“It’s time to boycott “Made in China’ Products”
China, ruled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since 1949, is New Zealand’s only potential enemy. Its authoritarian leader, Xi Jinping, is not only threatening other Pacific nations such as Taiwan and the Philippines with war but is also at war by other means with all Western democracies, including New Zealand.
Shortly after he came to power in 2013 Xi (now Fuhrer for life) launched a war against what he called the West’s “Seven Deadly Sins” in Document No. 9. These “sins” are, in fact, the very foundations on which our democracy and freedoms rest and for which our servicemen gave their lives in two world wars. According to Xi these “Deadly Sins” include: constitutional democracy (including the rule of law), universal values (freedom, democracy, human rights, etc.), a civil society, neo liberal economics (free enterprise), a free media, and teaching any history that is outside the CCP’s narrative.
The Chinese embassy in Wellington – and its various agents – spy on both students from China at New Zealand universities as well as New Zealanders, e.g. businessmen doing business with China and indeed anyone who expresses any criticism of its brutal government. In 2021 state-sponsored Chinese hackers made a cyber attack on the New Zealand parliamentary network just as they had done to the Australian parliament in 2019. These are not the actions of a friendly country.
China is seeking economic dominance of New Zealand in order to prise us away from our traditional friends and allies (Australia, Britain, U.S.A., Canada), these being the only countries that could protect our sovereignty and our rights from an aggressive bully – be it the Japanese Empire in the 1940s or China in the 2020s.
To build up its power so that it can intimidate other (and smaller) Pacific nations China is engaged in a programme of great military expansion, spending more on weaponry than all the other Asian countries combined. Why?
It is able to finance this massive military expenditure by its growing economy which is largely funded by trade with other countries, including New Zealand which so foolishly put its head in the jaws of this dragon in 2008 by means of the notorious China-New Zealand Free Trade deal. Every time that you buy a China made shirt at the Warehouse or a China made electric heater at Briscoes you are contributing to the strengthening of the economy – and the military – of the only country that can arguably be classified as a potential enemy of New Zealand’s.
Furthermore, you are also contributing to one of the worst slave labour systems on the planet. An important reason for China’s economic success is that millions of its people in detention (prison and labour camps) are forced to work like slaves in factories producing consumer goods for the West.
Take Dongguan prison for example in the booming factory area of Guangdong province. The reason why this area contains so many prisons is its proximity to the great export hubs of Shenzen and Guangzhou on the lower reaches of the Pearl River delta, reputedly the world’s largest export manufacturing centre. All the prisoners are required to work like unpaid slaves all day in the factories in which, in many cases, the senior prison officers have a financial interest.
The 15 factories in which the 5,400 inmates of Dongguan prison are forced to work are built around the prison complex – so interwoven is the prison system with the manufacturing sector. It certainly beats having to pay wages which, of course, is why so many China made products are so cheap. The prisoners have to march to work each morning, kicking their legs high and singing “We are happy to go to work to-day” – a song that dates back to the Mao era and which countless millions of prisoners have been forced to chant over the years. “A missed step or a false note will see the guards bring out their tasers and pepper spray,” wrote Angus Grigg and Lisa Murray in the Australian Financial Review.
If one does not produce the required daily quota with one’s over-worked hands, ritual beatings, torture and solitary confinement are meted out by the sadistic guards. “The [prison] boss is not just the director of a prison but the manager of a business”, explained the former “justice” minister, Zhang Fusen. Both guards and managers have their salaries tied directly to the output of the prisoners, hence the brutality towards anyone who might not reach the daily quota.
This prison system, with more than two million victims, is worse than slavery, and those politicians who promote trade with China and those businessmen who import all these things to New Zealand are contributing to one of the greatest crimes in history.
Westerners who buy Chinese goods are also collaborators in the crime of propping up the most murderous and oppressive regime on the planet. The bigwigs at Briscoes, the Warehouse, Walmart and other Chinese dependent retailers and importers would declare that their goods are not made by prison labour but, as the Sunday Star-Times reported on 30th June, 2013, “Such is the opacity and diversity of global supply chains to-day that establishing a clear link can be difficult”. Most of the companies importing Chinese goods don’t know where or how their products are made and they make no effort to find out for fear of learning the truth. So, those who buy Chinese made goods are not only aiding the rearmament of New Zealand’s only potential enemy but are also supporting a system of brutal slave labour.
Even when it is not prison labour the conditions of workers inside China’s factories are deplorable. In those factories that make iPads for Apple the workers toil for 15 hours a day, week in and week out, with no holidays apart from about five days over Chinese New Year. After each day’s long shift is completed they are taken to dormitories near their workplace to sleep. These dormitories, segregated for men and women, have no privacy. Children as young as twelve are employed on the work chains. The workers on the chain have to insert a particular electronic component, having only one to two seconds to do so. The repetitive nature of the work causes permanent injuries. Some have to use a dangerous chemical to clean the screen of each product. Wages are about $2 an hour, preventing them from affording accommodation outside the dormitories.
In May, 2010, seven workers committed suicide and so they put “anti-suicide” netting around the dormitory windows. But Apple made a profit of US$6 billion in the first quarter of 2011 and that was all that mattered.
A further reason not to support China by buying its goods or services is the murderous and oppressive nature of its gangster regime. Since 1949 the CCP have murdered more people than any other regime in history. It suppresses all the basic freedoms that Westerners take for granted such as freedom of speech, of association and of religion. Christian bishops and ministers are imprisoned, churches demolished and Christmas and Easter worshippers beaten up. The regime, based on the power of the gun, uses torture as a routine part of police investigation and oversees a system of child labour and environmental destruction without precedent in history.
It has brutally killed and suppressed the Tibetans and the Uighurs and is now threatening the peaceful democracy of Taiwan with invasion. One would have to be a morally debauched person even to contemplate buying anything that is made in that toxic country. Since no National or Labour government would ever have the courage, that patriotism or the human decency even to suggest that there is something wrong with making ourselves economically dependent on China it is up to each and every New Zealander – all five million of us – to do the deed ourselves by refusing to buy anything that is China made or has a China made component in it.
For further information on China’s increasing economic dominance of New Zealand, see In the Jaws of the Dragon: How China is Taking over New Zealand and Australia” by Ron Asher. Available from Tross Publishing.