Free Republic

In China, we are seeing forced televised confessions, a mass surveillance state, the killing of Falun Gong practitioners for their organs, and what many are calling a genocide of the Uyghur people. 83 global brands, including major U.S. companies, are tied to Uyghur forced labor in China. Over in Hong Kong, 53 pro-democracy activists, lawmakers, and lawyers were arrested on Jan. 6 under the draconian national security law. Despite all this, the EU recently announced a major trade deal with China. American Thought Leaders interviews human rights activist and writer Benedict Rogers, founder of Hong Kong Watch and deputy...

Officially, it’s all part of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s campaign to eradicate absolute poverty in ethnic minority areas by teaching local people new skills to enable them to increase their incomes and improve their livelihoods. These so-called “vocational training programs”, made infamous by the Muslim Uighur camps run in western Xinjiang, have more recently been extended to Tibet. But it is evident from official Chinese declarations in Tibet and Xinjiang that it’s not only about educating “rural surplus workers” in ethnic minority areas Beijing perceives as “backward.” Official Chinese documents on “poverty alleviation” quoted extensively by the non-partisan, Washington-based Jamestown...

Wristbands sold to raise money for a campaign against world poverty are made in Chinese sweatshops in "slave labour" conditions, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal. Worthy cause: hundreds of thousands of the £1 wristbands have been sold in Britain The "shocking" conditions are disclosed in confidential "ethical audits" of factories that make the ultra-fashionable white wristbands for the Make Poverty History campaign, started by a coalition of more than 400 charities. Bob Geldof, who last week confirmed a follow-up to the 1985 Live Aid concert - to coincide with the G8 summit in July - called for action when this...

German media giant Bertelsmann has admitted it lied about its Nazi past and that it made big profits during Adolf Hitler's reign in Germany using Jewish slave labour. A commission set up by the firm found Bertelsmann rode the rise of the Nazi party to restructure itself from a religious and school book publisher to supply millions of anti-Semitic texts. "Bertelsmann published a variety of papers and books that clearly had anti-Jewish bias," Independent Historical Commission (IHC) Chairman Saul Friedlaender, an Israeli historian, told a news conference. The IHC found Bertelsmann had targeted the youth market with its "Exciting Stories"...