The prevalent argument that market forces and international trade would transform China into a democracy has by now been completely discredited. China’s human rights record has worsened with each passing year of expanding international trade and investment in China. Such increasingly negative accounts of China’s human rights record have become a regular feature of the annual US State Department report on human rights in the last few years.

Since the USA’s de-linking of trade and human rights and the implementation of similar self-serving but short-sighted policies by other developed nations, the few modest leverages there were in the past to restrain China have now been effectively relinquished. The United Nations has also been ineffectual in this regard and, in fact, generally behaves as if its sole duty towards China were not to give it any cause for offense.

The only remaining way for concerned citizens to exert some positive influence on China seems to be through the power of the individual consumer. In short, a boycott of Made in China products.

Tibet today

Increased international trade and investment in China have provided the Communist regime with the resources to escalate its massive population transfer of Chinese people to Tibet. It has also allowed the regime to expand its brutal and all-pervasive apparatus of control and repression in Tibet. In fact, Secret Police omniscience, mutual-surveillance, informing and repression in Tibet has now returned to a Maoist climate where school children are exhorted to inform on their parents. China’s increased prosperity has further allowed it to maintain and re-equip its vast army of occupation and its nuclear arsenal in Tibet.

Religious repression is as ferocious as ever, with the arrests and detention of many prominent lamas. Every monastery in Tibet now has military re-education teams that hold daily compulsory classes on atheism and on "opposing the Dalai clique’s splittist activities" and "loving the motherland." Official efforts to undermine Tibetan language, culture, beliefs and way of life is so widespread, systematic and unrelenting as to fully justify the Dalai Lama’s accusations of "cultural genocide".

World’s #1 Human Rights abuser

In China itself, even a partial review reveals the Communist regime to be the world’s number one human rights violator, with such major abuses as: commercial harvesting of transplant organs of executed prisoners; wholesale and indiscriminate application of the death penalty; sweeping and brutal repression of all religions; forced abortions and compulsory sterilization; denial of basic labour rights to Chinese workers and farmers; criminal psychiatric abuse of political prisoners; routine torture of prisoners; draconian repression in East Turkestan, maintenance of the world’s largest system of forced labour camps, and so on.

What we must do

All these crimes against humanity should be sufficient reason for any morally conscious person to act. We believe we must seek a course of action that is not merely symbolic or supplicatory but strikes at the heart of the problem in a direct, non-violent way. Hence we, the undersigned, pledge not to buy any products manufactured in the People's Republic of China and to join and actively participate in the BOYCOTT MADE IN CHINA CAMPAIGN.