Li Qiang didn’t expect the McDonald’s executives would fly to New York to see him.
It was 2001, and the 29-year-old political refugee from China had just released his first report for China Labor Watch, the labor rights organization he founded. The report was on Merton, a company whose factory in Dongguan, China, produced toys for McDonald’s, Hasbro, and Disney. It followed a two-year investigation that Li, a former Merton factory worker himself, had orchestrated with his contacts there.
With detailed evidence, it found that employees were required to work for 120 consecutive days before getting one day off; that up to 20 of them were crammed into one dormitory room; and that the average salary, after required deductions, was just 13 cents per hour. Workers also complained of strong chemical smells and hands frequently burned by paint thinner. Because of an abnormal color in their urine, many told Li’s team they were “sure they will have some kind of ch
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On Thursday, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo met with Wang Wentao, the Chinese Commerce Minister, in Washington. It marked the first cabinet-level meeting in Washington between the U.S. and China during the Biden administration, and it was a signal of the Commerce Department’s increasingly central role in the current U.S.-China relationship. Usually, the Commerce Department is far from the center of anything, but as Katrina Northrop reports, the department is uniquely suited to address the China challenge.
The lawyer and author talks about the attack on a train in the 1920s which created an international incident, the rise of the Communist Party and the conditions for foreign media in China today.
