Apple among 83 global brands using Uighur Muslim 'forced labour' in factories | Hacker News Reader

Apple among 83 global brands using Uighur Muslim 'forced labour' in factories

independent.co.uk

39 pointsideals12 comments

I'm surprised this isn't a bigger deal for people, more the essentially concentration camps.

Any ideas why that is?

I think it is a big deal but short of going to war what do you think will cause china to change their ways? sanctions don’t do much. stop buying from china? good luck with that.

Not buying from them is the plan, along with oil from anyone. Long term I see this happening, almost inevitable at this point.

All you have to do is shut down the shipping lanes and stop the import of energy. We could do that from 1000s of miles away, far out of the reach of their navy. Of course they could go nuclear...

The best strategy is continued and increasing isolation of a bad actor, it will take time but they know they are looking out, seeing trouble ahead, and realizing how dependent they are on the US for survival. The changing opinions here is worrying them.

At an individual level, China is very good at keeping things on the down-low, keeping out reporters, etc, so I don't think there's a lot of mainstream awareness of the problem.

At a nation-state level, the sad truth is that the west didn't enter World War 2 because of the concentration camps. Appeasement was tried right up until Hitler made it clear he didn't intend to stop his conquest after being handed Czechoslovakia on a silver platter. The upperclass was perfectly happy to let him continue doing whatever he wanted within his own country.

And China, at least for the foreseeable future, seems much more interested in economic domination than a land war, so it may never provoke true pushback. The U.S. is still pretty unhappy, of course, because it would mean directly supplanting us as the dominant economic power. But the rest of the first-world seems content to wait on the sidelines for a clear winner to emerge, and then to throw in with said winner.

I wish I could say humanity is better than this, but, I can't.

I expect China to lose to itself mainly from oppression and the friction that puts on meaningful progress. China has major problems it keeps kicking down the road. Here, we can at least talk about police brutality while there you go to jail or worse.

That's the thing: to be frank, China is "smart" with its use of oppression. It doesn't oppress most people unless they go outside the bounds it's set in place. Unlike the average totalitarian state, it provides most of the population a very clear "golden path" to avoiding all of that nastiness. There's a carrot, not just a stick. It uses brutality and oppression and censorship to push people into conformance, to saying what it wants them to say, to playing by its rules. And in exchange, it gives them a genuinely mostly-prosperous lifestyle. It isn't moral, but I do believe it's sustainable.

The story is different for the Uighurs, of course. They are oppressed by default. But they're also a minority, so as morally reprehensible as it is, they simply don't carry enough power to matter to the CPC. They can be kept in the shadows, abused, and the majority population either doesn't know or doesn't care.

Personally I think this may be the greatest human rights crisis of our time. But unfortunately, in this case, I don't think that will translate to an unsustainable society which eventually collapses.

Prison labour is a billion-dollar industry, with uncertain returns for inmates

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2017/03/16/prison-la...

Curious why Samsung and Sony were pulled out of the headline? Surely people aren’t convinced that Apple is the only corporation in the world with questionable things in their supply chain.

Yes - dang, this is clearly a misleading headline. Please can we have it updated?

Actually even the full headline is misleading. The impression is given that Apple, Sony, and Samsung directly used the forced labor rather than simply buying things from suppliers who did.

This doesn’t absolve them of responsibility for preventing this now that they know, but it isn’t what the headline says.

Using that logic a similarly valid headline would be "iPhone (and Samsung and Sony phone) owners using Uighur Muslim forced labour in factories", which while probably true, isn't that surprising.

Full report: https://www.aspi.org.au/report/uyghurs-sale

and full pdf https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/ad-aspi/2020-06/Uygh...

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