No Christmas for Chinese Slaves

Inside Christmas Card, Girl Finds Plea From Chinese Prison Laborers
A 6-year-old found the note in London while writing Christmas cards to her classmates. “Forced to work against our will,” the message read.
By Daniel Victor

Florence Widdicombe, 6, in London on Sunday with a Tesco Christmas card from the same pack as a card she found containing a message from a Chinese prisoner.

A 6-year-old girl in London preparing Christmas cards for her classmates found a message from prisoners forced into labor in China, prompting the Tesco grocery chain to suspend ties with a supplier.
Florence Widdicombe was going through cards her mother purchased about a week ago at a Tesco supermarket when she saw one card had writing in it, her father, Ben Widdicombe, told the BBC.
“We are foreign prisoners in Shanghai Qingpu Prison China,” the handwritten note read.
“Forced to work against our will. Please help us and notify human rights organization.”
The New York Times could not independently authenticate the note, which also suggested that the recipient contact Peter Humphrey, a British journalist who was a prisoner at Qingpu from 2013 to 2015.
Mr. Humphrey, who was jailed on corruption charges he says were bogus while working as a fraud investigator, first wrote about the note in The Sunday Times.
Tesco said in a statement that it would stop selling the cards while it investigates.
The supplier was independently audited in November and “no evidence was found to suggest they had broken our rule banning the use of prison labor,” the company said.
“We abhor the use of prison labor and would never allow it in our supply chain,” the company said. “We were shocked by these allegations and immediately suspended the factory where these cards are produced and launched an investigation.”
But the supplier, Zhejiang Yunguang Printing, said that it had not heard from Tesco and that it became aware of the accusations only after being contacted by foreign news outlets, according to state-run media.
China has a poor human rights record — it has come under criticism for, among other things, its treatment of the Muslim minority in East Turkestan, surveillance of its own citizens and detentions of journalists — but the printing company insisted that it had “never had any connection with any prison” and suggested that the story was manufactured for political reasons.

Peter Humphrey at an event in London last year.

Tesco is among the international companies that have publicly vowed to stamp out prison labor. Britain requires large companies to describe the actions they have taken each year to keep modern slavery out of their supply chains.
Former inmates have described brutal abuse in China’s labor camps, including beatings, sleep deprivation and untreated illnesses. 
Finding a note hidden inside packaging tends to attract worldwide attention, though the claims are difficult to verify and are often suspected of being activist hoaxes.
Still, there have been times when former inmates confirmed they had surreptitiously sneaked out notes.
In 2013, a former inmate at the Masanjia labor camp said he wrote 20 letters that he hid in packaging that seemed headed toward the West. 
One of them was found by a mother of two in Oregon inside a package of Halloween decorations.
Mr. Humphrey, the journalist and former inmate, told the BBC he believed the note was “written as a collective message” from the prisoners.
He said he believed he knew who wrote the note but would not reveal the person’s identity.
He said there were about 250 foreigners kept in Qingpu “living a very bleak daily life.”
The cells held 12 prisoners apiece, with rusty iron bunk beds and mattresses about a centimeter thick, he said.
When he was there, manual labor work was voluntary, with inmates earning pennies they could spend on soap, toothpaste and cookies, he said.
“What has happened in the last year or so is work has become compulsory,” he said.
Mr. Widdicombe said he felt he had a responsibility to pass along the note to Mr. Humphrey.
“The first thought was it must be some sort of prank, but on reflection we realized it was actually potentially quite a serious thing,” Mr. Widdicombe told the BBC.

Chinese Propaganda Machine

Chinese broadcaster CGTN’s Hong Kong protests coverage probed by UK watchdog

• British regulator Ofcom investigating four broadcasts by CGTN aired in August and September
• Watchdog looking at whether Chinese programmes broke rules requiring news to be presented with due impartiality

By Simone McCarthy

Coverage of the Hong Kong protests by CGTN, the overseas arm of China’s state broadcaster, is being investigated by Ofcom, Britain’s communications regulator. 

Britain’s communications regulator has launched an investigation into coverage of the Hong Kong protests by the overseas arm of Chinese state broadcaster China Global Television Network (CGTN).
“We are investigating whether these programmes broke our rules requiring news to be presented with due impartiality,” said an Ofcom spokesperson, referring to four separate broadcasts on Hong Kong’s anti-government protests that aired in Britain on three dates in August and one in September.
The investigation brings the total number of programmes from CGTN and its Beijing-based parent company China Central Television (CCTV) under investigation to eight, according to Ofcom documents.
Media reports have linked earlier investigations, launched in May, to complaints about the network’s airing of forced confessions made by detained Hong Kong bookseller Gui Minhai and British private investigator Peter Humphrey. 

The programmes under investigation range in date from August 2013 to February 2018, according to Ofcom.
The latest investigation into the Hong Kong coverage comes as CGTN is set to open its London headquarters and is expanding its European footprint, part of China’s decade-long coordinated push to grow its overseas propaganda influence.
Overseas arms of China’s state propaganda have drawn criticism for coverage of the anti-government mass protests which have gripped Hong Kong and drawn global attention since the start of June, with most scrutiny focused around the networks’ social media presence.

Social media giant Twitter moved to ban advertisements from state media on its platform last month, as reports emerged that China state propaganda used the paid promotions to call into question human rights abuses in East Turkestan and promote the central government’s view on the Hong Kong protests.
Broadcast media expert and lecturer in media and communication at Xian Jiaotong-Liverpool University Yik Chan Chin said that compliance with overseas media regulations was a burden for many of China’s outwardly mobile media companies.
“Impartiality is not part of the requirements for domestic media in China,” Chin said, noting there would likely exist a certain amount of autonomy for the overseas branches balanced with a need to follow central guidance “to an extent”.
“But if they take global expansion seriously, they need to be aware of the local regulations and comply with them,” she said, noting that Ofcom appeared to be increasing its scrutiny of the network, which had been broadcast as CCTV in Britain before being launched as a separate international arm in 2016.

A screengrab of some of CGTN’s coverage of the Hong Kong protests. 

“It could be because the Hong Kong issue has been very prominent [in the news] and CGTN’s presence is becoming more prominent than before, so those are a couple of reasons that could have triggered the investigation,” she said.
CGTN is “shortly opening up” its London-based news office in Chiswick, originally slated for a 2018 opening, according to CGTN materials.
The London-based office is part of the CGTN mission to “provide 'objective', 'balanced', and 'impartial' news and current affairs content” while “reporting the news from a Chinese perspective”, according to CGTN Europe’s LinkedIn page.
CGTN and its British broadcasting licence-holder did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Enemy Within

China’s Communist Party runs this U.S. TV station: CGTN America, which based in Washington and available in 30 million United States households, does Beijing’s bidding.
By Paul Mozur

From China Central Television’s Beijing offices, Xi Jinping addressed CGTN America’s Washington staff via videoconference in 2016. “Good morning, President Xi,” they responded in a rehearsed moment.

It broadcasts forced confessions to American audiences. 

It avoids subjects that displease Beijing. 

It cuts away when wind musses the hair of Xi Jinping, the Chinese dictator.
China Global Television Network America, which reaches 30 million households in the United States, is an arm of China’s propaganda machine. 

It is controlled by the Communist Party and serves as part of what Xi has called Beijing’s “publicity front.”
But when the American authorities asked about those ties, CGTN America argued that the Chinese government doesn’t tell it what to broadcast.
That contention, made last month in a filing with the United States Department of Justice, may not get a warm reception in Washington. 

In the wake of Russian influence in the 2016 election, American officials are trying to get a clearer picture of efforts by China to build influence in the United States. 

The claim by CGTN America, an overtly state-owned organization, represents a direct challenge to that effort.
“They have put the Department of Justice into a position of looking utterly ridiculous and toothless if it simply walks away from this type of false claim,” said Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University.
“This is right up there with Pravda claiming to be a health magazine,” he added, referring to the onetime official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. 

“On its face, it doesn’t hold.”
CGTN America, based in Washington, is part of the international arm of China Central Television, Beijing’s main domestic propaganda organ. 

It runs a typical newsroom except when it comes to stories about China, said four current and former employees, who asked for anonymity to protect their careers. 

Some stories, like the 2012 escape from China of the activist lawyer Chen Guangcheng or 2014 protests in Hong Kong calling for freer elections, were covered only briefly days after the news broke, three of them said.
Employees were rebuked when a report mentioned Falun Gong, the religious group that Beijing considers a cult. 

Images of the flag of Taiwan, the self-governing island that China claims, are banned from broadcasts.
CGTN made the filing under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, at the urging of the Justice Department. 

FARA requires those doing publicity work for foreign-controlled groups to submit government disclosures.
American officials have stepped up their requests that foreign-controlled groups make FARA filings in response to Russian interference in the 2016 election. 

Two years ago RT America, a Russian-backed broadcaster, made a similar filing at the urging of the Justice Department.
Chinese companies and organizations in general have come under greater scrutiny as the trade war has intensified, including the deals they strike to buy up American firms and technology. 

Some American officials contend the companies pose a security risk.
As part of its demands that CGTN America make a filing under FARA, the Justice Department in a December letter to the broadcaster said it put Xi in a positive light and had attempted to influence the American public during the recent trade dispute.
“Reporting China’s policy positions and presenting them in a positive light are primary reasons for CGTN’s existence,” the letter said.

The Justice Department’s Letter to CGTN America
In December, the Justice Department sent a letter to CGTN America, the American arm of state-run China Central Television, outlining the reasons why it should register as a foreign agent. (PDF, 17 pages, 0.92 MB)
17 pages, 0.92 MB
CGTN America did not respond to emailed requests for comment. 

American officials sometimes challenge filings, requiring registrants to disclose more data about their relationships with foreign governments.
Unlike the Russian influence campaign, which is designed to split Americans, the Chinese propaganda effort tends toward the sunny side. 

Recent broadcasts on CGTN America extolled traditional Chinese medicine and China’s economic rise, while its website offers a link to its panda coverage.
China’s influence push may be ham-handed compared with Russia’s, but it is well funded. 

Official Chinese media spend heavily to advertise on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter that are banned within China. 

China Daily, an English-language, state-controlled newspaper, buys advertising inserts in American newspapers, including The New York Times.
Based in a glassy office building four blocks from the White House, CGTN America employs about 180 journalists — many of them Americans — devoted to covering the United States. 

It broadcasts seven hours of programming a day through cable and satellite providers like AT&T and Comcast. 

Its employees cover a wide variety of topics, from news to features to business, and occasionally win awards for their coverage.

Current and former CGTN employees say CCTV editors in Beijing dictated plans for covering China. 

American employees sometimes pushed back and the Chinese allowed some flexibility when Beijing’s orders didn’t specifically forbid or dictate content. 

But three people interviewed said they had little choice but to air propaganda clips when Beijing said so.

For instance, in November CGTN America was told to broadcast a piece that played down China’s imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of members of the Uighur ethnic minority group. 

The Times and others have reported that the mostly Muslim Uighurs are held against their will, often in dismal conditions, and subject to an indoctrination program designed to discourage Islam.
The piece that aired portrayed the camps as successful vocational training and antiterrorism centers and Uighurs as grateful. 

CGTN America employees packaged the clips with context citing international criticism, but the video nonetheless ran, at times without their framing.
Other times there was less recourse. 

CGTN has broadcast the televised confessions of people accused of a wide variety of crimes in China, with those confessions sometimes touted internally as “exclusives” by editors, one former employee said. 

China forces people to make false, televised confessions to serve its own propaganda needs.
CGTN broadcast the confession of Peter Humphrey, a British private investigator who was imprisoned in China in 2013 and accused of illegally obtaining and selling Chinese citizens’ data.
Mr. Humphrey, who has since been released, had been drugged, chained to a chair, locked in a cage and then made to read out a statement written by the police in front of the cameras. 

The anchor who presented the footage, James Chau, is now a goodwill ambassador with the World Health Organization. 

He declined to comment.

Peter Humphrey, a British private investigator who was once jailed in China. His confession, which had been forced, was broadcast by CGTN’s forerunner.

The news organization “collaborates with the security and police organs to extract forced confessions from prisoners under extreme conditions of duress,” Mr. Humphrey said, adding that the confession was packaged to “distort reality, intrude on privacy and fairness, and humiliate me.”
Chinese leaders get different treatment, said three current or former employees. 

During a 2014 visit by Xi Jinping to Greece, a clip that showed him getting off the plane with unruly hair was eradicated from broadcasts, one current employee said.
One CGTN America show, “The Heat,” is occasionally edited if it is too critical of China, two of the people said.
“CGTN wouldn’t exist or have any significant funding if it weren’t for the Chinese government,” said Sarah Cook, a senior analyst for East Asia at Freedom House, a pro-democracy research group in the United States. 

“And of course that comes with editorial strings attached.”
The Chinese government’s power over CGTN was underscored by a 2016 event at state media facilities in Beijing in which Xi said official media and publicity broadly were “crucial for the party’s path.”
A group of CGTN employees in Washington attended via video conference. 

They had been kept after midnight several days in advance to prepare, without being told why, according to two of the people. 

When Xi greeted them, the group waved and, in a rehearsed moment, called out in unison, “Good morning, President Xi.” 

The moment became a source of tension internally, these people said.
“Media analysts say this is very much about cultivating a more robust image for the Chinese leader,” the CGTN America anchor Roee Ruttenberg said in the channel’s coverage of Xi’s appearance, “through all of the different outlets that in theory fall under his control.”

Twitter Users in China Face Detention and Threats in New Beijing Crackdown

By Paul Mozur

An online data processing center in Nangong, China. Twitter is blocked in China, but users in a small but active community in the country gain access with special software.

SHANGHAI — One man spent 15 days in a detention center. 

The police threatened another’s family. 

A third was chained to a chair for eight hours of interrogation.
Their offense: posting on Twitter.
The Chinese police, in a sharp escalation of the country’s online censorship efforts, are questioning and detaining a growing number of Twitter users even though the social media platform is blocked in China and the vast majority of people in the country cannot see it.
The crackdown is the latest front in Xi Jinping’s campaign to suppress internet activity. 

In effect, the authorities are extending their control over Chinese citizens’ online lives, even if what they post is unlikely to be seen in the country.
“If we give up Twitter, we are losing one of our last places to speak,” said Wang Aizhong, a human-rights activist who said the police had told him to delete messages criticizing the Chinese government.
When Beijing is unable to get activists to delete tweets, others will sometimes do the job. 

Mr. Wang refused to take down his tweets. 

Then, one night last month while he was reading a book, his phone buzzed with text messages from Twitter that contained backup codes to his account.
An hour later, he said, 3,000 of his tweets had been deleted. 

He blamed government-affiliated hackers, although those who were responsible and the methods they used could not be independently confirmed.
A Twitter spokeswoman declined to comment on the government campaign.
China has long policed what its citizens can see and say, including online, but the recent push shows that Beijing’s vision of internet control encompasses social media around the world. 

Messages on WhatsApp, which is blocked in China, have begun to appear as evidence in Chinese trials.
The Chinese government has increasingly demanded that Google and Facebook take down content that officials object to even though both companies’ sites are inaccessible in China. 

After the exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui used the platforms to lob graft accusations at top Chinese leaders, Facebook and Twitter suspended his accounts temporarily, citing user complaints and the disclosure of personal information.
Twitter may be banned in China, but the platform plays an important role in political debate and the discussion of issues in the country. 

To access the service, a small but active community uses software to circumvent the government’s controls over what people can see online. 

According to an estimate based on a survey of 1,627 Chinese internet users last year by Daniela Stockmann, a professor at the Hertie School of Governance in Germany, only 0.4 percent of China’s internet users, roughly 3.2 million people, use Twitter.
While it remains off limits for people in China, official media outlets like the Communist Party-controlled People’s Daily newspaper and the Xinhua news agency have used Twitter to shape perceptions of the country in the rest of the world.
“On the one hand, state media takes advantage of the full features of these platforms to reach millions of people,” said Sarah Cook, a senior analyst for East Asia at Freedom House, a pro-democracy research group based in the United States. 

“On the other hand, ordinary Chinese are risking interrogation and jail for using these same platforms to communicate with each other and the outside world.”
LinkedIn, the business networking service and one of the few American social media outlets allowed in China, has always bowed to the country’s censors. 

It took down the Chinese accounts of Peter Humphrey, a British private investigator who was once imprisoned in China, last month and Zhou Fengsuo, a human-rights activist, this month. 

The company sent emails to both containing language similar to the messages it sends users when it removes posts that violate censorship rules.
“What we’ve seen in recent weeks is the authorities desperately escalating the censorship of social media,” Mr. Humphrey said. 

“I think it’s quite astonishing that on this cloak-and-dagger basis, LinkedIn has been gagging people and preventing their comments from being seen in China.”
Both accounts have been restored. 

In a statement, LinkedIn apologized for taking the accounts down and said it had done so by "accident". 

“Our Trust and Safety team is updating our internal processes to help prevent an error like this from happening again,” the statement said.

Peter Humphrey, a private investigator who was once jailed in China. LinkedIn, the business networking site, took down his Chinese account last month.

With Twitter, Chinese officials are targeting a vibrant platform for Chinese activists.
Interviews with nine Twitter users questioned by the police and a review of a recording of a four-hour interrogation found a similar pattern: The police would produce printouts of tweets and advise users to delete either the specific messages or their entire accounts. 

Officers would often complain about posts that were critical of the Chinese government or that specifically mentioned Xi Jinping.
The police have used threats and, sometimes, physical restraints, according to Twitter users who were questioned. 

Huang Chengcheng, an activist with more than 8,000 Twitter followers, said his hands and feet were manacled to a chair while he was interrogated for eight hours in Chongqing. 

When the inquiry was over, he signed a promise to stay off Twitter.
Those pulled in for questioning do not necessarily have the biggest presence on the social network. Pan Xidian, a 47-year-old construction company employee in Xiamen with about 4,000 followers, posted a comic by a dissident cartoonist known as Rebel Pepper, along with criticism of human-rights crackdowns. 

In November, the police called him in for 20 hours of questioning. 

After being forced to delete several tweets, he was allowed to go, and he thought his ordeal was over.
But officers showed up at his workplace a short time later and threw him into a car. 

They asked him to sign a document that said he had disturbed the social order. 

He complied. 

Then they showed him a second document, which said he would be detained. 

He spent the next two weeks in a cell with 10 other people, watching propaganda videos.
“In this era, we certainly know fear, but I can’t control myself,” Mr. Pan said while crying during a phone interview after he was released. 

“We’ve been living a very suppressed life.”
“We’re like lambs,” he added. 

“They’re taking us one after another. We have no ability to fight back.”
The crackdown is unusually broad and punitive. 

When censoring domestic social media in the past, officials have targeted prominent users. 

People were questioned or detained less frequently and more haphazardly.
The current push appears to be well coordinated between local and national law enforcement authorities, said Xiao Qiang, a professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.
“Actually taking nationwide action, physically calling in all of these people, we’ve never seen that before,” he said.
The new approach involves broad action by China’s powerful Ministry of Public Security, which oversees law enforcement and political security. 

Several Twitter users said local authorities had specifically cited the internet police, a branch of the security ministry that monitors online activity. 

The agency, which refers to such local enforcement as “touching the ground,” was taken over last summer by a hard-liner known for a crackdown on telecom fraud in Xiamen, a city on the southeast coast.
The security ministry and the Cyberspace Administration of China, which regulates the internet, did not respond to faxed requests for comment.
The police have impressed upon activists that they can see posts outside China’s wall of censorship. After a four-hour grilling of a Twitter user with a small following who had complained in a post about the environment, a police officer offered him some advice. 

The user, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of further reprisal, recorded the interrogation and provided a copy of the audio.
“Delete all your tweets, and shut down your account,” the officer said. 

“Everything on the internet can be monitored, even the inappropriate comments in WeChat groups,” a reference to a popular Chinese messaging app.
“This is truly wholehearted advice for you,” the officer added. 

“If this happens a second time, it will be handled differently. It will affect your parents. You are still so young. If you get married and have kids, it will affect them.”
The efforts have dampened debate on Chinese-language Twitter, said Yaqiu Wang, a China researcher with Human Rights Watch, who chronicled the crackdown in November. 

Still, not all users have gone quietly.
“Many activists want free speech,” Ms. Wang said in an interview. 

“Even when they’re harassed and intimidated, they’re very brave and continue to tweet. This is an act of defiance to censorship and oppression.”

China's State Terrorism

The Foreign Billionaires, Activists and Missionaries Detained in China

By Javier C. Hernández

Michael Kovrig, a former Canadian diplomat who was detained in Beijing on Monday.
BEIJING — Missionaries. Corporate investigators. Billionaires. Legal activists.

China has a long history of arresting or holding foreigners for mysterious reasons, often in a tit-for-tat play to put pressure on overseas rivals. 

In recent years the number of such detentions has increased, a disturbing trend for foreigners visiting or conducting business in the country.
Michael Kovrig, a former Canadian diplomat who was detained in Beijing on Monday, is the latest foreigner to be held by the Chinese in retribution for the arrest of Meng Wanzhou, Huawei's CFO, in Canada, this month.
Here are some recent cases of foreigners caught in the cross hairs of China’s opaque legal system.

The Missionaries

Julia and Kevin Garratt back in Canada in 2016. The couple were arrested in 2014 by the Chinese authorities on “suspicion of stealing and spying to obtain state secrets.”

Kevin and Julia Garratt, Christian aid workers from Canada, were best known in Dandong, a Chinese city near the border with North Korea, for operating a popular coffee shop. 

They also worked with a charity that provided food to North Koreans. 

But in 2014, they were arrested by the Chinese authorities on “suspicion of stealing and spying to obtain state secrets.”
Ms. Garratt was released on bail and allowed to leave China. 

Mr. Garratt spent two years in prison before his eventual release. 

Both have denied the accusations.
The Chinese have arrested the Garratts in hopes of pressuring Canada into releasing Su Bin, a Chinese spy who was being held in Vancouver, after the United States accused him of stealing military data and sought extradition. 

The Billionaire

The government of China has never specified the reasons for the abduction of Xiao Jianhua, a wealthy and well-connected Chinese-born Canadian citizen.

On a January morning last year, Xiao Jianhua, one of China’s most politically connected financiers, was escorted out of the Four Seasons Hotel in Hong Kong in a wheelchair by unidentified men. 

Xiao had rare insight into the financial holdings of China’s most powerful families, having made his fortune investing in banks, insurers and real estate.
Xiao, a Chinese-born Canadian citizen, is now believed to be in custody in the mainland, helping the authorities with investigations into the finance industry, though the government has not specified the reasons for his abduction.

The Corporate Investigators

Peter Humphrey, left, and his wife, Yu Yingzeng, both corporate investigators, came under scrutiny as part of a Chinese government investigation into fraud and corruption at GlaxoSmithKline, the pharmaceutical maker.

Peter Humphrey, a British private investigator, and his wife, Yu Yingzeng, a Chinese-born American citizen, ran a small consulting firm in Shanghai that specialized in “discreet investigations” for multinational companies, focusing on issues like counterfeiting and embezzlement.
But as an investigation by the Chinese government into fraud and corruption at GlaxoSmithKline, the pharmaceutical maker, escalated in 2013, Humphrey and Yu, who advised the firm, came under scrutiny as well. 

The couple were arrested and charged with violating the rights of Chinese citizens by obtaining private information. 

Humphrey and Yu served prison sentences of about two years.

The Legal Advocate

Peter Dahlin, the Swedish co-founder of a nongovernmental organization that provided legal aid to Chinese citizens, was forced to apologize on national television and then deported.

Peter Dahlin, a Swedish citizen, was the co-founder of a nongovernmental organization in Beijing that provided legal aid to Chinese citizens. 

His work soon caught the attention of the authorities, who were cracking down on foreign nongovernmental organizations and human rights lawyers.
In early 2016, Mr. Dahlin was detained and interrogated for 23 days by China’s Ministry of State Security. 

He was forced to record a confession and to apologize on national television. 

Then he was deported.

The Fugitive’s Family

Victor and Cynthia Liu, who are American citizens, in an image provided by family friends. They have been held in China for months in what some describe as a bid to lure back their father, Liu Changming, a former bank executive who is among China’s most-wanted fugitives.

Liu Changming, a former executive at a state-owned bank in China, is among China’s most-wanted fugitives.
He is accused of playing a central role in a $1.4 billion fraud case.
He fled the country in 2007.
Now, in what some describe as a bid to lure Liu back, the Chinese government is preventing his wife and children, who are American citizens, from leaving China.
Liu’s wife, Sandra Han, and their children, Victor and Cynthia, arrived in China in June to visit an ailing relative.
Han was detained, and the children have been held for months under a practice known as an exit ban.

Forced Labor: China, H&M, 3M and C&A

Chinese prisoners made products for H&M and C&A
By Marc Bain

Peter Humphrey, the British private investigator whose arrest and nearly two-year-long detention by Chinese authorities made international news, has written an account of his ordeal in the Financial Times (paywall). 

His revelations about life in Qingpu Prison, on the outskirts of Shanghai, over several months in 2014 and 2015 focus mostly on the grim, dehumanizing conditions he endured. 

But he also shares a detail that should alarm some international companies manufacturing in China.
The prison, he says, “was a business, doing manufacturing jobs for companies.” 

Among the brands whose names he recognized on products were the European clothing giants H&M and C&A, and the US consumer-products maker 3M. 

Humphrey writes in FT:
Mornings, afternoons and often during the after-lunch nap, prisoners “laboured” in the common room. 

Our men made packaging parts. 

I recognised well-known brands — 3M, C&A, H&M. 

So much for corporate social responsibility, though the companies may well have been unaware that prison labour was part of their supply chain. 

Prisoners from Chinese cell blocks worked in our factory making textiles and components. 

They marched there like soldiers before our breakfast and returned late in the evening. 

The foreigners who laboured in my cell block were Africans and Asians with no money from family, and no other way to buy toiletries and snacks. 

It was piece work; a hundred of this, a thousand of that. 

Full-time, they earned about Yn120 (£13.50) a month.

As Humphrey indicates, the foreign prisoners were paid and didn’t appear to be forced to work. Whether the Chinese prisoners were paid for their labor is unclear, as is which products for each brand the prisoners were producing. 

We have reached out to Humphrey for more information through his investigative firm, ChinaWhys, and will update this post with any reply.
Even so, many international brands do not allow prison labor in their supply chains.
It can veer dangerously close to forced labor—which is why the International Labour Organization (ILO) keeps clear guidelines on when the practice is acceptable.

But it can be near impossible to make sure these rules are followed, which is why the Ethical Trading Initiative says companies would be “foolish” to believe that prison labor complies with ILO standards.
Many companies don’t allow it in their supply chains at all. 

H&M requires its supplier factories to sign a commitment that explicitly says “forced labour, bonded, prison or illegal labour is not accepted.” 

Asked about Humphrey’s allegations, a spokesperson for H&M said, “To our knowledge, there have been no violations. But needless to say, we take the information published by the Financial Times very seriously.” 

The spokesperson acknowledged that there have been rumors of prison labor in China in the past, and the company has reminded its Chinese suppliers that its stipulations on prison labor are non-negotiable. 

Failure to comply “would lead to a permanent termination of our business contract,” the spokesperson said.
C&A’s supplier code of conduct (pdf) prohibits prison labor in the section on forced labor, and elsewhere says plainly, “C&A does not permit the use of prison and/or detained labour in any form.” A spokesperson for C&A responded to questions about Humprey’s account, saying, “We audit all 273 of our suppliers’ factories in China on at least annually basis, and have not observed or been made aware of the use of prison labor in our Chinese supply chain.” 

C&A has auditors and quality-assurance teams with measures in place to catch any unauthorized subcontracting, the spokesperson added. 

Suppliers that violate their agreement with C&A are “terminated with a long term remediation plan.”
The supplier responsibility code for 3M (pdf) prohibits forced labor and “involuntary prison labor.” 

It is not clear whether 3M would approve of the conditions Humphrey describes at Qingpu. 

Update: In a statement emailed to Quartz, a spokesperson for 3M said the company “does not engage or participate in exploitative working conditions, and we are not aware of any 3M suppliers in China using prison labor. We take our commitment seriously and are investigating Mr. Humphrey’s report.”
Even if prisoners were laboring to make or package products for these companies, the companies themselves may not have been aware, as Humphrey points out. 

Often brands will contract work to one factory, and that factory will subcontract the work to another factory. 

Bangladesh’s garment industry is notorious for the practice, but it has been known to happen in various countries, including China. 

Some Chinese textile firms have been reported to subcontract work across the border to North Korea, then apply “Made in China” tags to the items. 

In other cases, factories will subcontract work to prisons for their cheap labor.
Humphrey wound up in Qingpu Prison after he and his wife Yu Yingzeng, a Chinese-born American, were arrested in 2013, while working for pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline. 

Glaxo hired them to look into allegations that its China operation was bribing doctors. 

The Chinese government started its own investigation into Glaxo’s China division, and detained Humphrey and Yingzeng, holding them without trial for 13 months. 

Both were ultimately convicted in Chinese court of “illegally acquiring citizens’ information”—accusations Humphrey vehemently denies—and sent to prison. 

Humphrey’s term was 30 months, and Yingzeng’s was 24 months.
They were released in June 2015 (paywall), with seven months left in Humphrey’s sentence, after his health deteriorated enough that he had to go to a hospital.