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‘The most prominent feature of the trial has been the court’s complete lack of interest either in the facts or in issues of law’, he said in his speech to the Dongguan court. The defendants, he admitted, had taken part in ‘inappropriate action’ but they had already paid dearly for it with the loss …

Wal-Mart employs one hundred auditors and inspects at least some of its suppliers. We know this because of a document known as a ‘cheat-sheet’ which in 2004 found its way to an NGO from a worker at a Wal-Mart supplier, the Heyi factory in Dongguan, in Guangdong Province. The factory had prepared th…

The compliance inspector tries to ensure that the factory is not going to embarrass the brand by ensuring that the factory is sticking to an agreement that would typically cover the length of the working day, the amount of compulsory overtime, wage rates, safety and health requirements, and fire re…

Then in the early 1990s another model train maker called Bachman (originally an American company, now owned in Hong Kong) began to make miniature British locomotives. In the shops, they were priced the same as Hornby’s, though they were made in China. And, as Hornby could not help but notice, the q…

The strikers at the Tianwang textile factory had also expressed their indignation in terms of betrayed idealism as they chanted the slogans of the Revolution and sang ‘The Internationale’. Their solidarity with each other, for as long as they could maintain it, was the last expression of a shared b…