The company's China operations pulled in $10.7 billion in sales last year, less than one tenth of its international revenue. Four top managers of Wal-Mart China left the company in 2011, including Ed Chan, then chief executive officer for the country. Each window has a neat white frame, with a metal air vent attached.Several guards in uniform are standing in the parking lot of the building next door. The notes describe how poor labor practices are behind the store’s items; LBL gathers information about these practices through its own reports and interviews.“Dropping notes is an extension of leaving leaflets in stores,” says LBL’s director of policy Dominique Muller. If merely sharing information were enough, the countless viral stories about forced labor recounted here would have already resulted in widespread reform.Still, the incremental change the Walmart note led to — however impossibly small, however seemingly inconsequential — is a step. The processing price is low: Since the processing location is in prison, there is no need for manufacturers to provide space and accommodation; and the prison works in the principle of serving the people, so the processing price is guaranteed to be absolutely lower than the market price. He says the language, the style of writing, and the use of the phrase “horse cow goat pig dog” — a common expression in China that compares the treatment of prisoners to that of animals — add to its authenticity.
She says its walls are buried so deep into the ground that “even if the prisoners want to break out by digging an underground tunnel, they can’t dig through.”Zhenzhu recounts much of what her husband told her about his experience at Yingshan. “When we think we’re not getting movement from companies, we turn to confrontational tactics like this.”LBL doesn’t worry that the notes they plant in stores could overshadow any potentially real notes found in stores. This work includes identifying prisons and camps that employ forced labor, tracking the inmate population, and gathering personal testimony from those who have experienced forced labor.He says prisoners in China, the US, and elsewhere are sometimes paid for their labor. A jovial woman, she has lived in the village for 14 years, moving to the area right after she was married. Walmart is the world’s biggest retailer; it owns The Guilin Walmart sells athletic shorts made in Vietnam, girls’ T-shirts made in Bangladesh, and sports jackets made in Cambodia. Which is how I find myself in rural China, outside of a local prison, 7,522 miles away from where Christel first opened her purse.Guilin is a city in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of southern China, and a tourist haven, renowned for the tooth-like karst peaks that rise from the banks of the Li River. The farther we walk, the more literal the warnings that we shouldn’t be there. The amount depends on the financial situation of the prison; the average pay in American state prisons is Human rights organizations, such as the Laogai Research Foundation and China Labor Watch, say the biggest problem in stopping the export of products made in prisons is that the supply lines are “almost untraceable.” Supply lines, in general, are Li Qiang, the founder and executive director of China Labor Watch, explains that American companies that manufacture abroad place their orders directly with factories or sourcing companies, and that those factories and companies can transfer the orders to prisons without the company’s knowledge. But for the most part, the store’s clothing is made in China, some of it just a few hours away.