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?
Yes, of course it is. And many in the Holocaust, like Anne Frank, died from disease outbreaks in camps.
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.
I don’t think western media outlets or western governments in general particularly care about human rights. We’ve given our citizens rights, at least in the US, because we can more or less shape and influence their opinions. Our government doesn’t have to use force. At the end of the day, capitalist interests are what matters. I know there are the Bill Gates of the world trying to make a difference, but let’s put aside the notion that our foreign policy is shaped by human rights or where another country is a democracy.
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.
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.
Because they want to keep getting Chinese money. It’s that simple. Same reason the NBA will work to expand in China despite the outcry of Western fans lol
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.
I find it amusing how so many apple fans pretend to be so progressive but are super silent while tim cook pals around with trump and use forced labor in china to make their products.
I don't think Apple is as much of hippie type brand as it used to be, it is very commercial and mainstream. Those opinions are pretty much main stream opinions.
"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.
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:
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I’d argue that the ability to go from one paradigm to the next indicates a scalable pattern. So for example, a country with real human rights and labor laws wouldn’t shift into this paradigm until it went through all the steps. China is one step removed from slave labor.
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.
Slave wages? How do you figure? Are you comparing eg Foxconn wages to wages of Western workers in Western factories? If so then that’s a ridiculous comparison to make because COL and culture are so different.
They've known the conditions of workers for decades. Back home they'll talk about fairness and justice and progressive causes not so much because that is what they believe in (if they did their sourcing would be different) but because this is what their consumers want to _hear_. That's the only reason.
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.
I think to them it's a spectrum; the seas are wide and the consumer is far away. Do you think Nike and so on will balk? Is it a bridge too far?
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?
Do you only care about economic injustice when its perpetrated by companies led by left-leaning management, or do you apply that same scrutiny to right-leaning industries and companies as well? What are your thoughts on the Coal industry and the prevalence of black lung in their workforce? Does that kind of stuff bother you?
All industries, including Auto, resource extraction, etc. I’m not a socialist or anti-capitalist but I think over the last 30 years people (parties) who historically have espoused support for the working class, only do it as a token symbol and don’t mean anything with their words. Everything is a political calculus with the objective to win and return favors. Bernie is the only one who is ideological (normally not a good thing) enough to mean it, but I’m afraid he’ll go too far and make things worse economically, if unchecked by congress.
Politicians didn’t used to become millionaires after they did their stint.
The brands are certainly in a better position to do it than consumers, but it still doesn't seem all that great to have every company doing it separately? There need to be international standards for supply chains.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My hunch is that this is just one of the many consequences of our filter bubble culture. It’s just so easy to see the horrible news and choose to focus on something else instead.
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.
We would need actual investigators to get this out into the media the exact same way the Abu Gharib scandal got exposed. That was something society handled swiftly. I don’t know, it seems like the Chinese people can barely fight for open Internet, so what hope does that society have.
Abu Ghraib was a perfect example of a scandal that blew up because someone found the pictures. Contrast that against the CIA torture report, which documented numerous cases of the CIA torturing suspected terrorists using techniques from water boarding to anal hydration.
One of the leaders of that program now runs the CIA, and no criminal charges were ever filed against the intelligence community.
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:
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 the US is not much better, at least in terms of raw numbers. We have over two million people in prison:"
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.
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.
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?
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"
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.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] threadI 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?
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/china/wages
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.
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.
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.
*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.
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
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.
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.
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.
And not to diminish the horror of China's practice here, but I imagine they would call these slave factories "penal servitude"
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."