Inside China's Secret Prisons

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 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—and how its findings still reverberate today.

Schell weaves a fast-paced story of high-level journalism while uncovering the duplicity and rule-bending techniques that China uses to sell cheap 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 sneak in and film with a hidden camera. They documented that China compels inmates, including political prisoners, to toil in prison factories and then exports these wares to global markets by disguising their place of origin—and that prison officials would even sell products to CBS correspondents posing as American businessmen. Schell also confesses how he 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, and his own career, illuminating how Chinese intimidation tactics can drive journalists, scholars, and even businesspeople to self-censorship.

This powerful and incisive book shines a light on not only China’s forced labor camps—where hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs are now incarcerated—but also the moral quandaries faced by reporters and scholars who seek to investigate China’s shrouded and brutal penal system.