Business

Tofani’s “American Imports, Chinese Deaths”

(Photo via Salt Lake Tribune)

The World Security Institute’s Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting recently funded a news series about China factory conditions, titled, “American Imports, Chinese Deaths,” for the Salt Lake Tribune.

Veteran reporter Loretta Tofani’s most recent investigative project took her to China, where over a 12-month period she visited more than 25 factories and observed first-hand how Chinese workers routinely risk their health and sometimes their lives making products for export to the United States and other countries.

Tofani, who from 1992 to 1996 was The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Asia correspondent based in Beijing, examined thousands of U.S. import documents for this story. With a travel grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting in Washington, D.C., she interviewed Chinese workers in hospitals, homes and outside their factories as well as dozens of attorneys, business leaders, government officials and labor activists. She also reviewed medical and legal records, medical journal articles, government reports and other documents.

The Center for Investigative Reporting in Berkeley, Calif., also helped fund travel for the project with a grant from the Dick Goldensohn Fund for International Reporting.

Tofani won a Pulitzer Prize in 1983 at The Washington Post for a series documenting gang rape in a Maryland jail. She lives in Ogden.

I would especially like to point out the section of the series, “Who Is Responsible?”

So who is responsible?

Is it Chinese businesses or the nation’s central or local governments? International trade and labor organizations? Consumers themselves who buy — and demand — cheap Chinese-made goods?

Read Tofani’s full report to find answers.

[tags]China, factory conditions, worker safety, labor[/tags]

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