Tesco has suspended production at a Chinese factory that makes its charity Christmas cards, after a six-year-old in south London found what looked like a plea from prisoners tucked into one of them. The supermarket has also taken the cards off sale while it investigates.
Florence Widdicombe was writing cards to school friends when she came to one, with a kitten in a Santa hat on the front, that had already been filled in. The block capitals read: “We are foreign prisoners in Shanghai Qingpu prison China. Forced to work against our will. Please help us and notify human rights organisation.” It also asked the reader to contact Peter Humphrey.
Her father, Ben Widdicombe, felt “incredulity” and first assumed it was “some sort of prank”. He changed his mind. “I felt very shocked but also felt a responsibility to pass it on to Peter Humphrey as the author asked me to do,” he told the BBC.
He also thought about how close the card came to never being read. “We have many cards as all families do that are left over and we put them in a drawer and forget about them,” he said. “There is an incredible element of chance in all of this.”
Tesco’s statement
“We abhor the use of prison labour and would never allow it in our supply chain,” a Tesco spokesperson said. The company added that it was shocked by the allegations and had suspended the factory right away. Zhejiang Yunguang Printing, the card supplier, would be permanently de-listed if it were found to have used prison labour.
Tesco said the supplier had gone through an independent audit the month before, with nothing found to suggest a breach of its rule against prison labour. No customer had raised messages in cards earlier. CNN said it tried to reach Chinese authorities about the claims and could not get anyone on the line.
The cards bring in £300,000 ($390,000) a year for the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK and Diabetes UK.
Humphrey on life inside Qingpu
Humphrey, a former journalist who says he was jailed on “bogus charges” tied to his work as a corporate fraud investigator, spent two years in custody in Shanghai between 2013 and 2015. His last nine months were in the very cell block the note came from. “This was written by some of my cellmates from that period who are still there serving sentences,” he said. “I think I know who it was, but I will never disclose that name.”
The Widdicombe family reached him over LinkedIn. Humphrey then contacted former inmates, who confirmed that prisoners were being made to work. One of them, now living in the UK, said that for at least two years inmates in the foreign prisoner unit had picked designs, packed the Tesco cards, sealed the boxes and loaded them into shipping cartons. Gift tags were packed too. Humphrey said he had himself seen tags bearing other high street names during his time there.
He described a block of about 250 people, 12 to a cell, sleeping on rusty iron bunks with mattresses about 1cm thick. No heating in winter, no air conditioning in summer. Wake-up is around 5:30 or 6:00am and lights-out about 9:30pm. In his day, factory work was voluntary and earned money for soap or toothpaste. Now, he said, it is compulsory.
The authors, Humphrey said, “knew very well what risks they were taking”. Anyone caught could lose merit points or part of a food allowance, or be sent to solitary confinement for a month. Tighter censorship, he added, had cut off the ways he used to reach prisoners he knew. “They resorted to the Qingpu equivalent of a message in a bottle, scribbled on a Tesco Christmas card.”
Similar notes have surfaced before. In 2014, Karen Wisinska of Co Fermanagh found one in Primark trousers, claiming 15-hour days at a Chinese prison. Amnesty International says forced labour persists in Chinese detention facilities.
Sources
- Tesco withdraws Christmas cards from sale after forced labour claims
- Tesco stops production at Chinese factory after prison forced labor claims | CNN Business
- Tesco halts production at Chinese factory over alleged 'forced' labour
