In 1991, the China analyst and journalist Orville Schell worked on an in-depth 60 Minutes investigation of the People’s Republic of China’s vast “reform through labor” prison camp system, revealing that products made with forced labor were being surreptitiously and illegally sold to the United States. Inside China’s Secret Prisons is his gripping account of this milestone exposé’s progress—and how its findings still reverberate today. Schell weaves a fast-paced story of high-level investigative journalism while uncovering the duplicity and rule-bending techniques that China still uses to sell cheap prison-made goods abroad. He takes readers on a hair-raising journey into China’s secretive penal colonies, recounting how he worked with a former prisoner to gain access and film with hidden cameras. They documented how China not only compels inmates, including political prisoners, to toil in prison factories, but also illegally exports these wares into global markets by disguising their places of origin. The 60 Minutes program even documented Chinese prison officials selling products to CBS correspondents posing as American businessmen. Schell also confesses how he reluctantly set aside his account of the project, originally written for the New Yorker, out of fear of punitive consequences from the Chinese Communist Party for his Chinese-born wife, her relatives, their friends, and his own career, illuminating how Chinese intimidation tactics drive journalists, scholars, and even businesspeople to self-censorship. This powerful and incisive book shines a light not only on China’s forced labor camps—where hundreds of thousands of Uyghur Muslims have more recently been incarcerated—but also on the moral quandaries faced by reporters and scholars who seek to investigate China’s shrouded and often brutal penal system filled with political prisoners.
