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You are probably reading this article on a tablet, smartphone, or laptop computer. If so, your device could very well contain cobalt from the Democratic Republic of Congo, an impoverished yet mineral-rich nation in central Africa, that provides 60 percent of the world's cobalt. (The remaining 40 percent is sourced in smaller amounts from a number of other nations, including China, Canada, Russia, Australia and the Philippines.)
Cobalt is used to build rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, an integral part of the mobile technology that has become commonplace in recent years. Tech giants such as Apple and Samsung, as well as automakers like Tesla, GM, and BMW, which are starting to produce electric cars on a mass scale, have an insatiable appetite for cobalt. But unfortunately, this appetite comes at a high cost, both for humans and for the environment.
The Washington Post has an in-depth story, THE COBALT PIPELINE - Tracing the path from deadly hand-dug mines in Congo to consumers' phones and laptops. It summarizes the situation:
The Post traced this cobalt pipeline and, for the first time, showed how cobalt mined in these harsh conditions ends up in popular consumer products. It moves from small-scale Congolese mines to a single Chinese company — Congo DongFang International Mining, part of one of the world's biggest cobalt producers, Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt — that for years has supplied some of the world's largest battery makers. They, in turn, have produced the batteries found inside products such as Apple's iPhones — a finding that calls into question corporate assertions that they are capable of monitoring their supply chains for human rights abuses or child labor.
How much culpability do regular people have when they do not have a choice of the source of the components that go into their devices?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @02:16AM
Because of no reason other than the geography of the territory held by the two main factions, the Japanese invasion fell much harder on the Nationalists. The Communists were happy to let the Japanese wipe out their enemies for them, and the Japanese didn't much care who they were killing, so long as they were Chinese.
Let the world burn so you can rule the ashes? That was the Communists' strategy. And in the long run it seems to have worked out for them quite well.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Thursday October 27 2016, @10:01AM
And in the long run it seems to have worked out for them quite well.
For whom, exactly? Mao's remaining top associates were politically persecuted by his enemies after Mao's death. Mao's other top associates were eliminated by Mao during his lifetime in order for Mao not to have to share power. Millions of Chinese died basically by Mao's own hand because Mao intentionally starved them to death. Today, China has a dysfunctional one-party government routinely responsible for gross human rights violations and an economy propped up almost entirely by exports rather than domestic demand and by their one-child policy-created demographic dividend -- which is going to come back to bite them BIG TIME as their population ages. I know Slashdotters tend to think China is some sort of super-efficient authoritarian utopia, but it's not. It's a country with advantages and problems, and its political system is responsible for more of the problems than advantages.
Let the world burn so you can rule the ashes? That was the Communists' strategy.
No, it wasn't. The strategy of both sides was to cooperate, but they failed, stabbed each other in the back, and the result was that China fought less effectively than it otherwise may have been able to. The Communist Party of China wasn't able to magically predict in 1940 that the Allies would ultimately and decisively win World War 2, and, at the end of World War 2, Japan was still occupying a large portion of China, which, btw, the US instructed it to turn over to the Nationalists.
If the Axis had won the war, China would have been even more devastated by Japan than it already was. Perhaps there would have been no more Chinese; perhaps Japan would have administered its own Holocaust against them. Perhaps they would have all been enslaved for generations instead. Perhaps some Holocaust + enslavement combination. You're right that Japan didn't care about the Communists and the Nationalists, but, obviously, had the Nationalists been defeated by Japan, the Communists would have been next. The Communists themselves held very little territory at all at the time and were far inferior militarily to the Nationalists. Japan would have made short work of them.
China's only hope for survival was that the Allies won World War 2. Helping the Allies win World War 2 in every way possible, by fighting as effectively as possible in order to drain Japan's resources as much as possible, should have been the goal of every pretender to the government of China, and really anyone at all in China who cared at all about the future of the country, its civilization and culture, and its people. Because the two sides fought each other instead of uniting to together fight the dire and clear existential threat to China's survival, they were fuckwits.