The Chinese government has denied allegations that foreign inmates in a Shanghai prison are used as forced laborers in a Christmas card factory.
"After clarifying the matter with the relevant departments, I can assure you that there is no forced labor situation for foreign inmates in Qingpu Prison," said Foreign Minister Geng Shuang in Beijing.
"We are foreign prisoners ..."
According to a Sunday Times report, a six-year-old girl in Britain found a Christmas card distributed by Tesco calling for help from suspected forced laborers. "We are foreign prisoners in the Qingpu Chinese prison in Shanghai," said the card. The authors of the call for help therefore asked to contact journalist Peter Humphrey.
Tesco was "shocked" after the newspaper report and announced the immediate stop of card production.
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The spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Office described the allegations as "invented". He accused the journalist Humphrey of having invented a "posse" in order to "make himself big". Humphrey was detained in Qingpu Prison for nine months in 2015.
He wrote in The Sunday Times that he was detained in China for "fabricated allegations" and without trial. He was certain that the authors of the call for help were former co-inmates.
Is the prison a "company"?
After the call for help reached him, he contacted other ex-prisoners, Humphrey wrote. One of them told him that foreign inmates of the Qingpu prison had been obliged to produce Tesco Christmas cards and their packaging for at least two years.
In February of last year, Humphrey had made serious allegations against the prison in an article for the "Financial Times". At that time he wrote that the institution was a "company" that took over production work for companies. He described the prison conditions in his twelve-man cell as catastrophic.
