
China Uighurs 'moved into factory forced labour' for foreign brands - echelon
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51697800
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dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22457389](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22457389)

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lgleason
Really unpopular opinion ahead (in progressive tech circles)...

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.

~~~
bassman9000
Thosd sound like regressive circles

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jariel
More data here [1] I'd encourage having a look.

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.

[1] [https://www.aspi.org.au/report/uyghurs-
sale](https://www.aspi.org.au/report/uyghurs-sale)

~~~
hedora
Your link is an extremely thorough investigation into prison labor in China.
Thanks for sharing it.

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...](https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/incarceration-rates-by-race-
ethnicity-and-gender-in-the-u-s.html)

and many (most, I think) of them are forced to work:

[https://www.prisonpolicy.org/prisonindex/prisonlabor.html](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.

~~~
pimmen
The justice system in the US is not perfect but the people who are in US
prisons had access to defense attorneys, hearings about bail, trials where the
prosecution had to publicly present evidence and testimonies to explain why
the defendant should go to jail ("they are a muslim" is _not_ enough), and
also a process for appeal. And International observers are allowed to
thoroughly investigate US prisons, and when they publish scathing criticism of
the US prison system it's not cracked down by jailing the reporters or
diplomatic pressure.

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.

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TomMckenny
Unfortunately, the cheapest legal product will dominate almost any market.
Slave made products are de-facto legal on the world market so the market takes
advantage of that.

And not to diminish the horror of China's practice here, but I imagine they
would call these slave factories "penal servitude"

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chisleu
I guess China is trying to solve supply chain problems. Hope bad will it have
to get for the spaces in China before they decide to go to war rather than pay
back the debt owed?

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diogenescynic
Everyone should be boycotting China if they can. This is disgusting. The
pictures I’ve seen coming out of the Uighur concentration camps show people
being starved to death and are startlingly close to images from the Holocaust.

*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-...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2019/sep/23/footage-blindfolded-shackled-prisoners-china-video)

Here is a prisoner being starved to death:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/dt189h/picture_of...](https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/dt189h/picture_of_a_political_prisoner_in_one_of_chinas/)
and was reported by FOX 11 L.A.

~~~
lopmotr
A photo can't show people being starved to death. The video you linked to
doesn't even show obviously starved people. Why do people feel the need to
make up false information instead of letting the facts speak for themselves?
Are you afraid somebody will go "oh, just slavery, that's OK, as long as it
doesn't look like the holocaust I don't mind."?

Also, that video may be showing conventional criminal prisoners. We don't
know.

~~~
diogenescynic
You’re disgusting if you think people are making this up. Just google “Uighurs
starving China” and there are plenty of pictures. They’re been all over social
media as well. Mainstream news is slow to pick it up because China is huge $$
and Uighurs are a minority people seem to not care about. Don’t accuse me of
lying just because you want to make excuses for cultural genocide.

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.

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typeformer
Our society should not be built on SLAVERY! It is the responsibility of these
brands to know their supply chains or we all pay the price.

~~~
runawaybottle
We’ve been accepting of slave labor for decades now. Your clothes and
electronics are built on virtual slave wages, for decades.

~~~
eloisius
"Slave wages" is hyperbole when compared to actual forced slave labor. I agree
that it's tragic that lack of opportunity allows for foreign enterprises to
pay extremely low wages, but it's a far cry from falsely imprisoning people
and forcing them to work.

~~~
runawaybottle
I tried to throw the word ‘virtual’ in there. This stuff can always be boiled
down to semantics. Anyway, possibly relevant Onion article on the semantics of
it:

[https://www.theonion.com/jeff-bezos-tables-latest-
breakthrou...](https://www.theonion.com/jeff-bezos-tables-latest-breakthrough-
cost-cutting-idea-1824144898)

~~~
eloisius
I know you threw in the word 'virtual,' but that's just a way to weasel out of
actually having said that we've been accustomed to slave wages for a long
time, while still trying to make an emotional equivocation between captive,
forced, slave labor, and paltry factory wages.

~~~
runawaybottle
Okay, so here is a question for you. What would virtual slave wages look like
if it actually existed in this world (I’ll operate on the supposed fact it
doesn’t exist)? And to follow up, what would a society reliant on that labor
be like?

~~~
Consultant32452
Not OP, but I just wanted to put in my $0.02 regarding the importance of
understanding that the enslavement spectrum is orthogonal to the poverty
spectrum. You can be a rich slave or a poor slave. Slavery is about freedom.
Freedom even to choose a slightly poorer subsistence life compared to a crappy
factory is still a freedom.

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.

~~~
runawaybottle
And I’ll add, to be poetic about it, we Westerners are slaves to this supply
chain. Of course, I can just choose not to buy that 10 dollar t-shirt from
H&M, but it’s mostly hard in our economy.

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.

~~~
echelon
We're fighting it now. With every new bit of leaked evidence about the plight
of the Uighurs, conversations are sparked. The electorate isn't happy about
the CCP.

Change isn't as fast as I'd like, but it is happening.

Coronavirus is a reckoning for our supply chain as well.

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SheinhardtWigCo
Isn't this essentially a repeat of the events that led to the Holocaust?

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?

~~~
asplake
A tad selective there? The headline for example includes the phrase “forced
labour”, and the descriptions of conditions are clear enough. I’d argue that
those innuendos are being called out for what they are.

~~~
lobotryas
True, but for some people (not me though lol) if the media is not dropping
bombs like “genocide” or “holocaust” then they are lying and enabling the CCP.

