MCLC: cry for help from a labor camp

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: cry for help from a labor camp
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (6/11/13):
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/world/asia/man-details-risks-in-exposing-
chinas-forced-labor.html

Behind Cry for Help From China Labor Camp
By ANDREW JACOBS

MASANJIA, China — The cry for help, a neatly folded letter stuffed inside
a package of Halloween decorations sold at Kmart, traveled 5,000 miles
from China into the hands of a mother of two in Oregon.

Scrawling in wobbly English on a sheet of onionskin paper, the writer said
he was imprisoned at a labor camp in this northeastern Chinese town, where
he said inmates toiled seven days a week, their 15-hour days haunted by
sadistic guards.

“Sir: If you occasionally buy this product, please kindly resend this
letter to the World Human Right Organization,” said the note, which was
tucked between two ersatz tombstones and fell out when the woman, Julie
Keith, opened the box in her living room last October. “Thousands people
here who are under the persicution of the Chinese Communist Party
Government will thank and remember you forever.”

The letter drew international news media coverage and widespread attention
to China’s opaque system of “re-education through labor,” a collection of
penal colonies where petty criminals, religious offenders and critics of
the government can be given up to four-year sentences by the police
without trial.

But the letter writer remained a mystery, the subject of speculation over
whether he or she was a real inmate or a creative activist simply trying
to draw attention to the issue.

Last month, though, during an interview to discuss China’s labor camps, a
47-year-old former inmate at the Masanjia camp said he was the letter’s
author. The man, a Beijing resident and adherent of Falun Gong, the
outlawed spiritual practice, said it was one of 20 such letters he
secretly wrote over the course of two years. He then stashed them inside
products whose English-language packaging, he said, made it likely they
were destined for the West.

“For a long time I would fantasize about some of the letters being
discovered overseas, but over time I just gave up hope and forgot about
them,” said the man, who asked that only his surname, Zhang, be published
for fear of reprisal.

He knew well the practices of the camp in question, which was corroborated
by other inmates, and he spoke as other inmates did of their work
preparing mock tombstones. His handwriting and modest knowledge of English
matched those of the letter, although it was impossible to know for sure
whether there were perhaps other letter writers, one of whose messages
might have reached Oregon.

If Mr. Zhang’s account truly explains the letter’s origin, the feat
represents one of the more successful campaigns by a follower of the Falun
Gong movement, which is known for its high-profile attempts to embarrass
the Chinese government after being labeled a cult and outlawed in 1999.

Emboldened by an unusually open public debate in China that has broken out
here in recent months over the future of re-education through labor,
scores of former inmates have come forward to tell their stories. In
interviews with more than a dozen people who were imprisoned at Masanjia
and other camps around the country, they described a catalog of horrific
abuse, including frequent beatings, days of sleep deprivation and
prisoners chained up in painful positions for weeks on end.

Several former inmates recounted the death of a fellow inmate, either from
suicide or an illness that went untreated by prison officials.

“Sometimes the guards would drag me around by my hair or apply electric
batons to my skin for so long, the smell of burning flesh would fill the
room,” said Chen Shenchun, 55, who was given a two-year sentence for
refusing to give up a petition campaign aimed at recovering unpaid wages
from her accounting job at a state-owned factory.

According to former inmates, roughly half of Masanjia’s population is made
up of Falun Gong practitioners or members of underground churches, with
the rest a smattering of prostitutes, drug addicts and petitioners whose
efforts to seek redress for perceived injustices had become an
embarrassment for their hometown officials.

All agreed that the worst abuse was directed at Falun Gong members who
refused to renounce their faith. In addition to the electric shocks, they
said, guards would tie their limbs to four beds, and gradually kick the
beds farther apart. Some inmates would be left that way for days, unfed
and lying in their own excrement.

“I still can’t forget the pleas and howling,” said Liu Hua, 51, a
petitioner who was imprisoned at Masanjia on three separate occasions.
“That place is a living hell.”

Even if they found the work exhausting, many inmates described the time
spent in Masanjia’s workshops as a respite from mistreatment or the hours
of “re-education classes” that often entailed an endless recitation of
camp rules or the singing of patriotic songs while standing in the
broiling sun.
Much of the work involved producing clothing for the domestic market or
uniforms for the People’s Armed Police. But inmates say they also
assembled Christmas wreaths bound for South Korea, coat linings stuffed
with duck feathers that were labeled “Made in Italy” and silk flowers that
guards insisted would be sold in the United States. “Whenever we were
making goods for export, they would say, ‘You better take extra care with
these,' ” said Jia Yahui, 44, a former inmate who now lives in New York.

Corinna-Barbara Francis, China researcher at Amnesty International, said
that given the abundant money-making opportunities, abolishing or
significantly reforming the system would prove daunting. In addition to
the profits earned from the inmate labor, prison employees often solicit
bribes for early release, or for better treatment, from the families of
those incarcerated. “Given the serious money being made in these places,
the economic incentive to keep the system going is really powerful,” she
said.

During labor shortages, inmates say Masanjia officials simply buy
small-time offenders from other cities on a sliding scale that begins at
800 renminbi, or about $130, for six months of labor. They include people
like Zhang Ling, a 25-year-old from the eastern coastal city of Dalian who
said she was among a group of 50 young women rounded up by the police last
May during a crackdown on illegal pyramid sales schemes and then sold to
Masanjia. While there, she sewed buttons on military uniforms but was
released 10 months early after a brother paid for her release.

Masanjia officials did not respond to faxes and phone calls requesting an
interview. Approached one recent afternoon, a half-dozen guards on a
cigarette break outside the women’s work camp refused to answer any
questions. One guard, however, made a point of correcting the way a
question was phrased. “There are no prisoners here,” she said sternly.
“They are all students.”

Sears Holdings, the owner of Kmart, declined to make an executive
available for an interview. But in a brief statement, a company spokesman,
Howard Riefs, said an internal investigation prompted by the discovery of
the letter uncovered no violations of company rules that bar the use of
forced labor. He declined to provide the name of the Chinese factory that
produced the item, a $29.99 set of Halloween decorations called “Totally
Ghoul” that include plastic spiders, synthetic cobwebs and a “bloody
cloth.”

Although he was released from Masanjia in 2010, Mr. Zhang, the man who
said he wrote the letter, has vivid memories of producing the plastic foam
headstones, which were made to look old by painting them with a sponge.
“It was an especially difficult task,” he said. “If the results were not
to the liking of the guards, they would make us do them again.” He
estimated that inmates produced at least 1,000 headstones during the year
he worked on them.

His letter-writing subterfuge was complicated and risky. Barred from
having pens and paper, Mr. Zhang said he stole a set from a desk one day
while cleaning a prison office. He worked while his cellmates slept, he
said, taking care not to wake those inmates — often drug addicts or
convicted thieves — whose job it was to keep the others in line. He would
roll up the letter and hide it inside the hollow steel bars of his bunk
bed, he said.

There it would remain, sometimes for weeks, until a product designated for
export was ready for packing. “Too early and it could fall out, too late
and there would be no way to get it inside the box,” said Mr. Zhang, a
technology professional who studied English in college.His account of life
in the camp matched those of other inmates who said they produced the same
Halloween-themed items.

Last December, Ms. Keith, the woman who bought the product in 2011 but did
not open it until the following year, sent the letter she found to the
federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, which said it would
look into the matter. An agency spokesman, citing protocol, said that he
could not confirm whether an investigation was under way, but that such
cases generally took a long time to pursue.

For Ms. Keith, a manager at Goodwill Industries, the experience has been
sobering. She said she previously knew little about China, except that
most of the household goods she bought were made there. “When that note
popped out and my daughter picked it up, I was skeptical that it was
real,” she said. “But then I Googled Masanjia and realized, ‘Whoa, this is
not a good place.' ”

Shi Da contributed research.