’s plan to reduce Uighur birth rate to nearly zero.
I read “Made in China” as an exposé on China’s immense chain of laogai (“re-education through labor”) prison camps. But in an interview this week, Pang told me that her book “is ultimately about empowering consumers, about making educated purchasing choices, and holding our companies to … sustainability and social responsibilities.”
In her 5-page Epilogue, “What We Can Do,” Pang suggests we think twice before buying anything — from a little paper flower or an earring trinket to a computer — and ask whether it was made by slave laborers in China. And if so, to refuse to buy it, and ask the corporations involved — by letter or email or phone call — whether, and how, they audit their purchasing and sales chains to see whether they are selling products of slave labor.
I asked Ms. Pang whether she “really think(s) the average U.S. or EU consumer will undertake the 11 suggestions about quizzing corporations on their audits” that she suggests we ask, in her Epilogue.
She replied: “There’s been a surprising number of consumers who’ve reached out to me since the book came out and asked what else they could do … especially with Generation Z. They really do have a strong interest in finding out if their brands are sustainable and … about labor rights in other parts of the world.
“I’m a millennial. I’m 30 years old.” (Author’s note: All the more reason to admire her book — her first one.)
As more people of her generation and Gen Z “come of age and gain jobs and more purchasing power, you’re already seeing a lot of brands focusing on how to acquire this particular market, and how to market to them,” Pang told me.
“They’re the largest purchasing demographic in the United States: 20% of the U.S. population — and they haven’t reached their maximum purchasing power yet. … (Greta Thunberg) is representative of that generation, the sacrifice they’re willing to go to for social causes.”
Well, as I said, Amelia Pang wrote an important book, but I think the suggestions she makes in her Epilogue are pie in the sky. Here is another excerpt from our interview:
