Or does it not apply when it inconvenience you?
Easy to say when you're bloviating on the internet. Hard to do in real life. I know, because I try.
I end up buying a good amount of vintage stuff to keep from supporting China. But there are a lot of things that aren't available at any price where I live that aren't made in China.
I went through this a couple of years ago looking for a toaster. The only non-Chinese option available where I live was $900.
This isn't possible to follow on the individual level, even if you wanted to. Those 'Made in America' labels on product boxes aren't even accurate either, the parts can be built in China but assembled here, and still have that american label attached.
Still, it is sometimes possible to find alternatives that put proportionally more work and production into products outside China. I try to buy these things when I can, even when inevitably the materials or components come from China. Better than all the dollars going there, I figure...
Google and Facebook get caught doing it constantly. Just this week a lawsuit against Google was given the green light for gathering data when they were not supposed to. And isn't Facebook currently trying to illegally merge WhatsApp and Facebook data? Didn't the last US president complain about the EU stepping in to protect their citizens about this? Don't pretend this is some "evil China" problem.
We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China's Surveillance State - Kai Strittmatter (Author)
https://bookshop.org/books/we-have-been-harmonized-life-in-c...
"China's new drive for repression is being underpinned by unpre-cedented advances in technology: facial and voice recognition, GPS tracking, supercomputer databases, intercepted cell phone conver-sations, the monitoring of app use, and millions of high-resolution security cameras make it nearly impossible for a Chinese citizen to hide anything from authorities. Commercial transactions, including food deliveries and online purchases, are fed into vast databases, along with everything from biometric information to social media activities to methods of birth control. Cameras (so advanced that they can locate a single person within a stadium crowd of 60,000) scan for faces and walking patterns to track each individual's movement."
What the U.S. was doing was bad. What China is doing is also bad. They can both be bad.
Is this enough for me to say "I Know China evil"?