Is Your Convenience Worth Financing Atrocities?
Is Your Convenience Worth Financing Atrocities?
Yesterday, the Uyghur Tribunal, an independent, investigative committee in the United Kingdom, released its final findings and judgement regarding allegations that the Chinese Communist Party has, “committed genocide, crimes against humanity and torture against Uyghur, Kazakh and other ethnic minority citizens in the north west region of China known as Xinjiang1”. The tribunal’s report corroborates enough claims of human rights violations that one can conclude, at the very least, that China has instituted a gulag system on par with, or in excess of, the worst years of Stalin’s reign. Here are just a few of the allegations that they affirmed:
Hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs – with some estimates well in excess of a million - have been detained by PRC authorities without any, or any remotely sufficient reason, and subjected to acts of unconscionable cruelty, depravity and inhumanity. Sometimes up to 50 have been detained in a cell of 22 square metres so that it was not possible for all to lie on concrete (or similar) floors, with buckets for toilets to be used in view of all in the cell, observed at every moment by CCTV.
Many of those detained have been tortured for no reason, by such methods as: pulling off fingernails; beating with sticks; detaining in ‘tiger chairs’ where feet and hands were locked in position for hours or days without break; confined in containers up to the neck in cold water; and detained in cages so small that standing or lying was impossible.
Detained women - and men - have been raped and subjected to extreme sexual violence. One young woman of twenty or twenty-one was gang raped by policemen in front of an audience of a hundred people all forced to watch.
At ‘classes’ in detention centres - detainees were forced to learn and sing songs in praise of the CCP and the PRC in the presence of guards at risk of 10 being dragged from the class and tortured to the point of screaming within hearing of those still in the class.
Religious, cultural, political and business leaders have been imprisoned, ‘disappeared’ and, in some cases, known to have been killed or died.
Detainees were forced to take medicines by mouth or by injection that affected reproductive functioning of women and possibly of men - or that had other undisclosed mind-affecting effects.
Pregnant women, in detention centres and outside, were forced to have abortions even at the very last stages of pregnancy. In the course of attempted abortions babies were sometimes born alive but then killed.
Children as young as a few months were separated from their families and placed in orphanages or state-run boarding schools. In some cases the parents of these children did not know if their children were alive or dead.
A systematic programme of birth control measures had been established forcing women to endure removal against their will of wombs and to undergo effective sterilization by means of IUDs that were only removeable by surgical means.
Think about this list every time you run to Target to buy cheap things made in who-knows-what province in China. Think about it when you decide the iPhone you bought two years ago is obsolete and should be upgraded2. When you go to any number of big-box stores to buy clothes made in China, ask yourself if they were made with Xinjiang cotton. Picture a woman made to pick that cotton, who suffered a forced hysterectomy, whose last child was taken from her by the state and whose husband is in a camp, crammed into a cell with so many people that they have to sleep in shifts. Picture him being pulled out of the cell to have his fingernails ripped out, because he did not sing the CCP propaganda songs with enough enthusiasm. Do you need a new Patagonia jacket that badly3?
We can effect change
What if a significant minority of Westerners decided to immediately stop buying any products made in China? What if we were not afraid to talk about what is happening in Xinjiang (pronounced Shin-jong), and told our family and friends about why we were boycotting all Chinese products? Could a grassroots consumer movement muster enough economic pressure to effect change? If you believed that consistently reading the underside of packaging and placing any items made in China back on the shelf might save a single, innocent life, would you not do it?
It is true that many genres of products are no longer made outside of China or are extremely limited in ethical options. In this case, buy used or refurbished items and keep money from going to the CCP - all corporations in China must be owned by a Chinese citizen, and nearly all large corporations are headed by party members4. Think about how far you would go to economically starve a government if they did these evil things to your family, then picture yourself as a surrogate for someone that lacks the freedom to take such a stand.
Here is a browser plugin to tell you where products are made. Here is an Android smartphone, made by Motorola in India. Here is a Nerf gun, that will arrive in time for Christmas, also made in India. Here is a Garmin smartwatch made in the country of Taiwan. Imagine what policy demands would be possible if even just a minority of Americans decided to no longer purchase anything from China, and encouraged their friends and family to do the same.
Daily Wire Apple CEO Signed Secret Agreement With China Promising To Help Them, Report Says https://www.dailywire.com/news/apple-ceo-signed-secret-agreement-with-china-promising-to-help-them-report-says
Reuters Brands urged to stop sourcing from China's Xinjiang over forced labour fears https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-garment-china-xinjiang-trfn-idUSKCN24O0DR
The Guardian How the state runs business in China https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/25/china-business-xi-jinping-communist-party-state-private-enterprise-huawei