‘Re-education’, forced labour and surveillance beyond Xinjiang | Hacker News Reader

‘Re-education’, forced labour and surveillance beyond Xinjiang

aspi.org.au

255 pointshardmaru106 comments

As an Apple fanboy, I feel deeply conflicted to find Apple on the list and also Tim's approval & visit to one of the factories exploiting forced labor. I feel like a hypocrite, who supports human rights abuses through forced labour.

All the years I stubbornly rejected my friend's and colleague's criticism from the open source & linux community for being eccentric and making 'exaggerated' arguments, but now I am so deeply engrossed in the Apply ecosystem, that I fear a switch to some linux distribution would be unmanageable for me.

Ironically I feel like a slave of Apple myself. What could I do tho? Switch to some other brand and then find out, that they operate with the same unethical behaviour!? I'm just deeply conflicted.

advocate for policies that will return manufacturing to domestic factories

Fantastic actionable advice, I heard that they assembled the trash can mac pro in Austin, Texas. Unfortunately not any longer tho, if I am not mistaken. Thank you for your advice!

Out of the frying pan and into the fire? With it's wars causing the deaths of millions in the middle east and its excessive imprisonment of people for using near-harmless drugs, maybe the US is worse than China on human rights.

I am sorry you were downvoted. What you need to understand is that unlike China, the US spreads freedom. In the last two decades we have brought freedom to Afghanistan and Iraq.

The demise of american manufacturing happened in lock step with environmental regulations. Turns out the only way to have a profitable manufacturing operation is to hire cheap and dump your waste into the water supply, as was done in every single industrialized american city.

Maybe we should figure out how we focus less on making the most profit every quarter and more on how to establish sustainable industries that aren't going to look very profitable at all, and know that this lack of exponential profit isn't a bad thing. Advocating for a return of manufacturing is fruitless without this understanding coming to the business world first, and the only way to learn a lesson like this is to hold abusers of labor and the environment personally responsible.

Calculate the environmental damage, calculate the damage to quality of life, and put the bill right on the executive who oversaw this behavior. Putting it on the company lets executives like this walk off scott-free to their next executive position while the company bankrupts and the working class involved with the company loose their livelihood; lessons aren't learned by going after companies. We have to hold executives directly accountable for their direct decision making.

Maybe just don't buy any new hardware until/unless Apple addresses this. I expect that most of the forced labor goes towards hardware production, and I don't think that continuing to use Apple software makes you (any more) complicit.

Thank you for your constructive input, this sounds very reasonable. I'll try to keep that in mind and will try to desist buying new hardware until Apple addresses this.

Purchasing used devices also good for ecology and don't support Apple/another vendor directly.

Yes, I do that myself! Might still make you complicit (edit: People may be more likely to buy Apple hardware if there's a stronger used market for them) to some extent, but less so, I guess.

We need laws that prevent this stuff. If you avoid all companies that have connections with China then not many will be left to choose from. From a company’s point of view it’s also difficult to compete with others who deal with China.

It’s similar to environmental rules. A single company can’t do much as long as it’s possible for others to keep polluting and be cheaper that way.

One of government’s tasks is to level the playing field so everybody can compete while following the same rules. Same thing for workplace safety, child labor and a ton of other things. We need rules for acceptable standards

You have a very nuanced and insightful perspective, thank you for educating and sharing!

i sure hope thats sarcasm. he just threw out random thoughts with no actual way to achieve anything. laws cant actually to force multinational companies to do anything. how would they be enforced after all?

you'd first need a world government for any laws to apply. and no chance of that happening within the foreseeable future.

You can force multinational corporations to do things by not allowing them into your own market if they don’t follow certain rules. The US does it all the time, so does Europe.

> The US does it all the time, so does Europe.

Please give me an example of a corporation getting serious issues from any government for actions they took on foreign soil.

Companies have got into trouble for violating sanctions. There are plenty of examples for that.

GDPR is a huge one every user of this site should know.

GDPR is a law, not a corporation and is a recent attempt at enforcing something, and spectacularly failed at that.

Almost all eu-foreign enterprises ignore it entirely or don't actually adhere to it, even after showing a big pop-up claiming they do.

And the multinational corporations just started to hide their tracking better. For an obvious example: chrome includes a 24 bit unique identifier per installation to track you and instead of saving your PII they just build a nrr to "predict" them. Such a success, indeed.

What’s your exact point? Are you trying to say that laws don’t work and nothing can be done so it shouldn’t be tried? I don’t understand what you are trying to say.

Turkey can’t enter the EU because it doesn’t meet the EU’s standard for human rights. Standards work.

Turkey isnt a multinational corporation in case you didn't notice.

Nor did they change because of it, so your point makes no sense whatsoever

And yet there are at least some options of companies doing the right thing, or trying to do so. See Fairphone and Shiftphone for examples.

Totally agree. But that comes at the expense of profit. Big public companies who claim they are there only to make money for shareholders won’t do that.

Which is sickening. We need some sort of heavy handed regulation that stipulates that labor up and down the supply chain of a given American company conforms to American labor protections. We also need this regulation to be backed by consequence which would directly harm the lives of those individuals who directly decide to eschew these regulations.

I think we can stand to hold executives far more accountable for them deciding to commit human rights abuses via casual email or shareholder memo, some 3000 miles out of sight and out of mind from the crimes themselves.

These sort of regulations would be very painful for the economy in the near term, but far less painful than continuing the status quo for those being abused.

“These sort of regulations would be very painful for the economy in the near term, “

I am not even sure about that. Companies would adapt very quickly. That’s what they are good at.

You wouldn't think that if you listened to what these neocons have been preaching as scripture for the past 50 years...

What kind of law will help? A law that forbids trade with bad states?

Shopping will be hard after that ...

Exactly that law.

Alright, but you know, that quite some people would add the US to that list, too?

You know, private operated prisons, starting wars, torturing, kidnapping, dronestriking around the world called "extrajucidal killing" etc. etc. etc.

This world is not a simple one, so I doubt simple laws can change basic flaws.

> Alright, but you know, that quite some people would add the US to that list, too?

> You know, private operated prisons, starting wars, torturing, kidnapping, dronestriking around the world called "extrajucidal killing" etc. etc. etc.

Sure, and you know what? If that were ever the justification for trade restrictions with the US, it’d be well deserved.

I’d prefer if we as a country took the moral high ground, but in the absence of that, some pressure from outside could be a good thing.

Hm. But pressure from whom?

Russia, india, brasil, pakistan? Probably not ...

The EU? Well, we have for example this glorious law that mainly because of the holocaust, we don't kick people out who come asking for help and have no other safe place to go. But since we don't actually want them, we pay and support other dictators and warlords to keep them away from us, so they cannot ask for help in the first place and we punish people who rescue those wrong people from drowning, when they dare to take them to a safe place where they ask for help.

So who is left?

Switzerland? Maybe, but they for example had never a problem with taking all the dirty money and doing buusness with anyone, as long as its money.

This world is not black and white, but yeah, there surely are places which are a lot darker and if we believe to be in a lighter place, we can't feel superior if our wealth is based on those very dark places.

I'm sure things were a little rocky for the cotton industry in 1865 too...

If you're an American paying taxes, you're already a hypocrite for funding their international wars. Either accept that you're the baddie and enjoy life, or actually stop being the baddie even if you have to make huge sacrifices far beyond choice of consumer product brands. But you don't get to have it both ways being virtuous while selfishly doing harm.

I hear your pain but the average American citizen has no say or control over the war machine and many are actually against it. It's also not as easy as "stop paying your taxes" unless you're willing to give up being part of society and live as a social outcast (best case) or be taken to court and ruin yourself. Not paying taxes is only possible if you're already part of the system that made you. US citizens also are taxed on their income even they decide to live outside the US, so there is no escape for them if they disagree (and who would denounce their citizenship unless they're asylum seekers or political refugees). Don't hate the player, hate the game as they say.

It's far from limited to one company (or even one country). We can't even have oatmeal at this point without it.

https://www.ranker.com/list/companies-in-the-united-states-t...

https://www.vox.com/2018/8/24/17768438/national-prison-strik...

Wow... you're really epitomizing the notion of 1st World problems here.

If you're really that moved (and you really shouldn't be surprised after the Foxconn reveal), get a Pinebook and start playing with Linux Mint and go from there. Support Open hardware and Open source software on the side while still working with your old hardware until you realize that at this point the Linux ecosystem and its various distros can do just about everything Windows and Mac could, this isn't the 90s anymore.

I will say, though that if you do video editing that can be a hard one as even I still revert back to a Windows box for that, unfortunately. And I went all-in on Linux after XP in 2004ish.

I'll check out the Pinebook and Linux Mint, thank you for the concrete suggestions!

> at this point the Linux ecosystem and its various distros can do just about everything Windows and Mac could, this isn't the 90s anymore.

That's good to hear! I used Ubuntu in University for a short while and it seemed quite well developed, the problem was that I was bound to some tools that were only available on Windows/Mac, such that I couldn't adopt it as my main OS. Anyways I appreciate your constructive input, thanks.

You could always dual boot Windows if it's critical. You don't need a registration for windows 10. All it will do is put up a little disclaimer in the bottom right corner and occasionally nag you, but otherwise there is no reason to pay for Windows anymore.

"the Linux ecosystem and its various distros can do just about everything Windows and Mac could."

Can you please stop spreading that myth? It is wrong, wrong, wrong. It will just lead to false expectations and then disappointment with linux.

It is not only video-editing. What about audio? Qubase or FL studio? Nope. I like audacity, too. But it is not at all in the same league.

Photoshop? No, gimp is not equal.

And countless other professional software no one bothered to write linux versions, but quite some people need for their work.

And how about driver support on laptops? It is a fckn* gamble and you are allmost allways worse with linux on a laptop, than with the windows drivers. I wish it would be different, than I could dump my chromebook for a real linux laptop that satisfy my use case (small, light, long batterie, no standby hickups)

So yes, we need more people in open source software and hardware to change that for the better, but that won't work with false promises.

Why do you think pinebook wouldn’t be subject to the same slave labor? Isn’t it manufactured in china?

> Why do you think pinebook wouldn’t be subject to the same slave labor? Isn’t it manufactured in china?

'all devices are manufactured and sold by Pine Microsystems Inc. based in Fremont, California. Its founder is TL Lim, the inventor of the PopBox and Popcorn Hour series of media players sold under the Syabas and Cloud Media brands'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Microsystems

It's impossible to make $200 laptops in small batches in US. They really don't like mentioning it tho.

https://www.pine64.org/2020/01/15/pinephones-start-shipping-... - it's about phones, but I believe laptops are produced there too.

> It's impossible to make $200 laptops in small batches in US. They really don't like mentioning it tho.

What? They state they do not make a profit from the sale of these devices on their storefront when you're ordering one, and are probably doing so at a loss to promote the ideology behind open source hardware/software.

But, your claim is mere speculation until you definitively can prove otherwise, and it seems that the phone is the device limited to HK production: not China. And, yes, there is a difference.

https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=8956&page=4

Update: From what I have been able to gather is that the single board computer itself is made in China, the assembly of the finished products like the Pinebook laptop are in CA. The phone, however, may likely be made in the mainland if I read that correctly (its late), which while slightly disappointing is not really a surprise. They're in HK awaiting shipping to Pine US.

https://www.pine64.org/2020/02/15/february-update-post-cny-a...

In your first link, in first post OP says that pine gear is produced in mainland china.

> Factories [in China] producing the PinePhone, PineTab and Pinebook Pro remain closed because they need to undergo a long and complicated procedure that will allow them to resume operation...

I found the confirmation I was looking for; 'gear' was an ambigious term that related to the internal components to these devices, I had read in previous posts that these were made in Fremont as well as the wiki.

However, after another screening of the update it seems that the Pinebook pro is in fact made on the Mainland as its been the cause for the delay in new pre-orders.

No need to dump all your devices in the trash. But look into a small transition whenever the door opens - eg when your iPhone breaks get a Fairphone or similar. When you tablet breaks maybe Shift has a new tablet out, etc. It's hard when you make it all or nothing - easy when you just go with the flow.

Or buy your iphones used from craigslist, and ride your bike to the sale. That way you aren't contributing to further polluting the worlds oceans and the port of Los Angeles when the shipping container with your fairphone is received by the longshoreman.

You could just buy used gear. Apple doesn't benefit from that purchase.

Better to buy something that's already in existence in the local area where you live, than some new product from some supposedly ethical company that also requires turning natural resources into unrecyclable material via dirty energy and the generation of toxic waste.

The resale market props up Apple retaiy prices and profits.

In what way?

I'll give you the answer I gave to myself and my apple-loving friends since 2015, grab yourself a dell(the xps ones are really nice, but I like a cheap laptop, so I went with a latitude e7280), then hackintosh it. It's a bit buggy, but that's better than having a company which is all but cooperative with repairs, constantly abuses human rights and makes laptops which break easily.

This is why I apply a personal philosophy of "separation of powers" when it comes to browsers, operating systems and their ecosystems.

Next time you buy a phone, consider a different brand. That's about all you can do.

> Switch to some other brand and then find out, that they operate with the same unethical behaviour!?

If you know that Person A has done a misdeed, that doesn't necessarily mean that Persons B and C have done the same thing.

here is the list of companies they named as using Uyghur labor,

>In all, ASPI’s research has identified 83 foreign and Chinese companies directly or indirectly benefiting from the use of Uyghur workers outside Xinjiang through potentially abusive labour transfer programs as recently as 2019: Abercrombie & Fitch, Acer, Adidas, Alstom, Amazon, Apple, ASUS, BAIC Motor, BMW, Bombardier, Bosch, BYD, Calvin Klein, Candy, Carter’s, Cerruti 1881, Changan Automobile, Cisco, CRRC, Dell, Electrolux, Fila, Founder Group, GAC Group (automobiles), Gap, Geely Auto, General Electric, General Motors, Google, H&M, Haier, Hart Schaffner Marx, Hisense, Hitachi, HP, HTC, Huawei, iFlyTek, Jack & Jones, Jaguar, Japan Display Inc., L.L.Bean, Lacoste, Land Rover, Lenovo, LG, Li-Ning, Mayor, Meizu, Mercedes-Benz, MG, Microsoft, Mitsubishi, Mitsumi, Nike, Nintendo, Nokia, The North Face, Oculus, Oppo, Panasonic, Polo Ralph Lauren, Puma, Roewe, SAIC Motor, Samsung, SGMW, Sharp, Siemens, Skechers, Sony, TDK, Tommy Hilfiger, Toshiba, Tsinghua Tongfang, Uniqlo, Victoria’s Secret, Vivo, Volkswagen, Xiaomi, Zara, Zegna, ZTE. Some brands are linked with multiple factories.

Very few multinational giants remain if you protest all these.

Slavery is still wrong. Full stop.

And there's no clear solution. Full stop.

The solution is very clear. It just has to come from the government, not individual consumers.

calling your MP and making a stink works. Also public shaming on LinkedIn works by tagging their brands - they absolutely hate that (unless you're scared of your image in which case you're also part of the problem ofc).

There is no clear solution if you value profits over human life, you mean.

No, I mean there's no clear solution. People in this thread are confusing the desired outcome with how to get there, and claiming that because the former is clear, so is the latter.

Wasn't the same true for child labor in various industries? Seems like outlawing slavery doesn't get rid of the slave owners, instead they just move to the next unprotected group.

> Wasn't the same true for child labor in various industries? Seems like outlawing slavery doesn't get rid of the slave owners, instead they just move to the next unprotected group.

Yup, many of those megacorps took that page directly from the IMF and World Bank.

Child labor is a tricky one because it's actually viewed as a positive in poor countries. The alternative isn't 'no child labor', it's other types of child exploitation like prostitution.

I don't have a reference but there was a follow up report in a poor region where commercial child labor was abolished, and the outcomes weren't great.

Child labor is often a net negative because children can't go to school. If employers had to ensure the children go to school then I could see how it could be a net benefit during the transition period.

They are literally selling the body parts of their prisoners.

https://chinatribunal.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/China-T...

https://chinatribunal.com/final-judgment-report/

https://chinatribunal.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/ChinaTr...

EDIT: not sure why this is being downvoted, as this tribunal is well respected and contains members with experience looking at other atrocities.

https://chinatribunal.com/who-we-are/

Must be the news source is unfamiliar. I’ve seen more familiar news agencies do stories in this

For a list of Uyghurs that are missing or detained, see https://www.shahit.biz/eng/

Also, if you speak Mandarin or have other related language skills (Turkish, Russian, Uyghur, etc), there are volunteer positions!

Aside from not purchasing from the listed companies, is there other action that can be taken in support, from a distance?

Talk to people about this. Inform others.

Call / email your political representatives, for one. They are the ones who can enact sanctions against the Chinese dictatorship.

> Aside from not purchasing from the listed companies, is there other action that can be taken in support, from a distance?

Support the Hong Kong Revolution, they're literately the front line when it comes to encroachment from the CCP.

If/when they succeed then the notion of 'One China' policy falls in shambles; Taiwan, Macau and possibly Tibet are all in good strategic positions to rise up and contest it as well now that China is weakened economically.

Follow up with Documentary from Daily Apple (Jimmy Lai was recently arrested for his involvement with the protests) this should be a good preface for what is happening in HK:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=ldRsqmr5sQs&...

Update: I was wondering when the pro-ccp mainland brigade would show up.

Donate to Gene / shahit https://www.gofundme.com/xinjiang-victims-database-testimony...

We need to stop using the propagandists terms when we describe these things. It’s not re-education, it’s psychological torture. It’s not forced labor, it’s slavery

I am inclined to believe this is accurate, however I don’t know anything about the organization producing the report.

Can anyone fill me in in regards to their credibility?

As the name suggests, the "Australian Strategic Policy Institute" is a think tank for Australia's armed forces. It would save the outright lies for special occasions like 2003.

On the other hand, it doesn't pretend to take a neutral point of view. The strategic subtext is to warn Australia's neighbours that "them as makes muslim slaves of Uigurs, want to make ... oh, hang on, we keep forgetting that you're muslim as well ... slaves of you." Which warning will be all the more effective because it's quite possibly true.

To add, Australia is caught between US and Chinese interest, US for security, Chinese for trade.

ASPI is nominally aligned with US interests, receives funding from US State Department and is one of the largest proponents of China threat theory in Australian foreign policy. I wouldn't say their work is bad per say, but exceedingly one-sided in narrative. As long as that's understood.

>Former NSW premier Bob Carr has accused it of pumping out a “one-sided, pro-American view of the world”. Veteran foreign editor Tony Walker has slammed its "dystopian worldview" which "leaves little room for viewing China as a potential partner". "It lacks integrity and brings shame to Australia," says retired former DFAT chief and ex-Qantas CEO John Menadue. “I see it as very much the architect of the China threat theory in Australia”, adds ex-ambassador to China turned Beijing-based business consultant Geoff Raby.

>The rhetoric is extreme. And says much about how Australia’s consensus on China has dissolved.

...

>ASPI's annual reports list alternate funding sources. Sponsors from its most recent can be divided into three buckets.

>The first is filled with defence contractors such as Lockheed Martin, BAE, Northrop Grumman, Thales and Raytheon. The second, technology companies like Microsoft, Oracle Australia, Telstra, and Google. And lastly, there are the contributions from foreign governments, many being strategic competitors to China, including the Embassy of Japan and the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office (that is, Taiwan).

https://www.afr.com/policy/foreign-affairs/the-think-tank-be...

I'm not going to label them as propaganda,they do some good work like collating data on Chinese firms abroad, but their analysis isn't neutral. They're certainly not as lolbad as ChinaTribunal and all the Falungong funded organ harvesting studies that's been spamming the internet since tradewar started.

> I am inclined to believe this is accurate

You shouldn't. Almost everything ughyur and xinjiang related has pretty much been shown to be propaganda and from highly questionable sources. You should be inclined towards skepticism.

> however I don’t know anything about the organization producing the report.

It's literally australian government/defense propaganda.

"The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) is a non-partisan defence and strategic policy think tank based in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, founded by the Australian government and partly funded by the Australian Department of Defence."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Strategic_Policy_In...

Not saying the treatment of ughyurs are good or bad, but the first casualty in every war is the truth.

The more interesting question is how does government propaganda make it to the frontpage without much pushback?

> Almost everything ughyur and xinjiang related has pretty much been shown to be propaganda and from highly questionable sources

Do you have any evidence for that whatsoever? In contrast, here's a very thorough look from an established news source: https://youtu.be/v7AYyUqrMuQ

Remember the last time a major world power practiced ethnic cleansing and we joined a war over it? Instead of letting our corporations funnel money towards it?

Free trade works. It turns out China is just "more efficient" at manufacturing than the rest of the world.

As the Nobel prize winning economist Milton Friedman loved to argue, unilateral free trade helps both countries. (https://fee.org/articles/in-1970-milton-friedman-called-for-...)

I'm being sarcastic, but this has been the position of libertarians and both the center left and right for a long time. Of course, they didn't factor in the fact that trying to compete with literal slave labor means working class Americans see their wages stagnate. Further, it guarantees that this slave labor is very profitable for the Chinese upper class which get to live like kings, even though their GDP/capita might not be efficient.

For countries like North Korea, Cuba, and Iran, human rights abuses result in economic isolation and consternation. But for China, their human rights abuses pay for our cheap stuff so we'll look the other way.

Free trade is maximally effective. Maximal effectiveness usually entails moral compromises. In real life we usually take a more balanced approach towards people: you forgive your girlfriend for having a little too much in the bum, and she forgives you for not being Tyson Fury. But when it comes to big money, greed and faraway countries/abstract masses of citizens, being uncompromising and exploitative comes easier.

Any sort of regulation of slave labor/human rights/ecology in China will inevitably reduce overall efficiency and make everything more expensive. That's the only way to make things fairer, but only until some other country makes a more efficient bid and offers up its citizens as low-wage slaves.

The good caused by global free trade far outweighs this small issue. If you don't like globalization, find a strong reason, not a random exception to the norm of win-win.

Agreed in general, but just because free trade is mostly win-win doesn't mean we shouldn't try to improve on it through regulations and such.

Considering the conclusion that

> The response to the abuses identified in this report should not involve a knee-jerk rejection of Uyghur or Chinese labour. The problem is the policies that require Uyghurs to work under duress in violation of well-established international labour laws. It is vital that, as these problems are addressed, Uyghur labourers are not placed in positions of greater harm or, for example, involuntarily transferred back to Xinjiang, where their safety cannot necessarily be guaranteed.

I really don't like the parts of this article that don't clearly distinguish between companies employing Uyghurs, companies using forced labor and companies treating their employees like shit regardless of ethnicity.

E.g.

> a September 2019 report by New York-based China Labour Watch said contract workers at Foxconn’s Zhengzhou factory—which includes Uyghur workers—put in at least 100 overtime hours a month.

is not a forced labor problem if their Han workers also work that much. If that factory decides to implement a policy of not hiring ethnic minorities, as some do (I've seen job ads explicitly excluding Uyghurs, Mongols, Hui and Yi) that doesn't solve the underlying problem that the factory is grinding its workers to the bone.

It's funny how this treatment is very bad because they're adults but it's pretty similar to how normal people treat children everywhere. Perhaps it's bad because adults are less malleable so they suffer more from being forced out of their natural ways while children are still learning how to behave so they tolerate going to school, learning languages, being politically indoctrinated, being forbidden from performing seances or voodoo revenge rituals, and being coerced by threats of social exclusion for failing to do the proper behaviors.

It's not unreasonable for society to expect both children and adults to work some of the time. It is unreasonable for both children and adults to be separated from their loved ones and to be denied personal freedom to move and pursue their own interests, religion, etc to this degree. Children require more discipline than adults because they don't always have common sense like "don't set a fire in your bedroom."

That’s the western media narrative.

Consider what the other side is saying too https://youtu.be/u4cYE6E27_g

Second this!

A lot of people criticizing, but was from the human rights perspective. While it's important to debunk the lies about terrorisms happened in Xinjiang, which was used by Chinese propaganda to disguise as the legitimate excuse and secured the support from the Chinese citizens, even people living in Xinjiang.

By 'other side' you mean....the CCP: "CGTN is funded in whole or in part by the Chinese government."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Strategic_Policy_In...

So yes, lets see what both sides have to say. Or neither. You can't defend one set of propagandists while rejecting another without seeming a bit biased or agenda-driven.

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