Copyright 1996 Globe Newspaper Company, The Boston Globe
Christmas And Conscience
by Scot Lehigh
December 22, 1996 Check the bounty under the Christmas tree come Wednesday and here's one thing you're virtually certain to see: "Made in China."
With China the world's most populous country and third largest economy, its export machine sent $ 45.6 billion in goods and services to the United States in 1995; this year's total is expected to be even higher.
That translates to a huge influx of products from a country notorious for its bloody repression, human rights abuses and penal labor system. Such a huge influx that shoppers this year are hard-pressed to avoid those products. Take a brief tour through Downtown Crossing:
In Filene's Basement, many of the holiday specials - a Nicole Winter sweater, a jacket from Guess, apparel from London Fog, Fleet Street, or Jones New York - all made in China.
Enter Macy's, and one of the first things you see is an adorable stuffed panda bear, free with the purchase of Nautica for Men cologne products. And made in China.
From the nearby Radio Shack, where the Chinese penetration into home electronics is obvious, to Woolworth's, where a selection of low-end gifts and stocking-stuffers shows the same point of origin, store shelves are laden with products made in China.
They present conscientious consumers with a difficult choice: How to ensure that, in their purchases, they aren't aiding and abetting a regime that is one of the world's worst violators of human rights?
That used to be a national concern, of course. But in May 1994, President Clinton, a campaign-trail critic of George Bush's China policy, essentially adopted constructive engagement as his own policy, renewing China's most favored nation trading status even while conceding that it had not met US expectations for "signficant progress" in human rights.
With human rights on the back burner, consumers have been left more or less on their own. Worse, the various advocates and groups who monitor the human rights situation are split over how to proceed.
One of the best-known advocates is Harry Wu, who spent 19 years in Chinese labor camps, and whose work has documented some of the abuses of the Chinese prison labor system, where inmates are forced to produce goods for export.
Wu says Chinese goods are so much a part of the American marketplace that an overall consumer boycott isn't practical.
But he urges a US boycott of Chinese toys as a way to send the nation's ruling gerontocracy a targeted message. China in 1996 is estimated to have shipped about $ 7.6 billion in toys, or about 60 percent of the total domestic market, to the United States.
As a walk through any Toys "R" Us confirms, if your children want it, it's probably made in China.
"Many toys are made by slave labor," Wu says. "If you totally cut off the toys . . . it is a very strong message."
Wu says such a move is just the beginning of a long struggle to change China, but argues that it's an important beginning - both for this country and China.
"When you ask the people, 'Don't buy the toys, some are made by blood and tears, made by slaves,' they will learn something," Wu says.
He also contends that, despite its fulminations against outside meddling in its internal affairs, the Chinese goverment will, if the "toycott" picks up steam, start to worry more about the international effects of its human rights abuses.
"China can only be changed by Chinese, but a foreign country plays a very important role," Wu says. 'It will get the message to the Chinese government."
Wu is hardly the only one who favors spurning Chinese goods. Massachusetts Democratic Congressman Edward M. Markey, for example, also thinks US consumers should shun all Chinese products.
"Consumers shouldn't check their consciences at the cash register, they should check the labels," Markey says. "They can look at the product and make sure it hasn't come from Burma or China or Pakistan."
Markey, who is critical of the Clinton administration for turning a purblind eye to China's abuses, says that a consumer protest could put pressure on the US government to be less tolerant of China's abuses.
"Right now, it is a hidden political issue, but this issue will begin like the nuclear-freeze movement, like the environmental movement, at the grass roots," Markey predicts. "An educated consumer is not only the best customer, but is also the best citizen."
Adrian Karatnycky, president of Freedom House, a New York-based organization that monitors political rights and civil liberties around the world, believes that by refusing to buy Chinese goods - and letting companies know the reason - consumers could eventually persuade the Chinese government to change.
"If they saw their market share dropping, I think there is enough internal pressure and desire for liberalization in that country that after the aging leadership goes, the direction the country takes will be up for grabs," Karatnycky says. "If the new set of leaders gets the message of moral disapproval for the direction their predecessors have taken, it will make them more, not less, likely to see other ways of behavior."
Others say that tack is unlikely to work, that a boycott is a blunt instrument that punishes willing Chinese workers while trying to target slave labor and human rights abuses.
Although sympathetic with the goal of changing China, Holly Burkhalter, Washington director of Human Rights Watch, the largest US-based human rights organization, doubts such a boycott could work.
"I don't think a boycott of all Chinese-made goods is arealistic pressure mechanism," Burkhalter says. "In my 15 years in the human rights field, I am only aware of one boycott that really did the job, and that was the Nestle boycott."
That pressure tactic, aimed at getting Nestle to stop its aggressive marketing of infant formula in the developing world, worked because it was focused on an objectionable practice of a single company. "A boycott of a whole country could only have an effect if literally there was such a drop in demand that importers diversified to other countries and told the Chinese why, and I think that is unrealistic," she says.
A more practical way to proceed, others say, is for US consumers to use their purchasing power to demand more responsibility from companies doing business in China as well as in other countries guilty of human rights and labor abuses.
That approach, however, means much more work for the consumer.
"The bad news is that the research on worker rights and human rights is so pathetic and puny, that, at this point, there is no foolproof way to make up a list of good companies and good products," said Charles Kernaghan, director of the National Labor Committee, or NLC, a worker-rights advocacy group.
Sometimes groups like Kernaghan's take the lead in applying that pressure: His is the group that pressured the Gap to allow independent monitoring at the El Salvador factory that produces some of its products, and which revealed the sweatshop exploitation behind Kathie Lee Gifford's line of Wal-Mart clothing.
Kernaghan's group is pressing Disney Corp. to ensure that its contractors around the world - Disney does business in China, Haiti and Thailand, according to the committee - pay better wages and foster better working conditions.
Currently, according to the NLC, the piecework pay for Haitian women sewing Disney's 101 Dalmatians children's outfits, which retail for $ 19.99, translates into a maximum wage of 42 cents an hours, with many workers earning only about 30 cents an hour.
For its part, Disney contends the median wage for Haitians working on its products is between 48 and 52 cents an hour, which is above the Haitian minimum wage of 28 cents an hour. Disney spokesman Ken Green says blaming Disney for the wage level is like blaming the company for the poverty of the country.
"What you are saying is that the social justice in another country should be the responsibility of an American corporation," Green said. But couldn't Disney require that its subcontractors pay a better wage? "I don't know," said Green. "I think maybe that is a simplistic idea to a complex problem, given the world we live in."
Other times, conscientious buying means forging your own way.
Linda Golodner, president of the National Consumers League, suggests a number of steps. Buying products with a union label may be the best way to ensure they have been produced in a factory with decent working conditions, she says.
Beyond that, she suggests asking store managers - "But make sure it is the supervisor who hears it and not just a teen-ager who is picking up a couple of extra bucks at Christmas time" - or writing companies directly to ask about the conditions under which their products are produced.
"If they get enough letters, something will be done because they will recognize it is affecting the bottom line," Golodner says.
A more systemized way of pressuring corporations is the growing movement to persuade companies to adopt codes of conduct governing the way their goods are produced.
"Ask whether the manufacturer or retailer has a set of standards that it requires the factories that produce goods for it to comply with, with respect to labor standards," advises Aron Cramer, director of business and human rights programs for Business for Social Responsibility, a San Francisco-based advocacy group. "That is a useful starting point to see if a company is making an effort."
Indeed, the Manhattan-based Council on Economic Priorities has begun putting together a list of various company codes.
Meanwhile, the Apparel Industry Partnership - a task force of human rights advocates, UNITE and companies such as Patagonia, L.L. Bean, Tweeds, Liz Claiborne, Reebok, Nike and Phillips Van Heusen Corp. - are working to promulgate a set of workplace standards and a label, list or other form of notification that would give consumers an easier way to find out whether the goods they buy have been humanely produced.
Their effort is a start. And on crusades like these, a journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.
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