Our work lasted 18 hours a day, seven days a week. Constant rounds of interrogation, threats, and physical beatings accompanied the labour. The guards’ goal was to break our will, or faith, while squeezing as much productivity out of us as possible, short of killing us.
Slavery
In today’s China, any Chinese person can be picked off the street and be immediately turned into a slave for years without legal procedure. Since 1999, this has happened to hundreds of thousands of people who practise Falun Gong and vanished into China’s vast system of labour camps.
Ethan Gutmann writes in his book "The Slaughter", on page 320, that on average 450,000 to 1 million Falun Gong practitioners are being held in the so called laogai (or “re-education” through labour camps).
Outdoors in Siberia-like weather of northeastern China winters, or in the suffocating heat of unventilated rooms filled with fumes from glue and faeces, detainees work up to 20 hours a day. Those who refuse are beaten, tortured, or starved.
What are they manufacturing? Our clothes, Christmas tree decorations, toys, chopsticks ...
Eyewitness accounts
Jennifer Zheng reported that she had to work from 5 o'clock in the morning until 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning the next day (21 hours) in the Beijing Xin'an Labour Camp, where she had to make toy rabbits for Beijing's Mickey Toys Co. Ltd, reportedly subcontracted from Nestle. She was so exhausted that she could not clearly count from 1 to 9.
Another person told how "sanitary chopsticks" were produced in the Daxing County Labour Camp in Beijing. The chopsticks to be packed were piled on the floor arbitrarily and often stepped on by workers. Not a single measure had been taken to guarantee hygiene. The payment for the contracted forced labour was income for the policemen at the labour camps.
