It doesn’t justify China’s actions, but note that the US is not much better, at least in terms of raw numbers. We have over two million people in prison:
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/incarceration-rates-by-r...
and many (most, I think) of them are forced to work:
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/prisonindex/prisonlabor.html
We are much smaller than China, so as a percentage, a much larger percentage of our population is forced labor.
You could argue that the people in these prisons are all convicted criminals, but enforcement and sentencing in the US varies widely by race, especially for non-violent drug offenses.
It is likely that approximately a million of the blacks and hispanics currently in the prison population would be free if they were white (either due to lax sentencing, or lack of police enforcement).
It shocks me that there’s no real discussion of this issue in the US. Ignoring the ethical issues, forced prison laborers are paid a tiny fraction of the minimum wage, stealing paid jobs from unskilled workers outside of the system.
Given the recent populist turn in national politics, I’d think that there would be bipartisan support for reforming the system, but for some reason there is not.