Products Made With Slave Labour - Colourful Lanterns at the Zhongba Forced Labour Camp in Guizhou Province

There are seven brigades at the Zhongba Forced Labour Camp in Guizhou Province, each of which makes slave labour products. "Slave labour" here refers to the fact that the guards in the labour camp use brutality to force the prisoners to manufacture products under adverse conditions. Prisoners must work about 16 hours every day. Those not completing their production tasks receive various kinds of corporal punishments, are subjected to barbaric torture, or have their terms in the labour camp extended. These production tasks are also assigned to those "reeducated-through-forced labour personnel" hospitalised in the Zhongba Forced Labour Camp Hospital.

At present, the slave labour products made in the Zhongba Forced Labour Camp include polished man-made crystal gems, various kinds of colourful lanterns, and electronic products. The cheap labour costs in these forced labour camps have prompted the manufacturers of such labour-intensive products to transfer the fabrication of their products to these forced labour camps to reap high profits.

Many of these products are exported to other countries. For example, the Fifth Brigade at the Zhongba Forced Labour Camp that aims specifically to persecute the imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners primarily produces colourful lanterns, which are exported mostly to European countries, including Belgium, Italy, and France, North American countries, and other Asian countries. The production merchant is Zhuhai Chili Electronic Ltd.

According to the staff of Chili Electronic Ltd., a lot of the processing and production of the company's many coloured lanterns in Zhuhai have been transferred to forced labour camps. Its main plant is focused only on the production of technically difficult colour lanterns and the quality testing and packaging of products processed in various forced labour camps and jails, which then become export products. The company exports on a large scale, and every year the value of its exported products is from twenty million to over one hundred million yuan¹. The Zhongba Forced Labour Camp in Guizhou alone has four production brigades, with more than 2,000 inmate workers. The production serial number of the Zhonba Forced Labour Camp in Guizhou is arranged as the 28th workshop in this company.

Many of the Chili Electronic Ltd. products are specially made for specific activities and holidays, with its peak of production just before Christmas every year. After Christmas, the lamps produced are the common varieties of coloured lanterns.

It is worth mentioning here that when people are celebrating the holidays, the flashing lamps everyone is enjoying could have actually come from such forced labour camps, which are trampling and violating human rights and demanding excessive work quotas from the persecuted cheap labour. These products have not only upset markets values but also helped the persecution.

Note

1. "Yuan" is the Chinese currency; 500 yuan is equal to the average monthly income of an urban worker in China.

Chinese version available at http://minghui.ca/mh/articles/2005/10/12/112231.html