system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
As a free market economist is there anything that can be done regarding discipline/restrictions against China for how they are treating Turkic Muslims?

I feel like I’ve answered my own question by putting “free market” and “restrictions” in the same sentence, but from an economic perspective only is there something that can be done that would incentivize China to stop?

Mods I’m sorry if this comes across political.
gpt
Controversial political opinion aside, this is essentially a game theory problem. You can sort of break it down into several games, but the key is to assess the payoff dynamics from the Chinese side. This would stand even if you were trying to discipline the Americans for how they treated Iraq/Afghanistan or anything else really. There are many many strategies and it can be a real rabbit hole, but here's a teaser.

The first to consider is the basic static two-player payoff matrix. Let's assume you have China on one hand, and the West on the other. China can continue (C) or stop (S), the West can punish (P) or do nothing (N). 

We have four possible payoffs expressed as China/West in arbitrary units, C-N gives +5/0, C-P gives +2/-2, S-N gives 0/+2, S-P gives -3/-2. These ultimately reflect that China derives +5 political etc benefits from its actions, and the West incurs a -2 cost in order to deliver -3 damage to China's economy. In this situation, China's dominant strategy is obvious, as playing C is strictly preferable to playing S. Knowing this, the West should play N, as playing P results in -2 loss vs 0. 

The solution to this is to change the payoffs. But the way that many activists attempt is to place political pressure on the West, without significantly affecting China. We can show this by having a -5 political pressure payoff attached to the N decision, giving S-N (0/-3) and C-N (+5/-5). Note that this payoff only applies to politicians, and people are getting the payoff we depict above. This is relatively easy to do as American politicians are extremely insular as a result of the political system and can be quite easily swayed to prioritize any vote-winning issues. You now have P as the dominant strategy for the West, which might seem to have achieved the goal. However, this is a strategic failure since the dominant strategy for China knowing that P is dominant for the West is still C. In practice, all you've done is achieve C-P, which still results in China continuing. 

Consequently, the ideal solution would target Chinese payoffs. But that's prohibitively difficult given how resilient the political actors are to external influence. So we're back to targeting the West. One way is to do a repeated game using something called a trigger strategy. There are multiple trigger strategies, but let's talk about the grim trigger, which basically says that the West commits to playing N, but once China play S, the West will play P in every future period. We can also dramatically ramp up the punishment so that the West incurs -6 damage to inflict -8 damage to the Chinese economy when playing P. 

Grim trigger strategies have relatively complex solutions involving discounting future payoffs, but the messaging here is that given a sufficiently large punishment, China would find that playing C gets +5 in one period and -3 in every other period and would find that undesirable; so instead it prefers to play S from the beginning and get 0 in every period. The problem with this strategy is that a miscalculation results in the worst possible outcome where the payoffs are -3/-6 forever (grim triggers are commonly identified with Mutually Assured Destruction). This also means that such a strategy is inconsistent, in practice you can just flip in the next period, and since the West is now incentivised to just flip from P to N which gives a better payoff, getting back to C-N but only after inflicting serious damage to itself. Even if it promises not to do this, it is completely incentivised to. In fact, we have up to now treated the West as a single entity, when its really a gigantic group of individual countries, each with multiple parties, and hence multiple competing interests (which makes this more like a cartel game).

There are many other strategies, and the dynamics depend on the payoff numbers you use. The takeaway is that you can absolutely assess what politicians are doing based on how likely they are to be successful. Simply pushing politicians to attack and punish China is not helpful to the situation (though it might make you feel better) because it doesn't change the Chinese dominant strategy. Neither is threatening to forever sanction China because it's not a consistent strategy. The best way is still to change the payoffs for the Chinese side by either lowering the benefits of C or raising the benefits of S.