The data stealing thing is such a cope too, I would rather a chinese company "steal my data", what are they gonna do with it? Increase my insurance premiums? Use it to call the cops on me? Share it with other corpos to raise my plane ticket prices? Yeah, thought so, they can't do diddly.

As for the child labour, it's a known social problem, and they're trying to solve it. Legally, child labour was abolished way back when, you can't work unless you're over 16, but of course that won't stop some people from sending their kids to work, especially in rural areas. As per this paper an estimated 7% of children between 10 and 15 were working in 2010 (yes, some 14 years ago). I can only imagine the situation got better. I trust to cite it because the study is done by Chinese people at a Chinese University.

I think there's a difference between a country where child labour is on the books illegal, people do it out of desperate social conditions, and the government are trying to find a solution for it, including supporting studies to get the real numbers; contrasted with a country where child labour laws are rolled back, were never that stringent to begin with, and are pushed because of increasingly desperate social conditions, as a trap to almost guarantee generational poverty from then on out.

edit: To be precise and to the point, the "child labour for TEMU" angle is demonstrably false. That sounds like people imagine that children are ushered into the iphone assembly abattoir, ooh, spooky. But this is all subsistence smallholders sending their kids to take the cows to graze after school, or pull out weeds and re-dig watering trenches. Or families that have otherwise not enough working heads and pressure their kids to take up work early. Remember, by Chinese standards, a 14-year old stocking shelves is child labour and therefore illegal.

I don't like TEMU, I think it's a bit crap, and I can say that without having to rely on weird sinophobia, it's that easy.

It is ILLEGAL to employ children below age 16 in China. Child labor law has been protected by the Constitution of the PRC since 1991 (Decree No. 81 of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China: Regulations on Forbidding the Employment of Child Labour). Meanwhile, several US states have recently repealed child labor law, even allowing children to work until 11pm.

There have been cases of capitalists in China skirting the law and employed teenagers (younger than age 16), but once exposed, the government would impose heavy penalty for the violation.

However, it is a murkier territory when children help their parents running small businesses or doing farm work especially in the rural areas.

I hate to just automatically jump to "Every accusation a confession." but it's usually a good rule of thumb.

i don't know dick about shit about china but i know it's a developing (or at least was) nation of 1.4 billion people. Frankly, it would be shocking if there was zero instances of child labor in a country so vast

The minimum working age in the US (14) is lower than in China (16). I can't really speak to enforcement though.

Even if it does happen in China, a couple years ago (or maybe even just 2023, time is meaningless these days) this Hyundai plant in the southeast US was exposed for employing a lot of child labor. So for the US to accuse China of that is pure hypocrisy

Ah but you see, we outsource our child labor

this is something you can be really weasly with definitions about. i mean lets compare framings from western media: "China" uses child labor. technically true enough, there are child laborers somewhere in the country.

but when they catch children working at a meat packing plant in the US, do they call out the US? the US state it was in? even the parent companies? and take care to apply modifiers like "migrant" to the children, so the people the media has wired to disregard crimes against [out-group] can ignore it.

West was outright caught using Child slaves for chocolate

no no no those were Corrupt Developing Nations that did that. Nestlé pinky-promises they send an inspector to make sure the labor is done by adults. rhetorical shell games all the way down

You already know it's bullshit because of how it's framed. When some farm in the USA gets busted using child labour it is never generalised to "America uses child labour" or even "<state> uses child labour."

Of course there are children in China being allowed or forced to work illegally. Just like everywhere in the world. Because the rights of children are barely protected anywhere.

In the way that rural folk have their kids help out around, it's definitely true. I went to my cousin's husband's old family home in the boondocks in Hubei and they had their 12 year old cleaning and loading chicken eggs into cartons for sale at the market the next day. Or their other kid feeding said chickens (it's fucking wild, the chickens just hang around the bamboo forest in the mountains all day and flock back around feeding time). I mean this is technically using child labour for profit but, like, to the extent I've seen in the west, as well

Although this was like 12 years ago and the kids are no longer children and the family moved to an apartment complex in a slightly larger town nearby so.

In terms of within industry, I wouldn't be surprised if some companies continue to do it illegally after crackdowns in recent decades as well as increased automation making it unfeasible, but it would be a declining minority. It is against the constitution and the benefits of paying them less is outweighed by the consequences. Esp since Xi has been extremely hard on bribing low level officials to let that shit slide.

My guess is it must be happening to an extent considering the difficulty in enforcing labour codes in a country of 2bil people. But there’s no evidence of systemic use of child labour the way it used to occur in, say, Victorian England.

These days they won't even let kids do gold farming in MMOs.

0% true