Boycotting China is definitely possible, simply stop buying their goods. Vote with your wallet! If enough people do this then it will definitely have an impact, possibly even enough to bring about some real change.
I personally blame corporations and governments in Europe and the USA for the issues with China. They put money above everything.
How would you even know which products have raw materials that come from China? You will be hard pressed to find something that doesn’t have parts made in China, and even harder pressed to be able to figure that out.
Is it possible though? I’m really not so sure.
You can also support political action that takes concrete steps against China for these atrocities, rather than supporting them. There are real differences in political stances here.
You don't need to feel utterly powerless because you can't solve the problem 100%. That's always true anyhow, but especially true of something of this magnitude. It's OK; literally nobody expects that. You can take what steps you can. You are being joined by many other people.
I often think about it that way; if I'm moved enough to action because of this particular belief, then the odds are pretty good that many other people are as well. It is the actions of that group that will matter. If that group all individually concludes that their individual actions are meaningless, then the whole group will do nothing. So I choose not to act on the belief that my individual actions are meaningless.
(Essentially an argument based on superrationality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superrationality It is obviously false that the rest of the world is entirely superrational... but it is also false that they are 0% superrational. Often too much time is spent on the irrationality of human beings... a lot of people seem to have a model of them in which they are insane crazies who never make a sane decision, but if you take that model seriously everyone covered by it would just die. Humans are often quite rational. They just really, deeply suck at explaining why they are doing what they are doing, but the actual actions are often quite rational when understood in the correct context.)
Cancel culture can hit non-famous/significant people as you describe. To me it's all about shutting down debate, and reducing free-speech.
You'd find out that 90% of "their goods" are what you consider yours and other third party goods... Even BMW's are largely made there from what I've read.
"cancel culture" here is both powerful and dangerous enough to bring down Western civilization, yet so laughably weak it cannot even pretend to solve real problems.
From Point #8
"by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak"
[0] http://interglacial.com/pub/text/Umberto_Eco_-_Eternal_Fasci... [1] https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/
Any strength misdirected is simultaneously “too strong” and “too weak”.
I've read that somewhere.
By the same "heuristic" anti-Trump talk is "political bullshit", because he is said to be simultanously a buffon/ineffectual loser and a very powerful insidious force.
But of course such heuristics are themselves usually selectively applied to opinions which those applying them already agree are "political bullshit".
There are a million tweets condemning China’s behavior... way more than the number of tweets targeting people who are ‘cancelled’
The difference is that tweets can effect a regular person’s life, and they are ‘cancelled’. China doesn’t care. A company will act to fire a single person who behaves badly because of consumer pressure; it doesn’t cost them much and is good PR. Stopping doing business with China is a lot costlier, so they don’t give in to the same consumer pressure that they would for an individual employee.
The different outcome doesn’t mean there is some hypocrisy amongst the people tweeting their support for ‘cancelling’ someone.
It just means that tweets aren’t that powerful for real change.