Alexa whistleblower demands Amazon apology after being jailed and tortured

Now, after spending two years in prison, he is appealing to the higher courts to clear his name. He has taken the difficult decision to talk publicly, despite being aware of the risks of reprisals, because he believes Amazon and its founder, Jeff Bezos, have a responsibility to support his appeal and that the Observer also has a responsibility to highlight his case.

He described how he was beaten by his interrogators, handcuffed in stress positions until he could take no more and signed a confession to the crime of infringing trade secrets.

Illegal working practices at the factory were first revealed in an investigation by the Observer and the US-based China Labor Watch in 2018. A year later, a second investigation found that Foxconn had tried to solve its subsequent recruitment problems by drafting in schoolchildren to work illegal overtime.

Internal Foxconn documents passed on by Tang formed the basis of the second investigation. Amazon sent its own staff into the factory to investigate the labour law breaches and Foxconn was forced to pay more than £165,000 in compensation for underpaying workers making Echo and Echo Dot devices in Hengyang.

Meanwhile, Foxconn brought in the Chinese authorities to investigate the leak. Tang was charged, convicted and jailed for two years. He said he believed Amazon acted correctly in addressing the illegal working practices but that it should have intervened on his behalf in line with US law offering protection to whistleblowers and guaranteeing their freedom of speech.

Tang worked for Foxconn monitoring supply levels and had access to the factory computer system. He said he came across information showing how Foxconn was using temporary workers and schoolchildren to cut costs.

He said workers regularly exceeded the limit of 36 hours of overtime in a month, with some on the assembly lines exceeding 100 hours a month during busy periods.