China Uighurs 'moved into factory forced labour' for foreign brands
bbc.com
bbc.com
Most low cost labor in low cost countries has elements of this, but China takes it to a new level. Talking strictly from a US standpoint, bringing jobs and the supply chains back into the US helps to significantly improve this. The only problem is that the orange man who everyone in progressive circles likes to label as a racist, sexist (name your favorite pejorative) is the only one who has talked about and taken any significant action to address this. Meanwhile they turn a blind eye to blatant racism, sexism etc..
Some other countries are beginning to wake up to this with their own economies as etc., but many wealthy, and powerful interests want to maintain the globalist status quo. Why? Because there is a lot of money to be made from slave labor. And the Chinese government is more than happy to help the wealthy quell this. While the progressive west is moralizing about perceived slights and hurt feelings, the Chinese are not worrying about that and eating their lunch.
Meanwhile western brands are censoring content etc. at the behest of the Chinese government and the actual cultural values that reject this are slowly being eroded away. The elites gain/maintain power and the middle class devolve back into being surfs/slaves.
You've said a handful of random different things, and some of them aren't necessarily untrue, but I have no idea what your point was.
Except one of several points was possibly to try to avoid saying you like Trump openly by hiding behind indirect and isolated observations.
"Everyone complains that he goes around killing dogs like that's so awful, but no one's talking about that one time one of the dogs had rabies."
I don't like the recent hyperbole in the press about the 'world resembling 1930's', it's overstated - but this artifact absolutely is worth comparison.
We have possibly a million people in concentration camps due entirely to their ethnicity and nobody will publicly say anything about it let alone do something.
Where are government leaders making this issue public?
The level of complicity by large Western brands is utterly shocking, to say the least, it lays the entirety of their ridiculous empathetic marketing attempts bare.
Building-sized pictures of Colin Kaepernick quotes, with shoes made by literal slaves (?) it's beyond hypocritical.
The other issue relates to the extent to which China will push for the suppression of this information. Any Western outlet that dares raise the issue, faces the wrath of China. Everyone unless otherwise under the protection of some kind as only some journalists may be accustomed to ... can be pressured to shut up.
The popular silence on this issue is shocking.
I remember experiencing this myself a couple months ago after reading an absolutely terrifying account of sexual violence from a survivor of one of the camps. I almost threw up reading the piece, which I don’t think I’ve ever experienced before, and it took days for me to get the visceral images of the described events out of my head. I just couldn’t keep reading about the camps after that because it was just soul-crushing to read. I can’t begin to imagine what they’re going through, but attempting to made me sick to my stomach.
Unfortunately, I think it’s going to take images or video footage to get the public’s attention on this, just as we’ve seen with police brutality cases. The effort to read about what’s happening is just too much effort for most people.
One of the leaders of that program now runs the CIA, and no criminal charges were ever filed against the intelligence community.
It doesn’t justify China’s actions, but note that the US is not much better, at least in terms of raw numbers. We have over two million people in prison:
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/incarceration-rates-by-r...
and many (most, I think) of them are forced to work:
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/prisonindex/prisonlabor.html
We are much smaller than China, so as a percentage, a much larger percentage of our population is forced labor.
You could argue that the people in these prisons are all convicted criminals, but enforcement and sentencing in the US varies widely by race, especially for non-violent drug offenses.
It is likely that approximately a million of the blacks and hispanics currently in the prison population would be free if they were white (either due to lax sentencing, or lack of police enforcement).
It shocks me that there’s no real discussion of this issue in the US. Ignoring the ethical issues, forced prison laborers are paid a tiny fraction of the minimum wage, stealing paid jobs from unskilled workers outside of the system.
Given the recent populist turn in national politics, I’d think that there would be bipartisan support for reforming the system, but for some reason there is not.
That is, by any resonable definition of the word "better", much better.
And this statement is just categorically false:
"It shocks me that there’s no real discussion of this issue in the US."
I can name five news segments or documentaries about the US prison systems role in structural racism on National television off the top of my head. Try pitching a segment about the CCP's human rights violations to Chinese television where you have full editorial control and you'll get laughed out of the room, at best.
There cannot be any comparison of people who are in jail for crimes, and people who are in jail simply for being a part of an ethnic group.
That the US system is not a perfect form of justice is a fair criticism, but it misses the most important point, and more importantly, the evidence for racial unfairness and not just disparity, isn't always as good as people think it is.
FYI the Chinese 'regular' judicial system is effectively completely corrupt and entirely politicized.
And not to diminish the horror of China's practice here, but I imagine they would call these slave factories "penal servitude"
*downvoters are disgusting. Google this. It’s a fact that it’s happening. This is what you’re defending: https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2019/sep/23/footage-...
Here is a prisoner being starved to death: https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/dt189h/picture_of... and was reported by FOX 11 L.A.
Also, that video may be showing conventional criminal prisoners. We don't know.
Just noticed you’re a relatively new account and all your comments are basically defending China’s genocide of Uighurs. Clearly you’ve got an agenda.
They also know that shipping semi skilled jobs overseas is hard and devastating to local communities, but again, they don't care. They promise they'll sell you things for cheap in the bargain.
If they don't care about the local communities, they're also not going to care about other communities.
'Conditions' for any group of Chinese working in Western factories have massively improved during that time, largely due to said 'factories', paradoxically.
'Trade and business' have pulled 100's of millions in China out of extreme poverty. We can argue about equality, but on the whole, things are getting significantly better.
The issue here is one of the people in concentration camps due to their ethnicity, and of forced labour. Which is altogether another level of oppression.
In other words, I don't think the following ever entered mr Knight's calculus when he first closed down factories in the US and opened them in China "What are these American workers going to do, how will our closures affect the communities and what is our responsibility to workers in China in terms of work conditions and bringing them out of CCP perpetuated poverty? I don't one bit. It was more like, how many more shoes will we make and sell and how will our profits improve?
Politicians didn’t used to become millionaires after they did their stint.
https://www.theonion.com/jeff-bezos-tables-latest-breakthrou...
Just to give the conceptual example of a relatively rich slave, a worker in a fully centrally planned communist/socialist state is a slave to the state, even though such a worker might have a clean/safe place to live and modern luxuries. They don't have the freedom to choose their job, negotiate wages, choose where they live, etc.
We can’t even vote with our wallet because everything is literally made there. Decades of compliance with this system. The comedy of it all is that got to actual slavery in these Uyghur camps.
Change isn't as fast as I'd like, but it is happening.
Coronavirus is a reckoning for our supply chain as well.
Wages have been massively improving, precisely because of said business operations.
'Buying stuff' from China doesn't make them poorer, it makes them richer.
Holding people in concentration camps is a different kind of activity.
I have no data to back this up other than I think they have giant factories that make stuff for a couple cents on the hour.
Also it is wholly incorrect to equate low wages with forced and unpaid labor.
Similarly, disregarding the whole concentration camp, torture, and murder as being a meaningless distinction is immoral.
And this probably means companies being more open about vendor relationships that they normally keep confidential? A label saying what country some product is from isn't enough.
I don't understand why BBC News and other Western media outlets are willing to parrot the phrases "education camps" and "vocational training centres". Are these not obviously innuendos invented by the Chinese government to conceal religious persecution? Why give any legitimacy to this?
China found the ultimate life hack: money. Who they can’t buy they will either try to kill or starve economically.
I'm German and I've spent a fair share of time studying the history of my country. What we see happening in China in the last few years is an uncanny repetition of what we saw happening in Nazi Germany.
- A highly sensitive and egomaniac person being elected as 'leader for life' - An extreme military build-up which we haven't seen since WWII - Persecution of minorities - Extreme state surveillance and control of public opinion - Growing hostility towards any foreigners / belief in own superiority
The only reason we are not at war yet is because of the economic interdependence in a globalised world. And that's exactly why the Chinese new primary goal is 'increased economic self-sufficiency and independence'.
It's also remarkable how the 'rest of the world' makes the same mistake that the rest of Europe did in the 30s. Not recognising the threat for what it is until it was almost too late (it's another argument if Nazi Germany ever had a realistic chance at winning the war).
You can criticise the orange man for many things but at least he put China on the map for what it is: The biggest threat to a free and democratic world that has existed in a long time. It should also be clear by now that our capitalist elite does not care about these values at all. They will happily make business with anyone that they can get away with (without being scrutinised publicly too much).
The earlier we collectively realise that China under Winnie-the-Pooh is a serious threat, the earlier we can adjust our global policy to hopefully prevent another disaster in human history.
This also starts at the individual-level by voting with our wallets and not buying from any Western companies that so happily throw away our values to earn a few more bucks.
As to why this is all parroted, it’s because the wealthy make money hand over fists from slavery in globalized industries and pour millions into manufacturing ideologies that justify this state of affairs. There are thousands of think tanks, academic careers, and media apparatchiks that work in service to that money and spend every waking hour constructing apologies for it.