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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.
For someone like me, who lived in exile with my father and spent my childhood displaced, reading Orville Schell’s work is deeply affecting. His sincerity, the richness of detail, and his tireless pursuit of truth, preserving it as evidence for humanity, reflect an immense effort that I find profoundly moving and striking. In many ways, it resonates with my own commitment to recording history and holding it up as a mirror to illuminate our present reality; this, to me, is the book’s true significance.
It is, without question, a very special work. For a country as vast as China, it will preserve an unforgettable memory for the future. The author’s craft and clarity of structure stem entirely from his passion for truth and his unwavering dedication to pursuing it.
— Ai Weiwei, artist, activist, and author of 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: A Memoir
Schell tells a captivating story of how American activists, China watchers, and journalists collaborated in a daring effort to expose China’s use of prison labor for commercial exports in the early 1990s. The courage, resourcefulness, and persistence of the main characters in this international political thriller are nothing short of inspiring.
— Minxin Pei, author of The Broken China Dream: How Reform Revived Totalitarianism
Adventure story, love story, psychological thriller, reflection on repression and dissent, and object lesson in how to deal with China—this book has it all, and it's all true. Take a wild ride with Orville Schell.
— Andrew J. Nathan, Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science, Columbia University
Inside China’s Secret Prisons reads like a tense, fast-paced spy thriller—yet more powerfully than fiction, since the story is true. In this important book, Schell reveals evidence of long-denied human rights violations, uncovering a vast network of secret prisons that, to this day, systematically uses torture and forced labor to produce commercial goods illegally sold to American and European companies.
— Elaine Pagels, Harrington Spear Paine Professor of History of Religion, Princeton University
The book is erudite, passionate, and personal. Inside China's Secret Prisons is one of the best statements we have on China’s prison-labor system and its important place in China since the 1949 Revolution.
— Timothy B. Weston, coeditor of China In and Beyond the Headlines