Comment by thesmtsolver2
21 hours ago
BYD ranks at the bottom for human rights. But interestingly, BYD’s proponents seem to brush it away.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/10/human-rights-...
21 hours ago
BYD ranks at the bottom for human rights. But interestingly, BYD’s proponents seem to brush it away.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/10/human-rights-...
> BYD's 2023 Corporate Social Responsibility Report initially lacked a human rights policy. However, the company later published a 2024 Human Rights Policy Statement.[67] This new policy also shows enhanced commitment to supply chain due diligence, including recognition of OECD Guidelines. Despite these improvements, the policy lacks details on battery material sourcing.
> BYD’s policies do not address gender-responsive due diligence. BYD states that it engages with stakeholders. However, it does not provide policies for engaging with communities affected by the battery supply chain or incorporating their views into decision-making processes. There is no reference to Indigenous Peoples or their rights in BYD’s reports.[68]
https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/ACT30/8544/2024/en/
I don't at all disagree with the importance of these topics and I'm glad to see them addressed but this entire metric seems to be based on specific language/terminology in a company's public commitments. And this terminology seems to be biased towards a western audience. For example, the United States (a settler-colonial nation) is ofc going to have more discourse around the rights of indigenous people. Whereas the term "indigenous" isn't used very much at all in China.
I also feel like you've buried the lead here. Yes BYD ranks the lowest of the 13 brands they looked at but not by much and they also explicitly state that ALL of the brands they looked at failed to meet their minimum baselines. The report is more of a critique of the industry as a whole than any individual actor
> BYD’s proponents seem to brush it away
At the end of the day, you aren’t going to convince consumers in Southeast Asia, South America or Africa to buy more-expensive American or European cars on account of human rights. Not while they’re middle-income economies.
That report is basically made up. Why would non western companies be “transparent” with western organizations? A lot of it is self reports. This is like looking at the freedom indexes and concluding that in the US women have the freedom to walk safely at night in cities because it ranks high on western freedom orgs but not in actually safe places like China.
You can pretty much replace BYD with any Chinese company (and to some extent, almost any company in the world) and the sentence would still make sense.
So I have mostly lost interest in the argument. Not that it is an incorrect or irrelevant argument, but none of that has really mattered.
This is the standard “nothing can be done and everyone does it” argument when shown that BYD is literally at the bottom of the pile.
A western org says out-group companies are at the bottom of the list of a report that is self reports and “transparency” aka trusting the companies words. Obviously their in-group companies will rank higher. That’s the entire purpose of the report.
Presumably you can't make the statement that almost all companies are below average on human rights. Mathematically at least half have to be above average.
Presumably most people also wouldn’t be particularly concerned with what the average is. If all companies have human rights records ranging from bad to terrible, surely it’s no compliment to be above average.
3 replies →
That’d be the median, not the average.
5 replies →
> and to some extent, almost any company in the world
This is weak sauce.
Claiming western companies are better because a western org said so based on self reports and western reporting is also weak sauce. “We investigated ourselves and found we are fine and our out-group isn’t”
1 reply →
This. Most of the Chinese products met the definition of dumping. They over produce with suppressed wages, currency exchange rate, and government subsidies. The current generations of Chinese workers do not benefit from this. To clarify, they have top products, some are well paid. But the general trend is dumping.
I am curious when will other countries would actually start of defend their industries properly.
Industry talking points, meant to convince you to subsidize them.
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Shouldn't we be writing thank-you notes to the Chinese tax payers who so graciously subsidies cheap cars for us?
I agree that Chinese workers and tax payers are hurt. But why do we need to 'defend' anything from their generosity?
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> They over produce with suppressed wages, currency exchange rate, and government subsidies
I mean, so does Germany.
Technically, the USA only has the massive subsidies part since the IRA came to be but they also have tariffs so, not doing too bad distortion-wise.
At this point in time, pretty much everyone is already defending their industries. China is just playing its cards better than the others and with a head start when it comes to EV.
8 replies →
Are BYD proponents allowed to say that this doesn’t matter much to them, or are they expected to measure themselves by your political views because they are the only correct ones?
Shouldn’t human rights factor into consumers choices?
I don’t think anything in particular “should” factor into everybody’s choices. Some are sensitive to price, some are sensitive to design, others to autonomy, others to speed, and then, yes, some will buy depending on human rights records.
Never ever I saw people in real life making purchasing decision based on "human rights"
Hello. I'm one. AMA.
What phone do you use? If not a Fairphone, why not?
2 replies →
Actually, credible ESG ratings like thee ones from Sustainalytics or MSCI show BYD scoring above average for human rights governance in the automotive sector, not at the bottom
More importantly, this highlights a pattern of selective scrutiny:
- When Western companies (like Tesla) source batteries from the same regions (or use batteries from BYD or CATL), human rights concerns rarely drive mainstream criticism or policy actions
- When industries dominated by Western monopolies (eg: Big Tech's app stores or cloud services) face human rights allegations (like labor abuses in global supply chains or censorship complicity)= the backlash is often muted or just silenced
- But when a non Western competitor like BYD gains traction, human rights rhetoric suddenly intensifies, even without evidence matching the severity of claims against established Western companies
It's geopolitically convenient criticism, FUD against what threatens a western monopolistic ecosystem
>But interestingly, BYD’s proponents seem to brush it away.
This feels like a rather lazy strawman to debate against. Not sure there's anything interesting about it.
Why focus on BYD, China as a whole is effectively a totalitarian state that locks up millions because of their ethnicity and disappears or executes people who disagree with the government. They are also territoriality aggressive and routinely use trade as a weapon to pushing states that stand up to it.
Buying anything from China is supporting that regime.
I could make a good case for the United States fitting that description, especially the bits about trade and agression.
The US is complex antihero type.
While it definitely attacks threats and has perpetrated plenty of unjust deeds, it also is responsible for the food security of much of the world. It has lifted more people out of poverty than any other party. It has brought poor nations to the point of industrialization.
The US has been a far greater force for good in the world than evil.
The leadership changes frequently, so it's hard to point to any single responsible party. It's democratic, so its institutions are subject to scrutiny. The free press sheds light on corruption and rule breaking.
Despite changing immigration narratives, the US has been an early and strong proponent of multiculturalism and welcoming people.
With declining US hegemony, the world is likely to become a much more dangerous place. We'll see more economic strife, more war, higher costs, greater tensions.
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No, you could make a weak case for the US doing that by using vague definitions and a lot of handwaving.
The Chinese government does this a lot.
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The inevitable whataboutism.
Firstly it's not relevant to a discussion about China's behavior.
Yes the US under Trump has become increasingly authoritarian, but besides being not as oppressive as China, the US remains a democracy and there is a chance to vote bad people out of the White House and more importantly reverse the direction of the country.
Your description of China as authoritarian and repressive is largely accurate, but the conclusion you draw from it is far too binary and ignores major parts of reality on both sides.
China’s system has produced outcomes the US cannot come close to matching. In a few decades it lifted hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty. It built nationwide high speed rail, dense urban transit, modern housing, and large scale infrastructure at a speed the US has not achieved since the mid 20th century. Many Chinese cities are cleaner, more connected, and more functional than American ones. Long term planning, industrial policy, and state coordination have delivered tangible improvements in daily life for a huge share of the population. Those are not propaganda achievements. They are measurable.
China’s downsides are also real. Political dissent is not protected. Surveillance is pervasive. Ethnic repression, especially in Xinjiang, is severe. There is no internal mechanism to safely challenge the regime when it abuses power. Prosperity is conditional on alignment. When the state decides someone or some group is a problem, there is no lawful way to resist.
Now look honestly at the US. The US has political freedoms China does not. Speech, courts, elections, civil society, and the ability to oppose the state without being erased are real advantages. That matters enormously. But the US also has a long record of extreme violence and moral failure. It slaughtered millions abroad in wars like Vietnam and Iraq, often based on lies. It overthrew governments, backed death squads, enforced sanctions that killed civilians, and built a mass incarceration system that destroyed entire communities. At home, it tolerates deep inequality, decaying infrastructure, and political paralysis. It cannot build basic transit or housing at scale, and millions live worse materially than citizens of far poorer countries.
So if the standard is “this regime has blood on its hands,” then the US fails that test as well. If the standard is “this regime produces good outcomes for its people,” China clearly succeeds in ways the US does not. If the standard is “this regime allows its citizens to challenge power and correct abuse,” the US is better.
That is the real comparison. Different systems optimize for different things and fail in different ways. One is not a moral fairy tale and the other is not a cartoon villain.
That’s why “buying anything from China is supporting evil” is not a serious ethical framework. Global trade does not map cleanly onto endorsement, and the same logic would implicate participation in much of the modern world, including the US led order that produced enormous suffering of its own. A coherent position is to argue for strategic decoupling or limits on state coupled firms. A black and white call for regime destruction or moral purity ignores both China’s real achievements and the US’s very real crimes.
Once you include the full ledger, the issue is not good versus evil. It’s tradeoffs between flawed systems, not a simple moral referendum.
It’s also worth noting that these are largely macroscopic, state level critiques. For most people living ordinary lives in China, many of these issues are not directly salient day to day, just as most Americans do not experience US foreign policy atrocities, coups, or wars as part of their daily existence. People judge their country primarily by stability, opportunity, safety, and whether life is improving, not by a moral audit of state behavior. Viewing China solely through its worst actions is no more complete than viewing the US solely through Vietnam, Iraq, or mass incarceration. Both perspectives flatten lived reality into ideology, and both miss why citizens of each country can hold nuanced, even positive, views of systems that are clearly flawed.
You really owe it to yourself to visit (or if possible live in) China for a while to see this other perspective.
Good argument, it really gives context.
Also it's worth noting throughout history, the incumbent world power will have clashes with the up and coming power to the throne. A lot of propaganda will be dispensed from both sides. Be critical of such information lest you become a useful idiot.
You missed the part where we chose to move all of our industries to China to save money, exploitation was always part of the plan, it's just that people who came up with that genius plan didn't account for the fact that China would develop and want a part of the cake too
Change BYD with Tesla, China with US and say for an European or anybody all above is still perfectly true.
No wonder you are called nutjob as every single thing you wrote can be said about today's USA.
Hello Greenland. Hello tariffs. Hello humongous incarceration rate of millions of people, particularly of one ethnicity.
Anything that is not Elon Musk is considered to be good
"But Tesla bad so BYD is a necessary evil" seems to be a common sentiment.
The European Union can't fight everyone at once - we need partners, hence trying to mend fences with MERCOSUR, toning down the struggle for human rights in China and tolerating India's authoritarian drift. For now the utmost priorities are defeating Russia and achieving actual strategic autonomy by decoupling from the traitorous USA. So yes, better BYD than Tesla.
Seems like there's an attitude of "If letting BYD sell in Eurozone hurts Tesla, it's good" because people hate Elon so much. However I think the loser from that is going to be all the European legacy automakers who will have to try and chase the high end market to survive.
"decoupling from the traitorous USA"
wow, seems like US must pull from the NATO fast
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As a European (but from Norway, so not entirely beholden to the unelected EU overlords) how in the _world_ do you get to the mindset that the _USA_ are traitorous!? How does this happen? Is it spending so much time online on social media in bubbles where you get convinced of drivel like this?
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Like many sibling comments, many companies are on a range that is on the bad side. There is a part of EV supply chain that is particularly bad and that is for all companies.
But what about the environmental costs that are being externalized? EV car production is likely worse or equal to ICE car production at each step. And the only arg seems to be that some day all EVs will be powered by solar/clean energy somehow.
> EV car production is likely worse or equal to ICE car production at each step
Does anyone feel otherwise? Is the net carbon and environmental footprint really lower over the entire lifecycle per car for an EV? Not today
You're severely misinformed if you think the cradle-to-grave footprint of BEVs is higher than ICEs today. Feel free to pick the study of your choice. They're pretty unanimous at this point and the comparison isn't particularly close. Here's a particularly comprehensive study from Argonne:
https://greet.anl.gov/publication-c2g_lca_us_ldv