DHARAMSHALA, December 23: With the jingle of the holiday season bells in the air and the much awaited Christmas weekend approaching, a group Tibetans in Minnesota, US have launched a campaign urging all holiday shoppers not to buy goods ‘Made in China’.
“We are educating consumers about what their money is supporting when they buy – Made in China,” said Tenzin Jigme, the president of the Minnesota Regional Tibetan Youth Congress while elaborating that many of the Chinese goods are made by prisoners and underpaid and underprivileged labourers.
Currently, there are thousands of political prisoners and prisoners of conscience in China, including Tibetan monks and nuns, journalists, lawyers, and rights activists. With no independent labour organisations in China, many of the labour activists, who have demanded better wages and accountability from the big companies, most of which are owned by Chinese Communist Party elites, have either disappeared or have been thrown in jail.
“More than any other force that could be brought to bear against China, the latent power of the free, informed and responsible consumer can pressure the world’s last surviving giant Communist dictatorship to allow the Tibetan nation and the Chinese people the freedom they have been long denied,” said the organisers of the campaign at its launch.
Organisers have vowed to take their ‘boycott’ message to the malls and streets of Minneapolis in the days leading up to Christmas. Many of the Christmas lights, decorations, toys, and other holiday presents on store shelves in the US and across the world come from China.
In a release, Regional Tibetan Youth Congress Minnesota and Students for a Free Tibet Minnesota, the two organises of the campaign said that the campaign was designed to “level economic pressure on the Chinese government to end its occupation of Tibet” and to remind the customers that that their ‘Made in China’ purchases are “helping to finance China’s military occupation of Tibet”.
“We have to inform people that when they spend their money on goods that are Made in China, they are indirectly supporting a communist government that threatens American jobs, economy and security. China has no regard for human rights and social justice either”.
