Slave Labour in Chinese Forced Labour Camps: The Inside Story

I am a Dafa practitioner forced to work in a prison in China. Throughout these years I have faced a brutal reality and have witnessed countless inhumane incidents and circumstances inside the prison. After seeing the investigative report published on Clearharmony.net about the Chinese forced labour camps producing products using slave labour, I decided to make public some of the facts inside the prison where I work.

In seeking cheap labour and reduced production costs, it is a common practice for some profit-driven enterprises to send staff to the gate of the prison and contact every division, to offer them business deals. At the same time, every division in the prison also sends personnel to the marketplace to find business by offering cheap labour. The products made in the prisons range from contract sewing, knitwear, toys, fashions, sweaters, toothpicks for restaurants, as well as the packaging of cotton swabs for women's makeup. The jumpers were exported overseas. For example, for a few years, jumpers with different designs and colours made by prisoners were said to be intended for export to Korea and Japan. But because it was a prison secret, nobody knows exactly where these jumpers went.

Conditions in the prison are very poor; particularly so for the division where elderly and handicapped people are incarcerated. Some of the prisoners were sick, and some were even Hepatitis B virus carriers. But the small articles for daily use they made or packaged have already been distributed to every corner of the world.

The working conditions for the prisoners are extremely bad. The working hours are far more than eight hours a day. The prisoners have to get up at 6:30 a.m. every morning, in winter or summer, and remain at work in the workshop until 9:00 p.m. They eat all three meals in the workshop, hurriedly and quickly, and go back to work again. This is considered normal. Working extended hours after 9:00 p.m. is very common.

The worst situation happens when there is a "rush order" that has to meet an urgent deadline. Then the prisoners have to remain in the workshop for several consecutive days and nights, without returning to their cells to rest. When they are tired, they can only find a corner in the workshop and take a brief nap, and resume work after they wake up. As a result of such relentlessly intense conditions, some prisoners' immune systems are drastically lowered and many have developed high blood pressure and suffer from malnutrition and all kinds of diseases. As soon as they become ill, prisoners only receive the lowest standard of medical treatment. If they want to use better medicine, then they have to ask their families for money to buy the medicine from the prison hospital. What inhumanity this is! Working day and night every day without pay, and then their families have to pay for their medical treatment!

What I cited above is the situation for the common prisoners. Since July 20, 1999, groups of Falun Dafa practitioners, who are good citizens in every circumstance, have been unjustly sent to the prison. They have suffered unfair treatment, even worse than the common prisoners. They have been enslaved, beaten, verbally abused, humiliated, tortured and deprived of their pure and wonderful belief system. Atrocities like this can only happen in unlawful places absent of human rights.

Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2004/6/15/77141.html