How China Hides Its Slave Labor From the Free World
Wes Vernon
Saturday, Jan. 11, 2003
WASHINGTON – The biggest cover-up in the long parade of Clinton scandals was probably the sell-out to the communist Chinese. Harry Wu had a front-row seat on that tragedy, from the inside of Chinese labor camps.
In his book “Troublemaker,” published by NewsMax.com, Wu compares those living hells (or laogai) to Hitler’s concentration camps.
The trade with China, paid for by Americans who are finding it harder and harder to find merchandise they want that does not bear the “Made in China” label, was already in force when the Clintons came to Washington. After they saw the political benefits to be had for selling out, the relationship took off like a rocket.
Thanks in large measure to the Clinton White House's cover-up, we do not know to this day the full story of Chinese espionage that enabled them to gain access to U.S. nuclear weapons know-how through the theft of highly sensitive classified data on sophisticated warheads or the missile-related technology that was compromised.
But Harry Wu saw the Clinton/Beijing relationship from a deeply human perspective: the blue uniforms and shaved heads in Chinese prison camps.
For years, he had been one of the estimated 50 million blue uniformed “troublemakers” who had worked in the camps under totally inhumane conditions. Some of them literally worked themselves to death.
The forced labor had turned out for the American market such items as rubber-soled shoes, boots, kitchenware, toys, tools, men’s and women’s clothing, and sporting goods.
What really bothered Wu was that in 1992, candidate Bill Clinton had criticized the first President Bush for being too lenient in regard to China’s human-rights behavior. Yet in his first year, he renewed China’s trade benefits. True, he attached some strings to the deal, including insistence that China abide by a 1992 agreement banning the export of prison labor products to the United States.
But much of China’s forced labor is carefully hidden from the Western World. A 1992 “white paper” issued by the Chinese regime in defense of its labor camps raised more questions than it answered, as far as Wu was concerned.
For example, he asks, “[W]hy do they put phony names on their prison camp factories, as if trying to conceal the profitable use of forced labor?”
At one camp of lost souls hunched over their machines, stripped of their identities (in some cases for decades), the security officer was asked if he could guarantee the quality of his products.
“No problem,” he answered. He then cited an example of a German manufacturer who bought steel pipes from the camps, and labeled them as being made in Germany. So the products were good enough for the Germans. “How about that!” he marveled.
'Getting Wise'
A manager at Shanghai’s Laodong Machinery Plant, where hand tools were made, boasted that because the U.S. Congress had recently made “quite a fuss” about the prison camps, he and his bosses had devised a way to get around the problem.
“We always go through the import-export company,” he said, meaning they set up companies to handle the shipment of goods. That way, as Wu explains it, “nobody quite knows where the goods came from. These guys were getting wise to the ways of the world.”
This wording in a law on the books in the U.S. for decades specifically forbids the importation of products made by slave labor. Wu cites a little-known section of the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Law. That controversial measure is widely known for having imposed a high tariff in an attempt to protect American jobs during the Great Depression. Critics say it made the Depression worse.
The tariff section of the law was changed by the Reciprocal Trade Act of the 1930s. But the anti-slave-labor section is still “the law of the land.” It specifically bans importing anything made by forced labor. Its final paragraph reads, “Forced labor, as herein used, shall mean all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty for its nonperformance, and for which the worker does not offer himself voluntarily.”
The law is routinely violated or circumvented, in part because of devices used by the Chinese (such as those cited above) to hide the true origins of the products, but also because of political pressure on politicians here at home not to probe to deeply into the matter. As Wu bluntly puts it, “Many American business people do not know - or do not want to know — the implications of purchasing forced-labor products.”
When the Clintons ascended to power in the White House, ignoring those “implications” became de facto policy in Washington. We will discuss that next.
