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Semana 09a

June 11, 2013 New York Times
Behind Cry for Help From China Labor Camp
By ANDREW JACOBS
MASANJIA, China The cry for help, a neatly folded letter stuffed inside a package of
Halloween decorations sold at Kmart, traveled 5,000 miles from China into the hands of
a mother of two in Oregon.
Scrawling in wobbly English on a sheet of onionskin paper, the writer said he was
imprisoned at a labor camp in this northeastern Chinese town, where he said inmates
toiled seven days a week, their 15-hour days haunted by sadistic guards.
Sir: If you occasionally buy this product, please kindly resend this letter to the World
Human Right Organization, said the note, which was tucked between two ersatz
tombstones and fell out when the woman, Julie Keith, opened the box in her living
room last October. Thousands people here who are under the persicution of the
Chinese Communist Party Government will thank and remember you forever.
The letter drew international news media coverage and widespread attention to Chinas
opaque system of re-education through labor, a collection of penal colonies where
petty criminals, religious offenders and critics of the government can be given up to
four-year sentences by the police without trial.
But the letter writer remained a mystery, the subject of speculation over whether he or
she was a real inmate or a creative activist simply trying to draw attention to the issue.
Last month, though, during an interview to discuss Chinas labor camps, a 47-year-old
former inmate at the Masanjia camp said he was the letters author. The man, a Beijing
resident and adherent of Falun Gong, the outlawed spiritual practice, said it was one of
20 such letters he secretly wrote over the course of two years. He then stashed them
inside products whose English-language packaging, he said, made it likely they were
destined for the West.
For a long time I would fantasize about some of the letters being discovered overseas,
but over time I just gave up hope and forgot about them, said the man, who asked that
only his surname, Zhang, be published for fear of reprisal.
He knew well the practices of the camp in question, which was corroborated by other
inmates, and he spoke as other inmates did of their work preparing mock tombstones.
His handwriting and modest knowledge of English matched those of the letter, although
it was impossible to know for sure whether there were perhaps other letter writers, one
of whose messages might have reached Oregon.
If Mr. Zhangs account truly explains the letters origin, the feat represents one of the
more successful campaigns by a follower of the Falun Gong movement, which is
known for its high-profile attempts to embarrass the Chinese government after being
labeled a cult and outlawed in 1999.
Emboldened by an unusually open public debate in China that has broken out here in
recent months over the future of re-education through labor, scores of former inmates
have come forward to tell their stories. In interviews with more than a dozen people
who were imprisoned at Masanjia and other camps around the country, they described
a catalog of horrific abuse, including frequent beatings, days of sleep deprivation and
prisoners chained up in painful positions for weeks on end.
Several former inmates recounted the death of a fellow inmate, either from suicide or
an illness that went untreated by prison officials.
Sometimes the guards would drag me around by my hair or apply electric batons to
my skin for so long, the smell of burning flesh would fill the room, said Chen
Shenchun, 55, who was given a two-year sentence for refusing to give up a petition
campaign aimed at recovering unpaid wages from her accounting job at a state-owned
factory.
According to former inmates, roughly half of Masanjias population is made up of Falun
Gong practitioners or members of underground churches, with the rest a smattering of
prostitutes, drug addicts and petitioners whose efforts to seek redress for perceived
injustices had become an embarrassment for their hometown officials.
All agreed that the worst abuse was directed at Falun Gong members who refused to
renounce their faith. In addition to the electric shocks, they said, guards would tie their
limbs to four beds, and gradually kick the beds farther apart. Some inmates would be
left that way for days, unfed and lying in their own excrement.
I still cant forget the pleas and howling, said Liu Hua, 51, a petitioner who was
imprisoned at Masanjia on three separate occasions. That place is a living hell.
Even if they found the work exhausting, many inmates described the time spent in
Masanjias workshops as a respite from mistreatment or the hours of re-education
classes that often entailed an endless recitation of camp rules or the singing of
patriotic songs while standing in the broiling sun.
Much of the work involved producing clothing for the domestic market or uniforms for
the Peoples Armed Police. But inmates say they also assembled Christmas wreaths
bound for South Korea, coat linings stuffed with duck feathers that were labeled Made
in Italy and silk flowers that guards insisted would be sold in the United States.
Whenever we were making goods for export, they would say, You better take extra
care with these, said Jia Yahui, 44, a former inmate who now lives in New York.
Corinna-Barbara Francis, China researcher at Amnesty International, said that
abolishing or significantly reforming re-education through labor would prove daunting
because it provides the police an easy way to deal with perceived troublemakers, but
also because it can be lucrative for those who work within a sprawling system that
includes more than 300 camps. In addition to the profits earned from the inmate labor,
prison employees often solicit bribes for early release, or for better treatment, from the
families of those incarcerated. Given the serious money being made in these places,
the economic incentive to keep the system going is really powerful, she said.
During labor shortages, inmates say Masanjia officials simply buy small-time offenders
from other cities on a sliding scale that begins at 800 renminbi, or about $130, for six
months of labor. They include people like Zhang Ling, a 25-year-old from the eastern
coastal city of Dalian who said she was among a group of 50 young women rounded
up by the police last May during a crackdown on illegal pyramid sales schemes and
then sold to Masanjia. While there, she sewed buttons on military uniforms but was
released 10 months early after a brother paid for her release.
Masanjia officials did not respond to faxes and phone calls requesting an interview.
Approached one recent afternoon, a half-dozen guards on a cigarette break outside the
womens work camp refused to answer any questions. One guard, however, made a
point of correcting the way a question was phrased. There are no prisoners here, she
said sternly. They are all students.
Sears Holdings, the owner of Kmart, declined to make an executive available for an
interview. But in a brief statement, a company spokesman, Howard Riefs, said an
internal investigation prompted by the discovery of the letter uncovered no violations of
company rules that bar the use of forced labor. He declined to provide the name of the
Chinese factory that produced the item, a $29.99 set of Halloween decorations called
Totally Ghoul that include plastic spiders, synthetic cobwebs and a bloody cloth.
Although he was released from Masanjia in 2010, Mr. Zhang, the man who said he
wrote the letter, has vivid memories of producing the plastic foam headstones, which
were made to look old by painting them with a sponge. It was an especially difficult
task, he said. If the results were not to the liking of the guards, they would make us do
them again. He estimated that inmates produced at least 1,000 headstones during the
year he worked on them.
His letter-writing subterfuge was complicated and risky. Barred from having pens and
paper, Mr. Zhang said he stole a set from a desk one day while cleaning a prison
office. He worked while his cellmates slept, he said, taking care not to wake those
inmates often drug addicts or convicted thieves whose job it was to keep the
others in line. He would roll up the letter and hide it inside the hollow steel bars of his
bunk bed, he said.
There it would remain, sometimes for weeks, until a product designated for export was
ready for packing. Too early and it could fall out, too late and there would be no way to
get it inside the box, said Mr. Zhang, a technology professional who studied English in
college.His account of life in the camp matched those of other inmates who said they
produced the same Halloween-themed items.
Last December, Ms. Keith, the woman who bought the product in 2011 but did not
open it until the following year, sent the letter she found to the federal Immigration and
Customs Enforcement agency, which said it would look into the matter. An agency
spokesman, citing protocol, said that he could not confirm whether an investigation was
under way, but that such cases generally took a long time to pursue.
For Ms. Keith, a manager at Goodwill Industries, the experience has been sobering.
She said she previously knew little about China, except that most of the household
goods she bought were made there. When that note popped out and my daughter
picked it up, I was skeptical that it was real, she said. But then I Googled Masanjia
and realized, Whoa, this is not a good place.

Read the article and answer the questions below.
1. Where was the letter pictured found?
uma carta dobrada recheado dentro de um pacote de decoraes de
Halloween vendidos no Kmart

2. Who found this letter?
Mos de uma me de dois filhos , em Oregon.

3. What did the letter say?
o escritor disse que ele foi preso em um campo de trabalho na cidade nordeste
chinesa , onde ele disse que os presos trabalhavam sete dias por semana , os
dias de 15 horas assombrado por guardas sdicos .

4. What is China`s system of re-education through labor?
uma coleo de colnias penais , onde pequenos criminosos , os infratores
religiosos e crticos do governo podem ser dadas at sentenas de quatro anos
pelo polcia sem julgamento

5. What is the Falun Gong movement?
conhecida por suas tentativas de alto perfil para constranger o governo
chins depois de ser rotulado como um culto e proibiu em 1999 .

6. What is life like for the inmates in these camps?
campos de todo o pas, eles descreveram um catlogo de abuso horrvel ,
incluindo espancamentos freqentes , dias de privao do sono e prisioneiros
acorrentados em posies dolorosas durante semanas a fio .

7. When did the identity of the letter writer become known?
um ex- presidirio de 47 anos de idade no acampamento Masanjia disse que
ele era o autor da carta. O homem , um morador de Pequim e adepto do Falun
Gong

8. How many letter like this one does he say he wrote?
era um dos 20 dessas cartas que ele escreveu secretamente ao longo de dois
anos.

9. How did he write the letters and smuggle them in the products?
Ele, ento, escondeu -os produtos cuja embalagem dentro de lngua Ingls ,
segundo ele, fez com que seja provvel que eles foram destinados para o
Ocidente.

10. Why have scores of former inmates of these camps come forward to tell their
stories recently?
R= Encorajado por um debate pblico aberto excepcionalmente na China que
eclodiu aqui nos ltimos meses sobre o futuro de reeducao atravs do
trabalho, dezenas de ex-detentos se apresentaram para contar suas histrias.
Em entrevistas com mais de uma dzia de pessoas que foram presos em
Masanjia e outros campos de todo o pas

11. Why, according to Corina-Barbara Francis, China researcher at Amnesty
International, would abolishing or significantly reforming these camps be
difficult?
dissee que a abolio ou a reforma significativamente reeducao atravs do
trabalho provaria assustador, porque ele fornece polcia uma maneira fcil de
lidar com desordeiros percebidos, mas tambm porque pode ser lucrativo para
aqueles que trabalham dentro de um sistema amplo , que inclui mais de 300
acampamentos