mmersion in sewage, ripping out fingernails,215 sleep deprivation, cigarette burns and beatings with electric prods—these are some of the torture methods used by China’s police and prison officers to extract confessions and maintain discipline, a United Nations investigation has found.

—The Guardian of London

Just how does the Chinese Communist Party of today beat, torture, work to the bone, sterilize, jail, and kill its own citizens—and millions of Tibetans, Mongolians, and Uyghurs? Let us count the ways in this chapter; and even a cursory reading of Beijing’s brass knuckled brutality should convince you that the problem in China is not with the Chinese people but with a government that regularly runs over its own citizenry.

No Male Child Left Behind—Except for One Tossed in the Trash

It is a serious offense to drown or abandon female infants.216

—Sign on a hospital wall in Dai Bu Village, Yunnan Province

China alone stands to have as many unmarried young men—“bare217 branches,” as they are known—as the entire population of young men in America. In any country rootless young males spell trouble...Crime rates, bride trafficking, sexual violence, even female suicide rates are all rising and will rise further as the lopsided generations reach their maturity.

—The Economist

It is true, all too true, that China is both grossly overpopulated and the most populous nation on the planet. Yet in many ways, China’s “cure” for its overpopulation problem—its “one child policy”—has created far more problems than it solves. Indeed, even as other developing nations218 like Brazil, India, and Mexico have brought their populations under better control in more humane ways, China’s governmental control over reproductive rights remains a chilling study in coercion, forced sterilization, compulsory abortions, and infanticide.

The cornerstone of China’s no-choice policy219 is a punitive fine for having a second child, the hefty amount of which nearly always exceeds the family’s annual income. The size of this fine means that most couples who find themselves in a second pregnancy face financial ruin if they decide to have the child. The not unsurprising result is that China has more abortions220 than the rest of the world combined—close to 13 million a year, and that’s a conservative government estimate.221

Note, however, that just because a couple may have the money to pay a fine or qualify for an exemption, it still doesn’t mean they can actually have a second child. Overzealous local officials, whose promotion chances often rest on the degree of compliance with the one-child policy, have often been known to forcibly round up pregnant women.

For example, Time magazine reports how 61 pregnant women were hauled into hospitals in Guangxi,222 where they were injected with abortion-inducing drugs. The normally pro-China Al Jeezera did a similar feature on Xiao Ai Ying, who was “forced to have an abortion eight months into her pregnancy223 because she already had a ten-year-old girl.” And National Public Radio has described how Christian Pastor Liang Yage and his wife, Wei Linrong,224 were ordered to a hospital despite being willing to pay the fine for their second child. When the couple refused to sign abortion consent forms, officials just forged their signatures and injected the wife who was seven months pregnant. The next day, Wei went through 16 hours of contractions before giving birth to her dead little boy, who was then tossed into a plastic trash bag by hospital staff.

While Wei Linrong lost her boy, it is mostly girls who suffer from China’s one-child policy. In fact, almost all of China’s abandoned babies are female,225 many abortions are sex selective,226 and female infanticide is still common enough to require public campaigns227 against the practice. Given that Chinese law bars Chinese couples under 35228 and those with kids from adopting, it’s no wonder thousands of abandoned little Chinese girls are lucky enough to find loving homes in America, Australia, and Europe—even as China’s government-run adoptions bazaar captures more foreign exchange.

At least to journalist Joseph Farah, China’s gendercide represents “the biggest single holocaust in human history.”229 Whether you agree, what is true is that Chinese gendercide has resulted in a socially destabilizing gender imbalance. In fact, China now has 119 baby boys registered for every 100 girls, while in some provinces the ratio is as high as 130:100.

Today, as a result of the perverse effects of China’s one-child policy, more than 100 million Chinese men are unable to find wives. These “bare branches,” as they are referred to in China,230 total more than the male populations of Japan and South Korea combined or the entire population of young men in America.

The inevitable result has been a dramatic rise in prostitution231 (and all that comes with it), sex slavery, and even the kidnapping of women from foreign countries. In fact, The Washington Post claims that as many as 100,000 North Korean women have been imported232 into China as sex slaves. What happens in China doesn’t stay in China indeed.

The Three Autonomous Provinces of the Apocalypse

We have been cheated, murdered, raped,233 violated, deprived, betrayed, discarded, sold and tortured for too long!

—Kekenus Sidik, Uyghur protestor

Forced sterilization isn’t confined to Chinese women seeking to have a second child. It’s quite literally a standard operating procedure in Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and East Turkestan—three of the so-called and ironically named “autonomous” provinces of China. Here’s the bigger ethnic cleansing picture.

Despite Beijing’s claim that Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and East Turkestan have nominally been under the sway of China for years, the reality is that these regions maintained their proudly distinct cultures and generally exercised home rule until the Communists’ tanks rolled in during the 1950s. During this time, the Red Army chased the Dalai Lama out of Tibet and Mao Zedong split up Mongolia with the Soviets. With the help of Stalin, Mao also managed to engineer a plane crash234 that decapitated the political leadership of East Turkestan and allowed for easy replacement of that leadership with Chinese puppets.

Today, more than 50 years later, all three of these once-independent territories remain under the jackboot of the Communist Party. They also suffer from a relentless ethnic cleansing campaign aimed at replacing the indigenous ethnic populations with ethnic Han Chinese. This so-called “Hanification” of Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and East Turkestan involves everything from the busing in of millions of ethnic Han Chinese and the busing out (or killing of) the locals to sterilizing the local women or diluting their gene pool through policies that drive marriage to Han men.

To date, such ethnic cleansing has been most successful in Inner Mongolia, where more than 80% of the population is now Han. According to the Inner Mongolia People’s Party,235 to bring about this Hanification, more than a quarter of a million Mongolians were murdered while more than 15 million Chinese were moved into Inner Mongolia to water down Mongolian culture.

As for East Turkestan—known now on the Chinese map as Xinjiang Province—Rebiya Kadeer, a Uyghur leader expelled to the United States from her native Xinjiang, has testified to Congress that 240,000 of her people, mostly women, have been forcibly moved out of their ancestral home. Of these women, many have been compelled to marry Han men to cross-breed, while many others have been used for cheap slave labor and as sex workers. Further, despite exemptions in the one-child law for minorities, thousands of Uyghur women have been subjected to “forced abortions, forced sterilizations,236 and forced insertions of intrauterine devices.”

Resentment in Xinjiang came to a head in 2009 with protests that escalated into open battles between Uyghurs and Han Chinese. In a typically hard-line response, Chinese police rounded up and beat hundreds of these protesters—even as they literally “disappeared” dozens of Uyghur men. A resident of Urumqi described the brutal crackdown to Human Rights Watch:

They told everybody to get out of the houses.237 Women and elderly were told to stand aside, and all men, 12 to 45 years old, were all lined up against the wall...They beat the men randomly, even the older ones—our 70-year-old neighbor was punched and kicked several times. We couldn’t do anything to stop it—they weren’t listening to us.

Tibet has hardly fared better than either Inner Mongolia or Xinjiang. In fact, the introduction of a new high-speed rail line to Tibet from cities like Beijing, Chengdu, Guangzhou, and Shanghai has merely accelerated the rush of a seemingly never-ending stream of Han Chinese into the Himalayas.

In today’s Tibet, Han Chinese now own most of the shops238 in the capital of Lhasa and likely already comprise the majority of the capital’s population. Meanwhile, the Tibetan language is being taught as a second, “foreign” language while Mandarin is the only speech allowed in high school.

Rural Tibet is under a similar Hanification siege. In some cases, entire villages have been evacuated and then flooded with Chinese-built dams while nomadic people have been herded into concrete camps and their livestock confiscated. One camp inmate explained the plight of his people: “They have no jobs and they have no land.239 The only way they can fill their empty stomachs is by stealing.”

And here’s a Tibetan version of Catch-22: Some local farmers have been reduced to renting their lands to Han Chinese to pay back loans on the new homes they were forced to buy to begin with because of a government policy that required them to relocate. Of course, Chinese bankers have been executing the rental agreements.240

For all these reasons and more, Tibetan anger overflowed several years ago as rioters threw stones at police, attacked Han Chinese on bicycles and in taxis, and set fire to Han businesses. As expected, the protestors were brutally repressed—while hundreds of monks who began the unrest with a peaceful protest were rounded up, kicked, and beaten.

Meanwhile, to keep its repression under wraps, Beijing has severely restricted the access of journalists to Tibet. Moreover, any foreign visitors must receive special approval, and in recent years such permits have been completely banned near the anniversary of the protests. Those who have snuck in have been horrified—as was British filmmaker Jezza Neumann working on the documentary Undercover in Tibet. He has noted, “I haven’t met anyone who had been arrested who wasn’t tortured.”241

The filmmakers also relay reports that the Chinese have swept into Tibet with mobile sterilization vans and are forcibly inserting permanent IUDs into Tibetan women as well as performing tubal ligations without anesthesia. One victim describes the process:

I was forcibly taken away against my will.242 I was feeling sick and giddy and couldn’t look up. Apparently they cut the fallopian tubes and stitched them up. It was agonizingly painful. They didn’t use anesthetic. They just smeared something on my stomach and carried out the sterilization.

Meanwhile, the Dalai Lama hangs out at his home in exile in India, helpless in his efforts to move his people toward true autonomy from Chinese rule. And in a park near the sacred Potala Palace where the Dalai Lama once lived in winter residence, his followers hide his forbidden image in their pockets and pray while government loudspeakers blast propaganda messages like this: “We are part of a Chinese nation contributing to a great future—we243 are Chinese people.”

Now here’s a cry-out-loud ode to both the zealousness and thoroughness of the jackboots of Beijing: They have managed to take two steps to ensure that the next Dalai Lama will be one of their puppets and not an independent voice like the current Dalai Lama. First, they long ago “disappeared” the six-year-old reincarnation of the Panchen Lama, Tibetan Buddhism’s second highest religious figure. This world’s youngest political prisoner has not been seen since 1996.244

Second, and this is as much laugh-out-loud as cry-out-loud, Beijing has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without the government’s permission. The Huffington Post has explained the hidden agenda behind this seemingly absurd law: “By barring any Buddhist monk living outside China245 from seeking reincarnation, the law effectively gives Chinese authorities the power to choose the next Dalai Lama, whose soul, by tradition, is reborn as a new human to continue the work of relieving suffering.”

Charles Dickens Does Dongguan

Chinese entrepreneurs have five-star factories246 that meet the ethical standards of the big companies they cater to. [Alexandra] Harney [in her book The China Price] takes the example of a Walmart executive who went to visit a factory that sold goods to Walmart. “Her job was to determine whether the factory was producing according to Walmart’s ethical standards—which include a strict ban on child or slave labour and rules on occupational hazards, working hours and payment of minimum wages.” What the Walmart executive was inspecting...was a five-star factory...[But] the real production takes place in a shadow factory...“Tucked away in a gated business park, the [shadow] factory is not registered with the Chinese government. Its 500 employees work on a single floor, without safety equipment or insurance and in excess of the legal working hours. They are paid a daily rather than a monthly wage. No one from Walmart has ever seen this factory, though Walmart buys much of the factory’s output.”

—Daily News & Analysis

While Tibetans, Mongolians, and Uyghurs suffer under the boot of Chinese Communist Party rule, workers don’t fare a whole lot better. In fact, while Chinese officials love to take Westerners to so-called “five star” show factories that offer guided tours of clean facilities with state-of-the-art safety and environmental protection equipment, they are rarely allowed to see the truly unbearable shadow factory conditions behind the ubiquitous electronic gates and guard shacks that surround virtually all Chinese plants. As a worker in a South China factory where Microsoft Xboxes are assembled has explained: “It is only when the foreign clients show up247 that management turns on the air conditioning.”

Laboring in sweltering sweatshops is just one of the many quasi-slave labor conditions that millions of Chinese workers face; this is true even in factories ostensibly under the direction of large American firms like Microsoft and Walmart. Consider, for example, the Yuwei Company in the southern city of Dongguan. It makes metal and plastic components for auto parts like brakes, doors, and gear shifts, and the Ford Motor Company accounts for 80% of its business. In addition, Yuwei services companies like General Motors, Chrysler, Honda, and Volkswagen; and as part of its American connection, Yuwei even has a U.S. office and warehouse in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Now here’s what life is like for workers at the Yuwei facilities248 according to a 2011 investigative report entitled “Dirty Parts/Where Lost Fingers Come Cheap: Ford in China.” As this report reveals: Yuwei workers toil 7 days a week in 14-hour shifts and regularly operate equipment with safety devices that have been intentionally disabled. One result is a remarkably high production rate; the other is an equally remarkable high rate of cut, mutilated, or severed fingers and limbs. As the “Ford in China” report describes this carnage:

Twenty-one year old Worker “A” had three fingers249 and several knuckles torn from his left hand when it was trapped in a powerful punch press, or stamping machine. He was making “RT Tubes” for export to Ford at the time of his accident. Management deliberately instructed the worker to turn off the infrared safety monitor device so he could work faster. “We had to turn it off. My boss did not let me turn it on,” said Worker A. He had to stamp out 3,600 “RT Tubes” a day, one every 12 seconds.

So what’s the loss of, say, three fingers, worth in China? About $7,000 in compensation pay—and the loss of the mutilated worker’s job and future career prospects. And, by the way, any worker who misses one day’s work at a Yuwei facility is docked three days’ pay. In fact, getting fired for becoming injured is a standard labor practice in China. As a friend of ours who sells supplies to a Shanghai factory told us, “If there is an accident, even a death, there is no investigation.250 A second accident at the same task, no investigation. A third time will probably be investigated.” Please remember all of this if you ever consider buying a Ford supposedly “Made in America” but put together with a bunch of Chinese parts.

Ain’t Nothing “Quasi” About This Slave Labor

Among the 10- to 14-year-old children,251 the working rate is 11.6% in China. Many companies prefer child labor because children are cheap, obedient and agile enough to maneuver in small machine-cramped work areas.

—IHS Child Slave Labor News

They took advantage of my brother because he has a mental disability.252 They forced him to work, beat him, tortured him, and then when he was too weak to take it anymore, they threw him out on the street.

—Liu Xiaowei

Not surprisingly, in particularly hellish jobs like brickmaking and low-skilled, numbingly repetitive jobs like toy making, it is difficult to recruit adequate workers. In such industries, many factory managers see labor shortages as an open invitation to human trafficking; and both children and the mentally handicapped are always at the top of the trafficker’s list.

In some cases, the children or mentally handicapped are tricked or coerced by phony recruiters who sell them to factories. In other cases, they are simply kidnapped, often by the factory owners themselves. Either way, they wind up in unspeakable working conditions.

Such was the fate of poor Liu Xiaoping, a mentally challenged 30-year-old. He was taken from his family by one of China’s new-age slave dealers and sold to a brick kiln—notorious for being among the most brutal of China’s many labor hells.

When the kiln was done with Liu, it tossed the broken, but still alive man out onto the streets with what the Los Angeles Times described as “hands as red as freshly boiled lobster from handling hot bricks253 from a kiln without proper protective gloves.” Along with these lobster hands, this man-child in a land of broken promises had chain marks on his wrists and burns on his legs where the foreman placed scalding bricks as punishment. Where’s Charles Dickens when you need him?

And, by the way, even in the most worker friendly of China’s factories, often unbearable stresses are created from having to live hundreds of miles from home with strangers while enduring long hours and the grinding monotony of assembly work. One of us (Autry) saw this firsthand on a visit to the highly secretive Foxconn City in Shenzen. This is the world’s largest factory with 350,000 workers making products like Apple’s popular iPad.

As Chinese factories go, Foxconn’s Taiwanese-run facility is far better than most. During his visit, Autry saw dorms, kitchens, and work areas that were first-rate, at least by Chinese standards. There were even game rooms, gyms, and pools. However, the most ubiquitous “amenity” at Foxconn is the string of safety nets protruding from the second story of every building. These nets were put in place to halt a rash of worker suicides.254 And that’s sadly representative of China’s solution to intolerable working conditions—don’t improve them, just make it harder to kill yourself by jumping out a building.

Don’t Bother Checking for the Union Label

Of course, one big reason Chinese companies can so thoroughly exploit their workers is because organizing a real trade union in China’s “worker’s paradise” is effectively illegal. Meanwhile, the official government-backed All-China Federation of Trade Unions is simultaneously a puppet for the companies it serves and a tool for management to spy on and control workers.

China’s slave labor situation is further compounded by this abiding fact of Chinese labor relations: Most organized attempts by workers are ruthlessly crushed by either the cops or hired thugs—with the hiring of thugs for beatings and intimidation a common practice in China.

One graphic case in point is offered up by the fate of the 2,000 workers at the KOK Machinery factory outside Shanghai. They had the temerity to organize a strike to protest unbearable conditions—including working with hot rubber in rooms up to 122 degrees Fahrenheit. One female worker described what happened when their protest spilled over into the streets: “The police beat us indiscriminately.255 They kicked and stomped on everybody, no matter whether they were male or female.”

Even filing a grievance within the rules of the system can get you into serious trouble. For example, Li Guohong, an oil worker in Henan,256 earned 18 months of “Reeducation Through Labor” in one of China’s infamous forced labor camps. His crime? Filing petitions and lawsuits in protest of being laid off.

Of course, being sent to a forced labor camp wasn’t exactly how Mr. Li envisioned getting back to work. But he has now joined the fraternity of more than 50 million Chinese citizens over the past 50 years who have passed through (or died in) China’s more than 1,000 forced labor camps. Today, these camps—known infamously in China as the Laogai (or Laojiao)—contain as many as 7 million Chinese citizens, many of whom are guilty of nothing more than attempting to exercise some freedom to speak, worship, assemble, or organize.

And here’s a final observation on the right to strike in China: The only circumstance that the government will allow such strikes to flourish is when they help Chinese enterprises beat foreign competitors.

A case in point is that of a series of strikes and public protests257 that shut down several Honda automobile factories. Rather than intervene, the usual riot police simply stood by and finally walked away. That left Honda thousands of cars short of production goals. The lack of the usual police strikebreaking258 also forced Honda to negotiate higher wages with its angry Chinese workers. Of course, this makes Japan’s Honda less competitive against Chinese car companies like Chery and Geely.

How Chinese Cops Bring Chinese Parishioners to Their Knees

The persistent desire to control the most intimate area of citizens’ lives,259 namely their conscience, and to interfere in the internal life of the Catholic Church does no credit to China. On the contrary, it seems to be a sign of fear and weakness rather than of strength.

—Communique of the Vatican Holy See

Communism is a secular faith that can brook no dissent,260 and the Chinese Communist Party does its best to follow Marx’s edict to abolish religion. To that end, the Party requires that all religious activity be conducted through state-approved churches, while unregistered religious activity can result in severe punishment.

Just consider the case of Yang Xuan.261 This pastor of the unregistered Linfen Church in Fushan received a sentence of three years for building an illegal church. Then his wife, Yang Rongli, was first severely beaten for organizing a protest of her husband’s detention and then slapped with seven years imprisonment. As you read this description of what happened at the Linfen Church, imagine for the moment that Linfen is a church in your own neighborhood:

In the early morning hours of Sunday, September 13,262 Linfen Church members were jolted awake by rowdy, screeching intruders. A mixed mob of 400 police officers, local government officials, and hired thugs beat the church members who were sleeping at the construction site of their new church building. Heavily bleeding, more than 20 members were severely injured and hospitalized. Local officials instructed the hospitals not to give the victims blood transfusions, forcing them to be relocated to regional hospital care.

As for access to the Holy Bible, copies may only be printed by the officially approved “China Christian Council”; and quantities are limited by the government. Moreover, unapproved printings and distribution of Bibles263 or Christian literature can result in arrest.

Of course, it’s not just Christians and “closet Catholics” who risk the ire of the Chinese Communist Party. It’s also quasi-religious groups like the Falun Gong—whose members regularly experience the tip of the Chinese sword.

In many ways, the extreme antipathy of the Communist Party toward the Falun Gong is puzzling. Falun Gong practitioners follow a peaceful philosophy based on Buddhism and Taoism, and they practice a series of physical exercises derived from traditional Chinese Qigong. These exercises are designed not to overthrow the Chinese Communist state but rather to align one’s breath, physical nature, and consciousness with the central tenants of Truthfulness, Benevolence, and Forbearance.

In the late 1990s, this then-fast-growing sect attracted the attention of the Communist security apparatus and propaganda system, which promptly labeled it a “dangerous cult.” The Falun Gong reaction was, in hindsight, a huge political miscalculation. When 10,000 adherents gathered in silent protest264 outside the walls of the Communist leaders’ compound at Zhongnanhai, this frightened President Jiang Zemin; and he ordered the Communist Party to crack down hard.

In the months following the protest, Vice-Premier Li Lanqing reported that over 35,000 Falun Gong members were rounded up; and since that time, the persecution of members has been as brutal as it has been relentless.

Of course, the Communist Party’s harsh response has produced some serious blowback265 in the form of a Falun Gong led anti-Communist Party campaign that features a worldwide newspaper and satellite television service. In China, however, the repression of this sect continues unmercifully; and thousands of its adherents have been shipped off to the Chinese Laogai gulags for beatings and torture.

Falun Gong practitioners are also often sequestered in so-called “psychiatric” ward extensions of the Laogai where all manner of brainwashing is attempted. According to the Congressional testimony of Ethan Gutmann: “Falun Gong comprises between 15 to 20% of the Laogai system.266 That’s about half a million to a million Falun Gong in detention on average, representing the largest Chinese Security action since the Maoist period.”

Just as with the other forms of slave labor that produce collateral damage to workers around the world, the repression of the Falun Gong likewise has its global labor market implications. To see these implications, we end this chapter with this description of a typical day in the life of a Falun Gong prisoner from the Falun Dafa Information Center:

Mr. Wang Jiangping is handicapped and can’t knit as fast as the others.267 It’s almost 2:00 a.m. and the Division Six prisoners have been working since dawn. They have to meet the deadline. His fellow Falun Gong practitioners nod off only to be wakened by guards stabbing them with scissors. Mr. Wang is exhausted. The guards throw bricks at his chest. The Changji Labor Camp has to meet Tianshan Wooltex’s quota of Kashmir sweaters, or the guards won’t get their bonus. The Chinese “reform through labor” camps have become privatized. They are small enterprises that sign contracts with big companies and export products to overseas shopping malls.

It is a place where torturers get rich, and where Falun Gong practitioners slave to pay for the purchase of the electric batons that will shock them if they slow down. These are places where persecution drives profit. These are places where sleep and food deprivation, filth, stench, beatings, heat, cold, and toxic odors are daily routines. These places are where products for export are made by the slave labor of prisoners of conscience: doctors, teachers and students abducted from their homes for practicing Falun Gong.