When I was in China, I saw lots of homeless people behind train stations. That was a long time ago.

In China, impoverished farmers line up for kilometers to be sent through a very, very long factory corridor. When there are enough workers to fill all the positions, the door is shut and the people left in line have to come back tomorrow. That was also a long time ago.

This sort of thing is nothing new in China. China's economy is juiced by actual slave labor, often in the form of political prisoners picking and processing cotton and textiles. Other industries are also rife with slavery, like brickworks. When China couldn't turn a blind eye to this any longer, they simply moved operations to places like Myanmar to import the slave-made bricks from there. This reduces the cost of manufactured goods to where it's impossible to beat their prices in places that don't have some slavery contributing to the economy.

Low amounts of money can buy a lot in China and tight government control on the value of Chinese money has made the system sustainable. It lets China pay their workers very low subsistence wages, subject them to unsafe and unhealthy working conditions that would be illegal in the markets they sell to, and cause invironmental damage that would also be illegal if it were to happen where Chinese goods are sold abroad.

Slavery is unconstitutional in the United States of America. Decoupling from China would be very difficult and costly to the US economy. I believe a small tariff that gets a bit higher every year on Chinese goods until they can demonstrably remove slavery from their economic system is the morally correct thing to do.

When I was in China, I saw lots of homeless people behind train stations. That was a long time ago.