6 ms·
China accused of forcing 570k people to pick cotton in Xinjiang
- fennecfoxen 6y ago"Beijing’s message is unmistakable: You must choose. If you want to do business in China, it must be at the expense of American values. You will meticulously ignore the genocide of ethnic and religious minorities inside China’s borders; you must disregard that Beijing has reneged on its major promises—including the international treaty guaranteeing a “high degree of autonomy” for Hong Kong; and you must stop engaging with security-minded officials in your own capital unless it’s to lobby them on Beijing’s behalf." — Matt Pottinger, "Beijing Targets American Business", Wall Street Journal, 27 Mar 2021 (regarding the pushback in China against H&M's statement that they don't source this kind of cotton). https://archive.is/D4hgm https://archive.is/D4hgm
- DoofusOfDeath 6y agoI'm pretty uninformed on this topic. Can some explain why the parent comment would get downvoted?
- quantstats 6y agoBecause within minutes of being published this post is filled with people apparently okay with defending the Uighur genocide that the CCP is carrying out in Xinjiang. Really sad to see such blatant attempts here, I thought this community was better than that. Just to be clear: there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that these violations of human rights are being committed, anyone you see denying that is either ignorant or wilfully lying.
- snurfer 6y agoThat seems like a straw man argument.
- transtrain 6y agoThe left can't acknowledge that their ideology of socialism and communism they are desperate to implement in the western world, has a history of genocide. Awkward.
- hungryhobo 6y agoWell perhaps that's not really Beijing's narrative? But an attempt at creating a you are either with us it against us narrative? Same thing was used when us went to war with Iraq but look where we are.
- dang 6y agoNationalistic and ideological flamewar are not what this site is for, and people are routinely descending into near-madness about this. The comments are predictable, over the top, and unbelievably lame. Users who want to yell at each other and blare national/ideological rhetoric need to post elsewhere. Boilerplate talking points belong elsewhere also. This is becoming epidemic on HN. I think we are going to have to ask the community to get a lot more systematic about flagging comments that flout this site's rules and intended spirit—regardless of which side of the battle they're on. This is the point at which some angry zealot accuses us of being secret communist agents. Not at all—we're just trying to have an internet forum that isn't dominated by cartoonish ideological and nationalistic yelling. Grandiose rhetoric is not intellectually interesting, so this follows from what we're trying to optimize for: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
- arkitaip 6y agoThe West will pretend it didn't know anything until it sees videos of the mass graves.
- xin45 6y agoMost of the Liberal politicians in the US are in bed with China. Even Biden said it was just a 'cultural difference' Non-liberal media has been talking about this for at least a decade.
- r0p3 6y agoThe centers of both parties have agreed for decades on selling debt to the Chinese and buying goods made with poorly protected labor.
- transtrain 6y agoThis is the entire business model of Amazon, Walmart, etc etc. Every company on the fortune 500 basically.
- Causality1 6y agoNothing will happen. The US/UK bloc wouldn't have done anything about the Nazi Holocaust if Germany hadn't started invading its neighbors.
- alexnewman 6y agoDoes that mean if they do, you’ll reject you axioms?
- Causality1 6y agoCertainly. Such a mighty act of unselfishness would have me celebrating in the street.
- bluedays 6y agoIf I didn't know better I would suspect they are being intentionally ironic.
- d3nj4l 6y agoA bit too on the nose tbh. It feels almost like a flex on the west.
- 46ve18v 6y agoThats not picked by machines ?
- throwaway4good 6y ago570.000 forced labourers just picking cotton certainly sounds a bit high ...
- boruto 6y agoEven if one person picks up 100 kilo per day, that is more cotton per day than total produced by china in the whole year. I wont question the validity of the article because I may be called a CCP shill ;)
- dirtyid 6y agoAlmost all north XJ cotton is picked mechanically, around 70% of XJ output. Why? Because XJ gdp / labour cost increased so much that labour is increasingly uncompetitive. Hence 4000% increase in orders of John Deere cotton picking machines, followed by US sanctions on John Deere to make sure XJ relies on manual labour so US/Zenz can keep driving the slave labour narrative. The 30% in South XJ is still hand picked, much poorer and rural region where manual labour is feasible. BTW XJ cotton is heavily subsidized (transportation mainly), it's basically a jobs program (i.e. poverty alleviation). The idea that XPCC depends on slave labour for XJ cotton is stupid for the simple reason that it's much cheaper to not pick cotton at all. And even Zenz hitpiece does not find examples that these are anything but competitively paid positions relative to local wages, which is still significantly higher than bottom 40% in China, there are over 500M+ Han from other provinces willing to work for XJ south poverty alleviation wages. Completely unrelated is US and India are the other largest cotton producers, one of which as record of forced child labour for ~10 years.
- logotype 6y agoWarning: account affiliated with the CCP.
- newbie578 6y agoThe situation with China is going to be the greatest challenge of the 21st century.. Although, when I say China, I mean the CCP, it is unfortunate but most people today equate China with CCP. I really don't know what is the best solution, and what we as a western community can do to make changes. It seems to me that China won't change until it changes itself from the inside, if it will ever even happen..
- nradov 6y agoOne option is to dust off the Cold War playbook for how we dealt with the USSR. Set up alliances and trade sanctions to choke their economy. Bait then into arms races and proxy wars to drain their wealth. Conduct covert operations and propaganda to foster internal dissent. And then wait patiently for the CCP to destroy itself. But there's no guarantee that will actually work; we're in for a rough time.
- blue_box 6y agoIf the companies don’t stop buying cottons there, we can stop buying clothes from those companies. I always try to buy products from the companies that respect their workers and environment.
- dogma1138 6y agoSo you spend most of your life naked? Jokes a side you won’t find clothes that are ethical, nor many other products for that matter as someone somewhere is being awfully exploited.
- genera1 6y agoOh come on, it's another piece of Adrian Zenz disinformation
- hungryhobo 6y agoI think this is a pretty good overview of what the US is trying to achieve with all these Xinjiang narratives https://youtu.be/mH-0l_zToN4 https://youtu.be/mH-0l_zToN4
- FredFS456 6y agoI have some anti-china bias (personal background), but many times these Xinjiang articles only cite Zenz et al. I would really appreciate better investigative journalism on this front.
- _tik_ 6y agoI checked Adrian Zenz on wikipedia. Zenz is a born-again Christian, and has stated that he feels "led by God" in his research on Chinese minority groups. He wrote report on Tibetan forced labour too. Quite an interesting source of news by Reuters
- genera1 6y agoHe doesn't speak, read or write Chinese and has been caught manipulating, confabulating and straight up lying multiple times. He is a Christian fundamentalist, and has described other belief systems to Christianity as “ultimately inspired by Satan". He's also openly sexist and homophobic in unambiguously hateful ways. The article is over 3 months old and posted now for some reason.
- yorwba 6y ago> has been caught manipulating, confabulating and straight up lying multiple times. Can you point to one such instance? Because personally I think the articles Zenz writes are much more reasonable than articles other people write with reference to Zenz. Specifically, he thoroughly annotatates factual statements with links to sources (often official data provided by the Chinese government), and when he presents his own interpretation, it is clear that it's just his opinion. I happen to often disagree with his opinions, but never with the facts he's basing them on.
- dirtyid 6y ago1. Article from Dec 2020. 2. Center for Global Policy rebranded Newlines (funded by a private university with only 120 students that has thinktank and publishing arm), aka another front used to launder Zenz studies. 3. Basically rehash of Zenz Jamestown hit piece, the 500K was based off CCP press releases of rural transfer programs. Literally misconstruing official CCP media bragging about poverty alleviation into coerced labour which internet then misconstrues as unpaid slave labour. Actual piece itself doesn't have any credible evidence of forced labour other than Zenz thinks there's coersion because some folks got paid less than they were promised. 4. Same report / propaganda drive that started the XPCC sanctions in the first place, culminating to recent H&M drama.
- logotype 6y agoWarning: account affiliated with the CCP
- user101hk 6y agolegacy of Henry Kissinger.
- franklampard 6y agoCenter for Global Policy said
- noxer 6y agoThese people are doomed absolutely no one will help them in any way and although they are many they can never reach the critical mass to start a revolution. 570k isn't much in china. "And so the idea... I'm not going to speak out against what he's doing in Hong Kong, what he's doing with the Uyghurs in western mountains of China, and Taiwan, trying to end the One China policy by making it forceful, I said — by the way, he said he gets it. Culturally, there are different norms that each country and their leaders are expected to follow." - Supposedly the leader of the free world
- bloak 6y agoVaguely related, in that it involves harvesting cotton in Asia: Turkmenistan uses "forced labour" for the cotton harvest. As I understand it, they need a huge number of people for 2-3 months, so people get drafted in. From the point of view of human rights I suppose it's no worse than a compulsory military service. (Or am I missing something?) Nevertheless, many people would prefer not to buy that cotton or clothes made from it, and perhaps such products shouldn't be sold internationally at all.
- kingofpandora 6y agoIt's Uzbekistan not Turkmenistan, no? Unless they are both at it.
- thefounder 6y agoFor some reasons I thought more or less forced labor has always been part of the communist doctrine. You are suppossed to always have a job whether you like it or not. The Xjinjiang thing brings this to a new level but I'm not entirely surprised. When were the dissidents treated fairly in communist systems?
- emteycz 6y agoI don't know why you're downvoted, it's absolutely true, all communist countries considered not having a job to be a very serious crime punished with many years in prison. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitism_(social_offense) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitism_(social_offense)
- transtrain 6y agoAmazing that anybody would flirt with an insanity like communism. Trying political movements that always end in genocide isn't thinking, it's suicide. Every down vote is a progressive voting to murder his neighbor because he doesn't like his thoughts and ideas. Welcome to communism.
- cdmckay 6y agoA US-based think tank releases a report accusing a rival of genocide. I would be highly suspicious of this and look at it carefully. For example, it’s authored by Adrian Zenz, a religious zealot who feels “led by God” to research Chinese minority groups. If you dig into his research and his credentials, it’s all pretty flimsy. But, it fits the narrative the US would like to have about China, so everyone eats it up uncritically.
- ForHackernews 6y agoWhy has this article been [flagged]?
- TheAdamAndChe 6y agoIt's not particularly intellectually stimulating and likely to cause a flame war.
- snicksnak 6y agoHow come a link to REUTERS article, with the exact headline is flagged?
- baybal2 6y agoThere is only one way to flag an article here. For a lot of people to click flag. And given this happening 7:00 San Jose time, I doubt any of mods would be logging into their mod account first thing in the morning to manually flag it. Still telling. Tech industry has a lot of communists.
- leereeves 6y agoBut why is it still flagged 4 hours later? The HN mods can and do turn off user flags on important stories. Edit: why is this being downvoted? You've never seen dang turn off flags? He admits it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15510075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15510075 So that raises the question: why not turn off flags on this story?
- transtrain 6y agoThere are too many pink haired alphabet people. Everything they dont like is hate speech, triggering etc.
- Black101 6y agoThis is 100% true... and they often do the opposite too... Sometime if feels like they are censoring more then Twitter.
- dang 6y agoBecause these threads are dominated by cartoonish, angry yelling which contains zero intellectual curiosity and therefore is thoroughly off topic. The commenters inundating the threads on these topics are plainly posting out of nationalistic and ideological zeal. That's not what HN is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26630172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26630172
- 6y ago
- po1nter 6y agoWhy is this flagged? Didn't know the CCP had that many supported on HN.
- dencodev 6y agoMy guess is that it challenges the capitalist status quo, which HN posters famously protect
- CyberDildonics 6y agoI'm not sure that slavery "challenges the capitalist status quo"
- Black101 6y agoWe do need shirts?
- dazsnow 6y agoMore Western propaganda.