Back in October, a woman in Portland found a letter written in English by someone claiming to be a labor camp inmate in Shenyang. “If you occasionally buy this product, please kindly resend this letter to the World Human Right Organization,” so it went. “Thousands people here who are under the persicution of the Chinese Communist Party Government will thank and remember you forever.”

The veracity was initially unverifiable. “We’re in no position to confirm the veracity or origin of this,” Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch, told the Oregonian. But new details have emerged — specifically, a 47-year-old former inmate has come forward and claimed authorship of that and several other similar letters.

Reports New York Times:

Last month, though, during an interview to discuss China’s labor camps, a 47-year-old former inmate at the Masanjia camp said he was the letter’s author. The man, a Beijing resident and adherent of Falun Gong, the outlawed spiritual practice, said it was one of 20 such letters he secretly wrote over the course of two years. He then stashed them inside products whose English-language packaging, he said, made it likely they were destined for the West.

“For a long time I would fantasize about some of the letters being discovered overseas, but over time I just gave up hope and forgot about them,” said the man, who asked that only his surname, Zhang, be published for fear of reprisal.

The handwriting apparently matches.

The rest of the story documents the torture and abuse of prisoners, with Falun Gong practitioners getting the worst of it.

Zhang, who produced plastic foam headstones, tells the story of how he smuggled the letters out.

His letter-writing subterfuge was complicated and risky. Barred from having pens and paper, Mr. Zhang said he stole a set from a desk one day while cleaning a prison office. He worked while his cellmates slept, he said, taking care not to wake those inmates — often drug addicts or convicted thieves — whose job it was to keep the others in line. He would roll up the letter and hide it inside the hollow steel bars of his bunk bed, he said.

There it would remain, sometimes for weeks, until a product designated for export was ready for packing. “Too early and it could fall out, too late and there would be no way to get it inside the box,” said Mr. Zhang, a technology professional who studied English in college. His account of life in the camp matched those of other inmates who said they produced the same Halloween-themed items.

Quartz notes that “an estimated 190,000 Chinese citizens are imprisoned in about 350 ‘re-education through labor’ detainment centers across the country.” In January, the government announced proposals to reform and possibly end “re-education through labor,” but even then, many people expressed skepticism.

Here’s Kmart’s response via Twitter:

@PhelimKine Our Global Compliance Program helps ensure vendors & factories follow all employment laws.Not doing so may result in termination

— Kmart (@Kmart) June 12, 2013

Behind Cry for Help From China Labor Camp (NY Times)

China may finally be reforming its frightening system of “re-education through labor” (RTL), according to state news agencies – but to what extent? While state media initially reported Monday that the CPC Central Committee would be pushing through a proposal to end the system by 2013, officials quickly backpedaled and settled on “reforming” the system, according to China Digital Times.

Since 1957, the system has allowed police to “detain people for up to four years without an open trial,” and has been a convenient way for the government to deal with political dissidents and critics. Yet the Ministry of Justice has been seeking ways to reform it for some time, according to the Dui Hua Foundation’s Human Rights Journal, a US-based NGO that focuses on prison justice in China:

After a brief lull in coverage in the run-up to the 18th Party Congress, the Chinese press has given renewed attention to cases in which RTL has been used in questionable ways. Significant coverage was devoted recently to the cases of Ren Jianyu, one of several individuals from Chongqing who have challenged the RTL decisions made against them for things they posted online, and Zhao Meifu, a 54-year-old woman sent to RTL in Gansu after a visit last month to Beijing, where her son is a university student.

Ren Jianyu spent 15 months imprisoned without trial for criticizing disgraced politician Bo Xilai, while Zhao Meifu was a Lanzhou land-grab petitioner who was sentenced despite her frail health. These two cases, along with others (including dubious ones as the “slave labor letter” found in Oregon), have put China’s forced labor system in the international limelight.

Dui Hua also translated coverage by Xiaoxiang Morning News reporters who in November investigated pilot reform projects to limit sole police involvement in case handling and sentencing in Gansu, Shandong, Jiangsu, Henan, Chongqing and Heilongjiang.

As of 2008, according to China Daily, 160,000 people were officially imprisoned in the country’s 350 forced labor camps – the latest data available from the Ministry of Justice. In 2009, the United Nations estimated the figure was closer to 190,000 detainees at 320 camps. For the entire country, the International Labour Organization reports around 11,700,000 people worked in forced labor conditions in China in 2012, a figure that includes everything from the sex trade to manufacturing.

While China’s critics are viewing the latest announcement with skepticism, we have seen official criticism of forced labor, however tacit, within the legal community. According to Dui Hua’s translation of the Xiaoxiang Morning News:

“Something that originally was supposed to be done together by civil affairs, public security, and labor [bureaus] is now being done by public security alone,” says Peking University Law School Professor Jiang Ming’an. This situation where “the player is also the referee” has long been the subject of public criticism.

“Although they are convenient for public security organs to use, in actual practice the procedures aren’t clear, which leads to all sorts of problems,” says one legal scholar. The mutation of the RTL system has not only turned it into a stability-maintenance tool for controlling petitioners but also become a hotbed for avoiding the risks involved in handling cases and blending interests.

Meanwhile, human rights organizations are continuing calls for a total abolition of the system.

(Photo CFP)

The Oregonian has this tale of a letter from China — written in English — folded into eighths and planted inside the box of a Kmart “graveyard kit.”

This “message in a bottle” traveled more than 5,000 miles to the home of Julie Keith in Portland, who purchased the Halloween kit but left it unopened for a year. When she finally opened the contents, she found this chilling letter:

“Sir:

“If you occasionally buy this product, please kindly resend this letter to the World Human Right Organization. Thousands people here who are under the persicution of the Chinese Communist Party Government will thank and remember you forever.”

The graveyard kit, the letter read, was made in unit 8, department 2 of the Masanjia Labor Camp in Shenyang, China.

Chinese characters broke up choppy English sentences.

“People who work here have to work 15 hours a day without Saturday, Sunday break and any holidays. Otherwise, they will suffer torturement, beat and rude remark. Nearly no payment (10 yuan/1 month).”

The article found its way to Reddit, where it inspired a second post about a “Chinese slave labor plea” — found on the cover of a toilet seat, apparently.

According to mequals1m1w:

So, there’s no way to authenticate any of these writings, that said, it reads:

China. Liaoning. WaFangDian. Detention Center.

All the work here originates from the Detention Center

All people detained here have no human rights

The food we eat have ants and flies in it.

Expired vegetables (could mean food in general). And there’s no oil at all!

Also items for sale inside are up to 2-3 times more expensive than the outside

There’s a spirited debate on both Reddit threads (more so on the latter) about whether these letters are real. Worthwhile questions are being asked. If either one of these was a hoax though, whoever’s behind it has done one hell of a job, because apparently ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations is currently on the case:

Title 19, section 1307 of U.S. Code generally prohibits the importation of all items ‘mined, produced or manufactured’ in any foreign country by convict labor, forced labor and/or indentured labor.

And while we take exception to passages like this from the Oregonian –

Julie Keith now checks the label of everything she buys, down to the Gingerbread house she purchased for the holidays. Her friends, she said, do the same.

“If I really don’t need it, I won’t buy it if it’s made in China,” she said. “This has really made me more aware. I hope it would make a difference.”

– which completely skew the reality of global supply chains, the story is nonetheless interesting. Real or hoax? You decide.

UPDATE, 12/30, 1:29 pm: Human Rights Watch has seen the letter.

Human Rights Watch also took a look at the note.

“We’re in no position to confirm the veracity or origin of this,” Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch, told the Oregonian. “I think it is fair to say the conditions described in the letter certainly conform to what we know about conditions in re-education through labor camps.”

For decades, China has run labor camps for alleged troublemakers. Laborers are sentenced to years of work without formal arrest or trial.

UPDATE, 12/30, 3:05 pm: Via @Alesia148: another view of the toilet-seat letter:

Halloween decorations carry haunting message of forced labor (The Oregonian via Reddit; h/t Gabe Clermont)