Made in China

Amelia Pang's Made In China isn't an emotionally easy-to-read book, but it's probably the most important book I've read in a long time.

She does a thorough job taking one man's story, a struggle for human rights, from beginning to untimely end and making it accessible to someone like me. My takeaway is that everything has a price and everything has a cost. When the price is at or below cost, there's something very wrong and we need to pay attention to it and understand why.

I'm a consumer of goods, and, likely, most of them are from China. How much do I see around me that was made by someone who was imprisoned simply because my demand for a cheap product drove an industry to imprison people for free labor? I shudder thinking about it.

I appreciate Pang's investigation into the laogai camps and her explanation of what “reeducation through labor” really means. The last couple of paragraphs of her Author's Note detail just how much she personally witnessed to bring us this research and this story. I'm grateful to her for introducing me to Sun Yi.

Well, this is a horrifying read and still so important. Three stars not because “I liked it” but because I don't know how to rate a book about something so terrible as China's forced labor camps. I have been fairly conscious and cautious of my buying habits for some time, but this story has spurred me to further examine those buying habits with a more defined commitment to ethically sourced goods. I would recommend this book to anyone who buys anything ever.