China accused of forcing 570k people to pick cotton in Xinjiang
reuters.comHow come a link to REUTERS article, with the exact headline is flagged?
There 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.
This breaks the site guidelines egregiously. It's also a cartoonish fantasy of the sort that makes me cringe for this community. Please do not post any more of this dross.
But 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
So that raises the question: why not turn off flags on this story?
Because 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.
This is 100% true... and they often do the opposite too... Sometime if feels like they are censoring more then Twitter.
Or a few people with multiple accounts.
You need a bit of karma to flag, even more for your flag to count against high karma upvotes.
I think some accounts have higher flagging powers... like mini-mods
What if I told you you could be a communist and condemn the atrocities done in the name of communist government. Though calling Chinese government a communist is same as calling North Korea a democratic republic.
The 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..
One 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.
If 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.
So 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.
The West will pretend it didn't know anything until it sees videos of the mass graves.
Oh come on, it's another piece of Adrian Zenz disinformation
I 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.
I 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
He 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.
> 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.
These 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
If I didn't know better I would suspect they are being intentionally ironic.
A bit too on the nose tbh. It feels almost like a flex on the west.
Why has this article been [flagged]?
It's not particularly intellectually stimulating and likely to cause a flame war.
Why is this flagged? Didn't know the CCP had that many supported on HN.
My guess is that it challenges the capitalist status quo, which HN posters famously protect
I'm not sure that slavery "challenges the capitalist status quo"
Vaguely 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.
It's Uzbekistan not Turkmenistan, no?
Unless they are both at it.
It seems to be both.
I wouldn't be surprised if most of Turkmenistan's and Uzbekistan's cotton gets sold to China though!
Center for Global Policy said
For 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?
I 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.
Nothing will happen. The US/UK bloc wouldn't have done anything about the Nazi Holocaust if Germany hadn't started invading its neighbors.
Does that mean if they do, you’ll reject you axioms?
Certainly. Such a mighty act of unselfishness would have me celebrating in the street.
Thats not picked by machines ?
570.000 forced labourers just picking cotton certainly sounds a bit high ...
Even 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 ;)
Almost 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.
More Western propaganda.
legacy of Henry Kissinger.
We do need shirts?
A 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.
1. 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.