You've seriously broken the HN guidelines. Please read the rules and stick to them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

If you'd like more explanation, there is plenty at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26652363 and the links back from there.

> Cool, China just spent $1 on me or is it 10 cents. What’s the going rate?

With the current rampant nationalism in China - likely nothing. They created a self protecting system. Especially with introduction of the social credits.

The Biden administration levied sanctions on a couple CCP officials a few days ago.

It's very likely that economic sanctions will cause more harm to the Chinese than the harm done to the Uyghurs, and has a poor record of it's intended regime change. They are not a solution to a humanitarian crisis.

Economic sanctions should aim at the top of Chinese society. Magnitsky type sanctions on officials. Things like preventing every political official or wealthy businessman and their family from travel, going to western universities and all these things they are now used to (and which they wouldn’t be happy to lose).

>Economic sanctions should aim at the top of Chinese society. Magnitsky type sanctions on officials.

Though an improvement over blanket sanctions, I suspect the rich would use it as an excuse to squeeze more out of the poor.

Additionally, I doubt the widespread abandonment of due process will truly make the people more friendly towards the West. You'd be targeting potentially millions, and any borderline case is a PR disaster. Imagine something like "mailman for forty years loses savings due to US attack."

It's intention is not regime change. It's directly making slave labor unprofitable. Sure it's a whack-a-mole of sorts, but it at least makes things clear for everyone involved.

So usually Joe Rando does not care when he is shopping, but at least he can't and doesn't fund more labor camps indirectly.

>It's directly making slave labor unprofitable.

At the cost of making a billion non-slave laborers also unprofitable. Sure, removing that billion from the labor pool may help other workers, but that's a huge sacrifice.

> It's directly making slave labor unprofitable.

That only works if sanctions apply to slave labor, but not to comparable non-slave-labor. Sanctions based on geographic region ("Made in China"/"Made in Xinjiang") ethnicity ("Made by Uyghurs") or product category (cotton) can't achieve that, because they don't apply differential pressure that allows non-enslaving businesses to outcompete enslaving ones (and then hire former slaves as free workers), they affect both equally.

To make differential pressure work, the first step is knowing who you're dealing with, which means having dedicated inspection teams working their way down supply chains to record labor conditions on the ground. Once you do have that information, highly targeted sanctions can be used to force change.

Sorry, I wasn't detailed enough. Sanctions help other countries', so let's say the Vietnamese cotton producers.

> dedicated inspection teams

That would be a very welcome development in international labor/human rights.

Helping other countries may be a good thing (although the Vietnamese government's human rights record isn't that great) but it doesn't offer a way out to current victims of forced labor, who can't just move to another country to benefit from the improved conditions there. Do you think they'd just get released once exploiting them becomes unprofitable? That would put a bunch of angry unemployed people on the streets, so the security services are unlikely to be in favor. The most likely path forward would be gradually transferring them into regular work, which works best if such work is available, i.e. there's no blanket ban making everything equally unprofitable.

Usually sanctioned countries have quite a lot of room for domestic economic growth, most obstacles are internal inefficiencies (like human rights abuses, inefficient ideology based policies), and naturally since the sanctions are a direct result of some alleged problem, as the problem is getting addressed the sanctions can be too. Diplomacy never rests.