Relieving pressure on overcrowded national prisons by employing convicts as laborers at Chinese-run projects in the developing world is a novel strategy China has adopted — an approach that is certain to create new backlashes against Chinese businesses overseas, besides highlighting the country's egregious human-rights record...The Chinese practice in overseas projects, including in Africa, is to keep the number of local workers to the minimum and to bring in much of the workforce from China...The use of convict laborers adds a disturbing new dimension to [China's] "going global" strategy...As it is, some Chinese projects, especially dam-building schemes, have been embroiled in...disputes with local communities. The pressing of Chinese prisoners into service will create new rifts. Chinese dam-building projects, for example, have been controversial with local communities in Botswana, Burma, Ghana, Pakistan and Sudan, among others. In Sudan, security forces killed three people and wounded several others in April 2006 to scatter demonstrators protesting the 9.2-km-long Merowe High Dam, while a similar protest against another Chinese dam-building project in that impoverished country, at Kajbar, left four people dead in June 2007.