How much do you really want an iPad?

As an example of organised hypocrisy, the Communist party of China beats all the world's religions. Article number 1 of the Chinese constitution states that China "is a socialist state under the people's democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants". Every word is a lie and yet in Britain you hardly ever come across criticism of Chinese communism, satires of its pretensions or demonstrations against its rule.

Consider the opportunities. For the right, China is a continuation of a system they have been fighting against since 1917, a communist tyranny with militaristic ambitions. To make matters worse, China is, in terms of the hundreds of millions affected, the most determined opponent of religious liberty on the planet. As conservatives have always been better than leftists at defending the freedom to worship, you might expect them to protest. But the overwhelming majority stay silent.

As for the left, go back to the sick joke of the Chinese constitution. The corrupt party hacks, who run the supposedly socialist state, allow domestic capitalists and foreign corporations to impose on workers the conditions that Engels and Zola railed against in the 19th century, while denying them the rudimentary protections offered by free trade unions, which even the Victorians could not bring themselves to suppress entirely.

The suicides at the vast Foxconn plant in Shenzhen ought to shake outsiders. They ought to make them wonder about the human cost to the 420,000 workers who make those nifty iPhones and iPads which so delight savvy westerners. Workers sleep in corporate dormitories, where an ever-shifting population of migrants makes it hard to form friendships, let alone relationships. The basic pay is $130 a month and overtime is essential. Most work 12 hours a day under the eyes of a fanatical management. One man killed himself after supervisors allegedly tore into him for losing a prototype iPhone.

Liu Zhiyi, who went into the plant undercover for a Chinese newspaper, said the lives of workers were mind-numbingly tedious. "As they make the world's finest gadgets," he said, "it seems that while they are controlling the machines, the machines also dominating them; the parts gradually come together as they move up the assembly line; at the same time, the workers' pure and only youth also disappears."

Liu Zhiyi emphasised, however, that there are worse places to work than Foxconn. So, too, do the activists at the China Labour Bulletin, which keeps the spirit of the Tiananmen Square protests alive from its Hong Kong offices. For millions of young people seeking to escape mass unemployment, a job in Shenzhen is not the worst option.

The employers who feature in the pages of the China Labour Bulletin do a little bit more than turn their workers into assembly line automatons. They set thugs on independent union reps. Since the start of the global recession, there have been ever more cases of employers, including "respected" European companies, cutting rates or just closing factories and running off without paying back wages.

Here we have the workshop of the world, which is also the sweatshop of the world, where even the practices of "good" employers would be unacceptable in the west. And yet the citizens of the world, particularly Europeans, do not care about the use of the one-party state to deliver a rigged market economy in which there is freedom for the rich and authoritarianism for the poor.

It is not as if there is a strong China lobby in the west. If you write anything critical about, say, Castro's Cuba or the increasingly authoritarian conditions in Chávez's Venezuela in a leftwing paper, admirers of dictatorship will try to shout you down. If you criticise Saudi Arabia in a rightwing paper, Arabist diplomats and the friends of arms dealers will say you do not understand the virtues of the "stability" the Saudi royal family brings. The Chinese dictatorship has no ideological lobby behind it beyond a couple of bereft old communists, who transferred their loyalties from the Soviet Union to China after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

For all that, I cannot imagine Stephen Fry stopping his drooling over the iPad – "Just to see this is fantastic!" he burbled as crowds gathered for its launch at the Apple headquarters in London – and showing some common decency by expressing a little concern for Apple's workers. More to the point, I am not sure that anyone would listen to him if he did. China is too big, too powerful, too impervious to criticism for Europeans to think about. The scale of the Shenzhen plant is beyond our imagination. A boycott of Foxconn's products would not just mean boycotting Apple, but Nintendo, Nokia, Sony, HP and Dell too. Boycott China and you boycott the computer age, which, despite the crash, effectively means boycotting the 21st century, as we so far understand it.

True, since 2008, everyone realises that the reserve army of labour in China pumped up the bubble of globalisation by flooding the world with cheap goods. Although China's entry into the global market kept working-and middle-class wages in the rich world down, it also kept interest rates low.

Although we can now see the disastrous consequences of the asset price inflation in everything from sub-prime mortgages to villas on the Costa del Sol that followed, no one is yet thinking about how to rebalance world trade. We are still dependent on Chinese products and cannot imagine a future where they would matter less to us.

Nor is communist rule quite bad enough to stir the sluggish conscience of the west. Journalists can print exposés, as Liu Zhiyi showed. Strikes and demonstrations are not always repressed. Owen Tudor, head of international relations at the TUC, told me that as the recession took hold the state ordered its tame official trade unions to be a little more robust "and like good communists, when they were told to be independent, they obeyed orders".

Like good consumers, we obey too. Not that we should. It would be heartening if people could shake themselves and say that the iPad is just another computer, which we do not need and will not buy unless Apple persuades its suppliers to improve workers' conditions. Until we do, the hypocrisy of the Chinese communists is our hypocrisy as well.

Nick Cohen @'The Guardian'