Amelia Pang

Lenin said communism meant soviet power plus electrification. On this book's account, the CCP's ideal is oligarchy plus consumer goods. Combining aggressive cooptation of talent, rising living standards, high-tech surveillance, and ruthless extra-legal punishment of dissidents, China may succeed in developing the most stable authoritarian regime of modern times. It is even getting away with slow motion cultural destruction of its minorities. WTO membership has not liberalized the Chinese economy so much as allowed it to entrench quasi-State businesses and forced labor products inside global markets. It's hard to see any hope for democratization now. This is simply a system of competently managed totalitarianism that shows no sign of breaking down.… (más)

nonfiction / minorities and political prisoners in Chinese forced-labor prisons (now "detox centers")

TW: torture, lots of torture, rape and assault

This was very tough to read at times, but I am glad to be better informed now. Will have to think twice before buying anything cheaply again (even binder clips!) and will try to question companies' labor sources more often (any factory in China can easily subcontract to a prison, and "socially responsible" audits actually do very little to detect these connections). I also learned about what's behind China's expanding organ transplant business (it's not a "voluntary" process and ethnic minorities and Falun Dong prisoners have been called to supply many organs on demand--i.e., they are executed and harvested according to what organs are needed). Even the Chinese Olympics become tragic when you realize that the people who protested the tearing down of their homes to make way for new arenas were subsequently arrested and jailed.

The thing that may be most influential in terms of hindering this huge industry is increased social awareness and customers using their buying power and calling on companies to change (as has helped in the past with Nike in one case). But since supply chains are so non-transparent it might make sense to view any cheap products (whether marked as a Chinese import or not) as suspect, and try to at least be more mindful of what you buy.… (más)

"Made in China: A Prisoner, an SOS Letter, and the Hidden Cost of America’s Cheap Goods" by Amelia Pang is a brief introduction to the laogai system of prison labor in China that specifically dates back to the Communist takeover.

Pang uses the true story of Sun Yi to illustrate how the system works when a note Sun wrote and inserted in a box of to-be-exported Halloween decorations is discovered by a consumer in the United States. It was not the first of these notes to be discovered in the West, but the case was well-documented.

Although Pang interviewed Sun over internet calls, she never met him and seemed to only do a little footwork in preparing this book. She spent a few weeks in China. For sources, she relies heavily on the Chinese Lens and a recently released documentary about Sun Yi, which Pang was given early access to.

Large sections of the book read exactly like tracts from Epoch Times, a Chinese language newspaper from New York that has turned into a multimedia empire that promotes COVID-19 misinformation and champions European far right causes while promoting and support former US President Donald Trump. Pang is a former writer for Epoch Times, which was originally created as the mouthpiece for the Falun Gong movement and Sun was a hardcore practitioner. Thus, readers get plenty of information about Falun Gong, China's twenty-five year crackdown on the movement, graphic depictions of torture, lengthy tangents on organ selling, and China's police state. Many of these tangents read like informative white papers. Amidst these peripheral topics, we learn a little about Sun and his wife.

Unfortunately, the most important part of the book, Pang's prescription to solve the problem, is a 5 page epilogue that advises readers to contact international suppliers through e-mail or telephone calls. The heart of the problem - I think - is rampant consumerism, but she offers no macroeconomic solutions for how to stop it.

The book itself is short, about 200 pages with generous font and spacing. That is definitely a bonus because Pang does a good job simplifying a very complex economic and social system.

Having read a few other books about this laogai system, I would recommend several of Liao Yiwu's books and Harry Wu's "Bitter Winds." In addition, there are excellent books that give a human face to China's new, harsh capitalism, especially Leslie Chang's "Factory Girls."… (más)