During our interview, Siakatsky recounted that on Christmas Day in the prison in 2019, cheers broke out when he got into a fight with another prisoner and dumped a plate of hot food on the other man’s head. Guards rushed to break up the fracas, and Siakatsky, who was deemed to have provoked the fight, was hauled off to spend 80 days in solitary confinement.

Siakatsky had attacked an inmate who was cooperating in the prison’s attempt to cover up the forced labor scandal that was inadvertently exposed when a young English girl found a message from prisoners at Qingpu scrawled in a Tesco Christmas Card.

In 2019, Florence Widdicombe, then a 6-year-old London schoolgirl, discovered a despairing message from Shanghai prisoners forced to pack boxes of Christmas charity cards bound for British supermarkets.

Her discovery made headlines around the world. I wrote up the story for the Sunday Times and followed it up with another one about the prisoners packaging Quaker oatmeal.

There were quick denials by Chinese media and Beijing’s foreign ministry at the time, and I came under a vicious personal attack in a 30-minute CGTN program assassinating my character.

Over the past two years I have gradually pieced together the reaction inside the jail after my Sunday Times story was published on December 22, 2019. Several of the prisoners involved have been released from Qingpu over the past year and have described the panic that erupted after Chinese authorities learned of Florence’s find.