For years, Chinese workers making nickel-cadmium batteries for U.S. distributors such as Eveready and Energizer complain of sickness, not realizing that cadmium can lead to kidney failure and death.
Exposure to chemicals in paint and varnish has claimed lives of Chinese workers who produce furniture for major U.S. companies like Restoration Hardware, Ethan Allen Furniture and Haverty Furniture.
Throughout China, workers making goods for export use outdated—sometimes jerry-rigged—machines that lack safety features standard in the U.S., causing workers to lose legs, arms, hands or fingers.
Workers producing Char-Broil stoves in China were given only thin gauze masks that do nothing to prevent metal dust from entering their lungs. Many end up contracting lung diseases like silicosis.
Most American businesses that import from China are small and medium-sized. Many have never visited the factories, and are unaware of any dangerous working conditions surrounding their products.
Over a 12-month period, Pulitzer Center grantee Loretta Tofani visited more than 25 factories in China to document the risks Chinese workers go through to supply American consumers with cheap goods.
While consumers in the U.S. are enjoying cheap products made in China, factory workers in the world's most populous country are exposed to hazardous working conditions. Loretta Tofani reports.
Pulitzer Center grantee Loretta Tofani offers a glimpse into the life of Chinese factory workers dying from occupational diseases that have been maimed as a result of making products for America.
With the United States preoccupied by war, nuclear threats in the Middle East and an array of problems elsewhere, a quiet revolution is underway in East Asia as the region adjusts to the reemergence of a great power: China.
BANGKOK -- The maps spread across the desk of senior Thai Commerce Ministry official Pisanu Rienmahasarn show the progress on a new 1,170-mile-long road project that will run from Kunming in southwestern China through Laos and on to the ports of southern Thailand.
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