{"id":177719,"date":"2021-02-13T20:52:51","date_gmt":"2021-02-13T17:52:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/us-mom-found-sos-in-decorations-and-exposed-chinas-camps\/"},"modified":"2021-02-13T20:52:51","modified_gmt":"2021-02-13T17:52:51","slug":"us-mom-found-sos-in-decorations-and-exposed-chinas-camps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/us-mom-found-sos-in-decorations-and-exposed-chinas-camps\/","title":{"rendered":"#US mom found SOS in decorations\u2014and exposed China\u2019s camps"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#US mom found SOS in decorations\u2014and exposed China\u2019s camps<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n

In 2012, Oregon mother Julie Keith opened a package of Halloween decorations from her local Kmart. Inside, she found something far more unsettling than a bunch of plastic skeletons and gravestones: an SOS letter from the prisoner who made them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Written neatly in a blue pen, it read:\u00a0<\/p>\n

Please kindly resend this letter to the World Human Right[s] Organization. Thousands [of] people here who are under the persecution of the Chinese Communist Party Government will thank and remember you forever.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Julie froze.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIs this a prank?\u201d she thought.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The 42-year-old read on as the note detailed inhumane work conditions and the fact that many workers were imprisoned despite having committed no crimes. She Googled the name of the labor camp mentioned in the note: Masanjia. It was real. She tried contacting various human rights organizations and finally went to the Oregonian news<\/a>paper, which published a story about the SOS.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Then she waited.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Sun
Sun Yi was arrested and sent to a labor camp for practicing a meditation-based philosophy and being critical of the Communist Party.<\/figcaption>
Photo Courtesy: Letter From Masanjia \/ Flying Cloud Productions Inc.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cMade in China<\/a>: A Prisoner, an SOS Letter and the Hidden Cost of America\u2019s Cheap Goods<\/a>\u201d (Algonquin Books), out now, tells the story of the note and its author, religious dissident Sun Yi, who spent 2.5 years at Masanjia Labor Camp in China.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThis SOS letter that Sun Yi wrote was not actually the first letter [from a labor camp] that ever arrived in the US,\u201d the book\u2019s author, Amelia Pang, told The Post. \u201cBut it was perhaps one of the more eye-catching.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sun was a mild-mannered engineer living in Beijing with his wife when he was sent to Masanjia in April 2008. He had been arrested at least 12 times before that \u2014 for practicing a meditation-based philosophy called Falun Gong \u2014 but had always managed to be released through hunger strikes. This time, he had been caught during a raid of an underground printing press that published critiques of the Communist Party.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At Masanjia, the slight 41-year-old worked 15-hour-plus shifts making holiday decorations for the brand Totally Ghoul. Guards tortured him continually over his last year there \u2014 prying his mouth open with a ball gag, force-feeding him with a tube, strapp<\/a>ing his wrists to the top of a bunk bed and letting him dangle there for days until he renounced Falun Gong. He never did.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was so hardcore,\u201d said Pang, who interviewed Sun several times via Skype after his release. \u201cHe cared so much about freedom in China, he sacrificed so much to what many would say was a futile cause.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Sun
Sun Yi\u2019s letter, penned in a Chinese labor camp, made it all the way to Oregon in a box of Halloween decorations.<\/figcaption>
Sun Yi<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

That activist streak \u2014 mixed with desperation \u2014 led to Sun writing his first SOS letter. In late 2008, with more than a year left to his 2.5-year sentence, he noticed that some of the shipping boxes had English-language labels and wondered if they were headed to America or the UK. Sun had studied English in school, and though his grammar wasn\u2019t perfect, he remembered a lot of vocabulary. Perhaps if he dropped a message into a box, someone overseas would receive it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He tore pages out of the \u201cpolitical reeducation\u201d workbook he had received from the prison and, when everyone was asleep, began drafting his letter very slowly and quietly. It took him two nights to finish the first letter, but after two weeks he had 20, which he hid between the bars of his bed. One evening, when he was packaging gravestones alone, he inserted his letters among the goods.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The next day, as he watched the boxes being whisked away, he felt a wave of relief. He wanted to do it again; he even enlisted a few of his fellow prisoners to help distribute the notes. They did so for a few months until the prison found a sample in another prisoner\u2019s mattress, rounded up all the Falun Gong practitioners and began the torture.\u00a0<\/p>\n

China has, according to Pang\u2019s book, at least 1,000 \u201cre-education\u201d or \u201cdetox\u201d camps providing forced labor to manufacturers churning out cheap products for sale everywhere from Walmart to Saks Fifth Avenue. The independent Australian Strategic Policy Institute found that between 2017 and 2019 more than 83 brands, including Nike, Apple and BMW, were sourced from Chinese factories where workers \u2014 mainly Muslim Uyghurs \u2014 were held against their will.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Penal labor isn\u2019t unique to China; the US, controversially, allows it under the 13th Amendment<\/a>, which forbids slavery or involuntary servitude, \u201cexcept as punishment for crime whereof party shall have been duly convicted.\u201d Yet China\u2019s gulags include not just convicted criminals, but also political dissidents, ethnic minorities and people who practice forbidden religions (like Sun) often imprisoned without trial or representation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

After finding Sun\u2019s SOS hidden in a package of Totally Ghoul decorations (inset), Julie Keith got the word out \u2014 and Sun was later inspired to flee the country, spreading his story.<\/figcaption>
Letter From Masanjia\/Flying Cloud Productions Inc.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Prisoners work between 15 to 24 hours a day, and may endure torture if they do not meet quotas. Some camps \u201cbrainwash\u201d their charges. Evidence suggests that some may supply organs for China\u2019s $1 billion transplant industry.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s often impossible for US companies to know whether or not slave labor is being used in making their products. Because they hire manufacturers who then subcontract to labor camps to meet demand, \u201cit\u2019s really hard to document,\u201d said Pang. Companies either don\u2019t ask the manufacturers if they subcontract to labor camps, or accept whatever the manufacturer tells them without investigating.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

Please kindly resend this letter to the World Human Right Organization<\/p>\n

note hidden in package by forced laborer Sun Yi<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n

\u201cWhen I went to China to follow trucks from these labor camps to see what manufacturers they went to, one went to an Apple factory,\u201d Pang said.\u00a0Still, she added, \u201cyou need a lot of hard evidence at one particular camp. Because there are no witnesses who made it to the US who can safely talk about it,\u201d US authorities \u201ccan\u2019t do anything.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

After the Totally Ghoul SOS made headlines in 2012, Sears Holding \u2014 which owns Kmart \u2014 said they found \u201cno evidence that production was subcontracted to a labor camp during a recent audit of the factory that produced the Halloween decoration.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Yet, Pang said, \u201cno evidence\u201d often just means that the production records no longer exist. \u201cTheir Global Compliance Program only requires suppliers to maintain time card and payroll records for \u2018at least one year,\u2019\u2009\u201d she explained. \u201cJulie\u2019s Halloween decorations sat in her shed for two years before she opened them. When I asked Sears Holdings if its auditors were able to access records from the relevant years during its investigation into the note Julie found, the spokesperson told me the company had \u2018no further comment.\u2019\u2009\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"China\u2019s
China\u2019s gulags include not just convicted criminals, but also political dissidents, ethnic minorities and people who practice forbidden religions often imprisoned without trial or representation. <\/figcaption>
Reuters<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At the end of 2009, Sun\u2019s sister Jing \u2014 who had tried to visit Sun several times, to no avail \u2014 received a call from a man who had recently been released from Masanjia.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cSun is in trouble,\u201d he told her. \u201cYou have to save him. He is about to be tortured to death.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Jing enlisted the help of a prominent human-rights lawyer, Jiang Tianyong, who went with her to the prison in March 2010, saying it was illegal to prohibit visitation. Soon, they were visiting Sun regularly \u2014 he would be released from his chains and be given food for a few days beforehand so he wouldn\u2019t look so haggard \u2014 and during their visits, Jiang would document the various tortures Sun described. The authorities held Sun 20 days over his 2.5-year sentence, since he never disavowed his faith, but they feared detaining him any longer would cause legal trouble. He was released that September.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Yet, returning to normal life wasn\u2019t easy for a known dissident. Sun could not get work as an engineer, so he crashed at a friend\u2019s house in Beijing before reconnecting with his ex-wife, May, who was still in love with Sun and invited him back into her life, despite the risks.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He continued his dissident activities, distributing Falun Gong literature, attending demonstrations and using his tech background to teach others how to use encrypted software and circumvent China\u2019s Great Firewall to surf the uncensored Web.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That\u2019s how, one day in December 2012, he came across the headline, \u201cChinese SOS Letter Discovered in Oregon.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"The
The independent Australian Strategic Policy Institute found that between 2017 and 2019 more than 83 brands, including Nike, Apple and BMW, were sourced from Chinese factories where workers \u2014 mainly Muslim Uyghurs \u2014 were held against their will. <\/figcaption>
Alamy (3)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It was his letter.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI achieved my purpose. All I wanted was for people to know,\u201d he said later. \u201cBut I was afraid to believe it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Seeing the article galvanized him. He began doing interviews with various American outlets \u2014 using a pseudonym \u2014 about his time at the camps. He connected with a Canadian-Chinese filmmaker named Leon Lee, offering to film documentary footage of himself for a movie about his experience. (It was released in 2018 with the name \u201cLetter from Masanjia.\u201d)\u00a0<\/p>\n

And he wrote a letter to Julie Keith, thanking her for sharing his letter with the world and giving her his e-mail.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At the same time, staying in China was becoming increasingly dangerous. In November 2016, Sun was arrested while attending a trial of a fellow Falun Gong practitioner. Shortly after his arrest, his blood pressure spiked, and three days later the prison released him so he could go to the hospital. Yet the police had confiscated his phones and Sun knew it was a matter of time before authorities would hack into his encrypted correspondence with Lee. So he said a tearful goodbye to May, who didn\u2019t want to leave her ill father in China, and boarded a flight to Indonesia, the one place that didn\u2019t require passports for visitors from China.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n
\"In
In 2017, Sun Yi and Julie Keith met for the first time in Jakarta, Indonesia.<\/figcaption>
Letter From Masanjia\/Flying Cloud Productions Inc.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

During this time, he struck up an e-mail correspondence with Julie Keith. Once he landed in Jakarta, Indonesia, he invited her to visit him. In March 2017, she flew to the Jakarta airport, where a car brought her and a cameraman (who was shooting the Masanjia documentary) to a decrepit building in the northern part of the city. Outside stood a small, frail man with wiry glasses and a kind expression: Sun. \u201cYou come here so long distance,\u201d he said in English as he embraced her. He took her inside to his tiny apartment and showed her around.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The next few days the pair wandered the city, sharing stories and photos of family members.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI had some people tell me the people in Masanjia would be punished because I published the letter,\u201d she told him. \u201cThey told me that I should not have done that. I was always concerned that I had put you in danger.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI thank you forever,\u201d Sun told her.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That October, eight days shy of his 51st birthday,\u00a0Sun died from a lung infection and acute kidney failure. Since his death was so sudden and he didn\u2019t have kidney problems before, some of his friends speculated that the Chinese government was involved. But since his body was cremated without an autopsy, that was impossible to prove.\u00a0<\/p>\n

His ashes were brought to his hometown of Xi\u2019an, where they rest alongside his mother\u2019s and father\u2019s remains.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI so badly wanted a happy ending for him,\u201d Keith told the BBC<\/a> in 2018. \u201cHe was the most resilient, strong person I have ever met. For someone to go through what he did and come out and be able to talk about it and share his experiences with the world \u2014 it\u2019s just incredible.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n
\"Made<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Three years after Sun\u2019s death, China\u2019s mass incarceration of its Uyghur population has sparked enough outrage that last September, the US House of Representatives passed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which would ban all products from Xinjiang, the region where these camps operate. It has since stalled in the Senate, but Pang said she\u2019s \u201chopeful that\u00a0<\/p>\n

.\u2009.\u2009. it will be picked up again.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the meantime, ordinary US citizens can make a difference, too.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe next time you go shopping online, anywhere, take a moment to look at either the sustainability page or the Corporate Social<\/a> Responsibility page,\u201d Pang said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd if they don\u2019t have information on what kind of audits they\u2019re performing at their factories, go on Twitter and go on Facebook and ask if they can prove with more transparency that they are doing everything they can to discourage their factories from subcontracting forced laborers. If there\u2019s just enough people tweeting them and tagging them on Facebook and social media, then they will be forced to respond and reckon with that.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the end, consumers have a lot more sway on corporate America than they realize.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe actually hold a lot of power to influence how businesses source from China,\u201d Pang added. \u201cI hope this book helps them do that.\u201d\n <\/p><\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#US mom found SOS in decorations\u2014and exposed China\u2019s camps” In 2012, Oregon mother Julie Keith opened a package of Halloween decorations from her local Kmart. Inside, she found something far more unsettling than a bunch of plastic skeletons and gravestones: an SOS letter from the prisoner who made them.\u00a0 Written neatly in a blue pen,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":177720,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/02\/The-Bombshell-SOS-Sun-Yi-letter.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[93136,4973,73823,56324,78757],"class_list":["post-177719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-2-13-21","tag-china","tag-human-rights","tag-prisoners","tag-torture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177719","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177719"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177719\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/177720"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}