Ben Widdicombe’s first reaction was that someone was playing a joke. His six-year-old daughter, Florence, had been writing Christmas cards to school friends from a box of Tesco charity cards when she found one already written in. “When I looked at the message I thought it was incredible and wondered if it was a prank,” he said.
The message claimed to come from foreign prisoners at Shanghai’s Qingpu prison who said they were “forced to work against our will.” It asked the finder to contact Peter Humphrey, a former journalist who had been held in the same prison.
From the family to the Sunday Times
The Widdicombes, who live in Tooting, south London, had not opened the box when it arrived. They got to it about a week later. Florence said she was on her “sixth or eighth card” when she saw the note. The card showed a kitten in a Santa hat.
Her father came to see it differently once he thought it over. It was “potentially quite a serious thing,” he said, and it would be “wrong not to pass it on” to the person the author had named. He contacted Humphrey, who took the account to the Sunday Times. The paper’s report, published on December 22, 2019, set off the rest.
What Humphrey says he learned
Humphrey was jailed in China from 2013, and released in June 2015. He and his wife, Yu Yingzeng, a naturalised US citizen, were caught up in the fallout from a GlaxoSmithKline corruption scandal that their company had first been hired to investigate. He was sentenced to two and a half years and fined 200,000 yuan (£20,260). She received two years and a 150,000 yuan fine. Both were released early on medical grounds.
After the family reached him, Humphrey spoke to other former prisoners. One said inmates in the foreign prisoner unit had spent at least two years choosing designs and packing Tesco cards, then sealing the boxes and loading them into shipping cartons. Gift tags for Tesco were packed the same way, the person told him. Humphrey added that while he was inside Qingpu he saw product tags carrying the names of other high street brands.
Tesco’s response
Tesco suspended production at the factory, pulled the cards from sale and began an inquiry. The retailer named the plant as Zhejiang Yunguang Printing, which the Independent reported sits close to the Qingpu prison on the edge of Shanghai.
“We abhor the use of prison labour and would never allow it in our supply chain,” a Tesco spokesman said. He pointed out that an independent audit the previous month had found nothing to suggest the supplier broke the ban. “If a supplier breaches these rules, we will immediately and permanently de-list them.” The supermarket also said no customer had complained before about messages inside cards.
Jeremy Lune, chief executive of Cards for Good Causes, which supplies cards for several charities, called the discovery “truly shocking” and wanted a wider look at prison labour in production. “No charity would want to be associated with any abuses of human rights,” he said.
Tesco gives £300,000 a year from the cards to the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK and Diabetes UK. The charities were expected to receive the full amount this year.
Not the first note
Messages like this have turned up before. In 2017, Jessica Rigby of Braintree, Essex, found a handwritten note in a box of Sainsbury’s Christmas cards, which translated as “Wishing you luck and happiness. Third Product Shop, Guangzhou Prison, No 6 District.” In 2014, Karen Wisinska, from Co Fermanagh, found a note in Primark trousers bought in Belfast. Its author claimed to be an inmate at Xiang Nan prison in Hubei province and wrote of 15-hour days.
Amnesty International says forced labour persists in Chinese detention facilities.
Sources
- Tesco withdraws Christmas cards from sale after forced labour claims
- Tesco shuts down production at China factory amid claims Christmas cards ‘packed by prison slaves’
