If China is the world's factory, an unassuming political refugee in New York City may be the closest thing we have to its union leader.
Li Qiang Illustration by Nigel Buchanan
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 con
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