The Alarming Human Toll of Cheap Stuff ‘Made in China’
In the aftermath of 2020 — a year that saw both the expansion of a vast detention and forced labor system in the western Chinese province of Xinjiang and a homebound global population increasingly reliant on goods delivered anonymously to their doorstep — Pang’s book feels timely and urgent. Her argument starts here, in the room with the mushrooms, and goes like this: that the way we consume is unsustainable; that things as seemingly trivial as paper mushrooms and Halloween decorations are entangled in a system that hides atrocity by design and makes complicity — with authoritarian governments, with dangerous working conditions and even with religious persecution — part of modern life. Pang, a freelance journalist who grew up in a Mandarin-speaking household, is most effective when she is drawing out these juxtapositions, putting production and torture matter-of-factly side by side.
Source: Times #Feb02
#China #Labor #Xinjiang #Human
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/books/review/made-in-china-amelia-pang.html?referringSource=articleShare
In the aftermath of 2020 — a year that saw both the expansion of a vast detention and forced labor system in the western Chinese province of Xinjiang and a homebound global population increasingly reliant on goods delivered anonymously to their doorstep — Pang’s book feels timely and urgent. Her argument starts here, in the room with the mushrooms, and goes like this: that the way we consume is unsustainable; that things as seemingly trivial as paper mushrooms and Halloween decorations are entangled in a system that hides atrocity by design and makes complicity — with authoritarian governments, with dangerous working conditions and even with religious persecution — part of modern life. Pang, a freelance journalist who grew up in a Mandarin-speaking household, is most effective when she is drawing out these juxtapositions, putting production and torture matter-of-factly side by side.
Source: Times #Feb02
#China #Labor #Xinjiang #Human
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/books/review/made-in-china-amelia-pang.html?referringSource=articleShare
NY Times
The Alarming Human Toll of Cheap Stuff ‘Made in China’
In a new book, the journalist Amelia Pang investigates the brutal system of forced labor that undergirds China’s booming export industry.