Amelia Pang sheds light on the human cost behind the cheap consumer goods we purchase in her investigative expose, Made In China.
Made In China should infuriate you. And, hopefully, it will then inspire you as well. This nonfiction investigative work pulls back the curtain on the human cost behind the cheap consumer goods we purchase.
Made in China opens with Julie Keith, a mother of two who lives in Oregon. In 2010, a relative gave her a set of decorative Halloween gravestones she had purchased on sale at Kmart, and it wasn’t until two years later that Julie opened the box for the first time. Initially, she did not notice the piece of onionskin paper that drifted out with the other packaging waste, and might not have seen it at all if her five-year-old daughter hadn’t picked it up and asked her what it was. This piece of paper turned out to be an SOS message from a forced laborer.
Made in China follows the story of the note’s author, Sun Yi, a Chinese engineer who wrote the note after finding himself a political prisoner, locked in a gulag for joining a forbidden meditation practice and campaigning for the freedom to do so. There he worked alongside petty criminals, civil rights activists, and anyone else the Chinese government decided to “reeducate,” carving foam gravestones and stitching clothing for more than fifteen hours a day.
Pang witnesses these camps firsthand while posing as a businessperson looking to use their services. During her investigation, she reveals the complicity that bargain-seeking consumers have in these camps’ existence. Our spending habits have made it virtually impossible for most Chinese suppliers to meet our desired bargain prices while adhering to ethical labor conditions.
She offers a call to action to become socially conscious consumers and stop rewarding companies for offering unsustainably low prices. The more we are aware of the underlying causes behind labor violations on the other side of the world, and the more that we shop locally and support ethical companies, then the more we can influence change globally as well as in our own communities.