Slavery: A 21st Century Evil Prison slaves in China

China is the world's factory, but does a dark secret lurk behind this apparent success story?

COMMENTARY
There is a lot to learn from this video. The first issue is the scale of the prison labor industry in China. The idea that there are about 5 million people doing commercial product manufacturing, mainly for export to USA, Europe and other countries is a surprise.

I am not surprised that there are commercial import/export companies in the USA handling these goods since the problem is a long way away and the goal is profit and the competition is pretty cut-throat ... but again I am a little surprised at the scale of these businesses.

One of the steps that must be taken is to have more customers take an interest in the quality of the supply chain being used for the goods and services being purchased. If the vendor does not have credible supply chain information, it is likely there is something illegal or unethical about the manufacture and distribution of the product.

It is reasonable to conclude that this cannot be solved simply by having the government write a regulation ... customers have got to stand up and be counted, and remove their purchasing power from businesses that are not fully engaged in getting rid of bad practices.
Peter Burgess

Once an isolationist communist state, over the last 20 years China has become the world's biggest exporter of consumer goods. But behind this apparent success story is a dark secret - millions of men and women locked up in prisons and forced into intensive manual labour.

'We were not paid at all, we were forced. If anyone refused to work, they would be beaten, some people were beaten to death.'

Charles Lee, former prison inmate

China has the biggest penal colony in the world - a top secret network of more than 1,000 slave labour prisons and camps known collectively as 'The Laogai'. And the use of the inmates of these prisons - in what some experts call 'state sponsored slavery' - has been credited with contributing to the country's economic boom.

In this episode, former inmates, many of whom were imprisoned for political or religious dissidence without trial, recount their daily struggles and suffering in the 'dark and bitter' factories where sleep was a privilege.

Charles Lee spent three years imprisoned for religious dissidence. He says: 'For a year they tried to brainwash me, trying to force me to give up my practice of Falun Gong. They figured me out ... so they changed their strategy to force me to feel like a criminal ... because, according to their theory, a prisoner should be reformed through labour .... So they forced me to do slave labour.'