Tesco charity cards ‘packed by China’s prison slaves’ UPDATED:
UPDATE
Tesco Ireland has withdrawn
Christmas cards from sale that were manufactured in a Chinese factory that is
alleged to have used "forced labour".
In a statement to RTÉ News, it said
Tesco UK has suspended the factory where the cards are produced and has
opened an investigation.
It said: "We abhor the use of
any form of forced labour and would never allow the use of prison labour in our
supply chain."
Tesco said the supplier was
independently audited as recently as last month and no evidence was found to
suggest they had broken the company's rule banning the use of prison
labour.
It also said that Tesco had a comprehensive
auditing system in place and if a supplier breached its rules it would
immediately and permanently de-list them.
Tesco Ireland said it sells two
charity Christmas cards, in aid of Temple Street Children’s Hospital and the
Irish Cancer Society, both of which are made and printed in Ireland.
The story emerged when a
six-year-old schoolgirl from Tooting, south London, opened her box of cards to
distribute them to friends and found the following message: "We are
foreign prisoners in Shanghai Qinqpu prison China.
"Forced to work against our
will. Please help us and notify human rights organisation. Use the link to
contact Mr Peter Humphrey," the message added, according to The Sunday
Times.
The girl, Florence Widdicombe, said
"it was a bit funny and I felt a bit shocked" when she discovered the
message.
She was writing cards to school
friends last weekend when she read the note that said its author was part of a
group of foreign prisoners in Shanghai who were forced to work against their
will.
She said: "We didn't open them
on the day that we got them, we opened them about a week ago.
"We were writing in them. About
on my sixth or eighth card, somebody had already written in it."
Her father, Ben Widdicombe, said he
felt "incredulity" and thought it was a "prank" when he
read the message.
He googled the name Peter Humphrey
and discovered he was a British journalist who had served two years in Qingpu
Prison.
He explained: "On reflection we
realised it was actually potentially quite a serious thing, so I felt very
shocked, but also a responsibility to pass it on to Peter Humphrey as the
author asked me to do."
A Tesco spokeswoman said the
company was "shocked" and had shut down operations at the facility.
"We would never allow prison
labour in our supply chain," she said.
"We were shocked by these
allegations and immediately halted production at the factory where these cards
are produced and launched an investigation.
"We have a comprehensive
auditing system in place and this supplier was independently audited as
recently as last month and no evidence was found to suggest they had broken our
rule banning the use of prison labour.
"If evidence is found we will
permanently de-list the supplier."
Tesco donates £300,000 (€352,000)
each year from the sale of the cards to the British Heart Foundation, Cancer
Research UK and Diabetes UK.
The card with the message on it had
been made at Zheijiang Yunguang Printing, where it is understood an independent
audit was conducted in November, which found no concerns about forced labour.
The retailer has not received any
complaints from customers about messages inside cards.
Colm O'Gorman, Executive Director of
Amnesty International Ireland, said China had abolished labour camps in 2013,
but the organisation still receives occasional complaints about poor labour
conditions in factories in the country.
He said it was now up to China to
investigate these allegations and ensure that companies both domestic and
international are following China's own labour laws and international human
rights standards.
Additional reporting PA
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| Florence Widdieombe Found A Message For Help In A Christmas Card |
Once an
isolationist communist state, over the last 20 years China has become the
world’s biggest exporter of consumer goods. But behind this apparent success
story is a dark secret – millions of men and women locked up in prisons and
forced into intensive manual labour.
We were not paid at all, we were
forced. If anyone refused to work, they would be beaten, some people were
beaten to death.
Charles
Lee, former prison inmate
China has
the biggest penal colony in the world – a top secret network of more than 1,000
slave labour prisons and camps known collectively as “The Laogai”. And the use
of the inmates of these prisons – in what some experts call “state sponsored
slavery” – has been credited with contributing to the country’s economic boom.
 |
| China's Prison Slaves Pack TESCO Charity Cards |
In this
film, former inmates, many of whom were imprisoned for political or religious
dissidence without trial, recount their daily struggles and suffering in the
“dark and bitter” factories where sleep was a privilege.
Charles
Lee spent three years imprisoned for religious dissidence. He says: “For a year
they tried to brainwash me, trying to force me to give up my practice of Falun
Gong. They figured me out… so they changed their strategy to force me to feel
like a criminal… because, according to their theory, a prisoner should be
reformed through labour… So they forced me to do slave labour.”
When Florence Widdicombe opened a box of Tesco charity Christmas cards to send them to her friends, the six-year-old schoolgirl from Tooting, south London, was startled to find that one of them had already been used. The card, featuring a kitten in a Santa hat, contained a despairing message from a Chinese gulag.
 |
| A Screen Grab Of The Prisoner's Message |
The
Christmas cry for help from a Shanghai prison has turned an embarrassing
spotlight on Tesco’s relationship with its Chinese suppliers and their use of
forced prison labour.
The supermarket chain’s charity cards will this year earn £300,000 for the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK and Diabetes UK. But the real price of cards that sell for £1.50 per box of 20 (or three boxes for £3) is that they might be benefiting the Chinese government’s prison system.
The
message on Florence’s card went on to urge the finder “to contact Mr Peter
Humphrey” without explaining why. Florence’s father Ben googled the name and
found a story about a former British journalist who had spent two years in jail
in China — at the same Qingpu prison.
That
journalist was me. On Monday I received a startling message through the
LinkedIn business network. It was from Mr Widdicombe, a civil servant
specialising in criminal justice, who explained about the card from Qingpu. I
was suddenly plunged back to a painful two-year period of my life when I was
working in Shanghai as a corporate fraud investigator.
My
activities upset the Chinese government, which jailed both me and my American
wife, Yu Yingzeng, on bogus charges that were never heard in court.
I
do not know the identities or nationalities of the prisoners who sneaked this
note into the Tesco cards, but I have no doubt they are Qingpu prisoners who
knew me before my release in June 2015 from the suburban prison where I spent
nine of my 23 months.
I
got to know many foreign inmates in Qingpu, and for a while found ways to
contact them after my release. But prison sources told me that censorship of
outbound and inbound correspondence has been tightened up this year, which may
be why none of the prisoners I know was able to write to me about their work
directly. So they resorted to the Qingpu equivalent of a message in a bottle,
scribbled on a Tesco Christmas card.
I
have since contacted several members of an informal network of ex-prisoners we
jokingly refer to as the Qingpu Prison Alumni Association. Some of them
confirmed that inmates in the foreign prisoner unit are being forced into
mundane manual assembly or packaging tasks.
“They
have been packing Christmas cards for Tesco, and also Tesco gift tags, for at
least two years,” said one ex-prisoner who now lives in the UK after his
release from Qingpu last year.
“The
foreign prisoners just package the cards. They pick different designs, put them
into boxes, seal them and pack them into shipping cartons.” They also make
packaging and tags for western clothing and other companies. I recall from my
own time at the prison seeing product tags with the names of other high street
brands.
Widdicombe
said he chose the Tesco cards because they were funny and they were cheap, and
ideal for kids. “When I looked at the message in the card I thought it was
incredible and wondered if it was a prank,” he added.
When
he realised the message must be genuine he thought it would be “wrong not to
pass it on to its intended recipient. It must have been very risky for those
prisoners”.
Tesco
said yesterday that as soon as the company learnt of the Widdicombes’
discovery, the factory that produced the cards was suspended pending an
investigation by an “expert in-country team”.
The
spokesman added: “We do not allow the use of prison labour in our supply
chain.” But the incident has highlighted the difficulty of monitoring
production of cheap goods in China, where sub-contracting is common and the use
of forced labour is often difficult to detect.
Jeremy
Lune, chief executive of Cards for Good Causes, the UK’s largest multi-charity
Christmas card organisation, said there should be an investigation into the
evidence of prison labour being used in the manufacture of charity cards. “Charities
exist to help people, not to put them under duress,” he added.
Florence’s
find echoes similar episodes involving smuggled pleas from desperate inmates.
In 2012 an American charity worker opened a box of Chinese-made Halloween
decorations to find an unsigned letter from an inmate at the Masanjia labour
camp in Shenyang, China. The letter claimed inmates were being forced to work
15 hours a day without weekend or holiday breaks “otherwise they will suffer
torturement, beat and rude remark [sic]”.
In
2017 another Chinese message surfaced in a Christmas charity card sold by
Sainsbury’s to Jessica Rigby of Braintree, Essex. Rigby had the Chinese
characters translated and was told they read: “Wishing you luck and happiness.
Third product Shop, Guangzhou Prison, Number 6 District.”
Rigby
was upset at the thought that British charities might be benefiting from
Chinese prison slavery. “You hear horror stories about these prisons,” she
said. “It’s not a very festive thought.”
The
problem for British and other western companies attempting to follow fair trade
guidelines is that nobody outside a Chinese prison has any real chance of
knowing what goes on inside. I don’t believe major British companies would
knowingly commission prison labour, but they may never be able to tell if their
Chinese suppliers are sub-contracting production to the prison system. The
Tesco spokesman claimed the company had a “comprehensive auditing system in
place” in China. The Shanghai factory that printed the cards “was independently
audited as recently as last month and no evidence was found to suggest it had
broken our rule banning the use of prison labour”.
The
daunting reality is that China’s prisons are closed to independent auditors who
have little chance of unravelling the secretive business arrangements that have
turned the jail system into a lucrative profit centre for the Chinese state.
“This
is an enormous industry in China,” said Kenneth Kennedy, a senior policy
adviser for forced labour programmes at the US Department of Homeland Security,
which has been investigating the use of prison workers for years.
All
this suggests that companies trading in the kind of products that emerge from
Chinese prisons need to be unusually vigilant to protect themselves from
allegations that they are profiting from abuse. A chance discovery by a
six-year-old Londoner last weekend underlines the urgency of the challenge.
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