So much of my reading centers on learning about the world and figuring out ways to do better- to be a kinder person, to learn more about injustices around the world and what part I can play in ending them, to discover ways I can be friendlier to the earth. The global supply chain has been constantly in the news throughout the pandemic, and that’s had me thinking a lot about supply and demand and what exactly it is that we’ve all been demanding so much of. That’s how Made in China: A Prisoner, an SOS Letter, and the Hidden Cost of America’s Cheap Goods by Amelia Pang (Algonquin Books, 2021) ended up on my TBR. I knew very little about how so many products are produced in China before; this book opened my eyes in a major, major way.
Back in 2012, a woman opened a package of Halloween decorations that had been sitting in her shed, unopened, for two years, only to be shocked to find a letter begging for help, detailing the gruesome conditions under which the decorations were produced. The woman hadn’t known too much about China’s forced labor system, sentencing political dissidents and ethnic and religious minorities to long sentences of slavery under hideous conditions, all to fulfill the relentless demands of global corporations, but after reading the letter, she began contacting human rights organizations in order to make them aware of what was in the letter.
Amelia Pang tells the story of Sun Yi, a Falun Gong practitioner imprisoned multiple times for dissent and the injustices he and so many others suffered and continue to suffer under China’s system of forced labor. Inmates are forced to work with little food, little sleep, no adequate medical care (unless they’re being examined as a possible forced organ donor; I wish that were an exaggeration), suffering beatings and torture, working until they drop dead. What China is running is essentially a system of concentration camps, and Amelia Pang has written a scathing exposé on the true cost of our consumerism.
This book is soul-crushing, and if you’re not reading it and thinking of all the absolutely unnecessary junk you’ve bought over the years that were likely manufactured with Chinese prison labor, I question your humanity. My husband owned one of the products specifically mentioned in the book, which completely and utterly horrified me. To be honest, I’m not sure how I’m going to buy much of anything ever again after reading this book- but that’s the whole point. I’m responsible for feeding into this system of demand. You are, took, if you’ve ever bought cheap products manufactured in China. We all are. And this needs to stop.
The problem is that there’s almost no way to tell which products are made using forced labor, a point which Amelia Pang stresses and outlines multiple times throughout the book. Often, because Chinese manufacturers will subcontract their labor out to these prisons, companies aren’t even fully aware of how or where their goods are produced. All they know is that demand is high, so they need to put pressure on their manufacturers to produce more and more at lower and lower prices. And what can be better for lower prices than not having to pay your ‘employees’ and forcing them to work 22 hours per day, beating them if they don’t produce as much as you want them to?
This is a book everyone needs to read. America isn’t the only country that feeds into this filthy system, though we are one of the biggest. I’m devastated to learn exactly how much torture and starvation and pain and death has gone into the products that fill my house, but I’m grateful that my eyes have been opened by this riveting book. I’ve never been that much of a thoughtless consumer, but I’m definitely going to be scrutinizing every single purchase I make from hereon out. No one should suffer or die for cheap goods.
She's probably at the library... 
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