Sweatshops probably did exist at some point and maybe they still do in some places in China. At the cusp of liberalization/opening up the labour conditions were not good. Over the years as the country has prospered the labourers are doing better too. Example is the rise in wages over the years.

Chinese children making the stuff all Americans own

This is an exaggeration.

Pretty sure Taiwan does

There is this report.

It was posted on r/GenZedong and has been archived on lemmy in a masterpost of sources mostly on Xinjiang I think.

I think this post kinda emphasizes why I enjoy this platform so much. You ask a question out of genuine curiosity and people answer civilly. I feel like social media is generally toxic asf but on lemmygrad I feel like actual productive conversations happen. Maybe that’s corny asf but I hope this mentality continues.

https://dessalines.github.io/essays/socialism_faq.html#what-about-the-tiananmen-square-massacre

Skip to the part ‘Workers rights’

You’ll find lots of source materials (imo, not every source is as good, but most of them are)

Maybe some places objectively qualify as sweatshops in the late 90’s, not but for children. In fact I struggle to imagine how a factory employing children would even work in China. Any kids with parents alive are clearly not going to be made to go into industrial manual labor, so it has to be orphans. What company would go out of their way to employ and feed such problematic inefficient and illegal kids instead of just hiring normal people?

It’s like the plastic rice propaganda all over again. Sounds like a possible claim until you realize the claim is that businessmen are deciding to spend energy and time to increase costs to make less desirable products with less profit at additional legal if not personal risks for themselves, with nothing to gain other than qualifying as an evil person…

i think the term sweatshop is pretty relative. it basically means a western corporation demanding high prices for luxury goods but using developing country labour recruitment and practices, usually by “outsourcing”.

if you work in a bangladeshi sewery and your product ends up on the bangladeshi markets, the circumstances may resemble that of a sweatshop, but the exploitation is relative to the labour relationship rather than the difference in pricing.

China makes every little thing Muricans own, but not childern of course, that’s only in one island province…