The US is in the process of barring imports of cotton and tomatoes from Xinjiang in westernmost China. Xinjaing has been in the news the last few years due to the rather brutal suppression of Uighur Muslim culture, as China tries to turn the Turkic Uighurs into good atheistic Han Chinese with all the tools that a high-tech police state has at its disposal.
Until now, the nearest analogy for this treatment comes from the American past, where native Americans (and First Nations Canadians) were stripped of their culture and forcibly Westernized and Christianized (Easternized and secularized in the Uighur's case); taking kids away from their parents and putting them in residential schools where they're de-nativized is a common thread.
However, the factoid that 20% of the cotton in the world comes from Xinjiang brings another of the less-savory parts of American history; the antebellum south, where slave labor was utilized to turn the plantations into a cotton-picking economic power at African slave's expense. The Xinjiang cotton is likewise "produced using forced labour" per the BBC piece.
A modest suggestion: call the ruling party Confederate rather than Communist and put the Stars and Bars on the cotton bales; it might have a following in certain US circles. They don't even have to change the acronym.
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