Cotton, Forced Labour & The Uighur Crisis

A number of designers and brands have stopped sourcing material from Xinjiang, an autonomous region in Northwest China, due to the continued enslavement of the Uighur people in Chinese detention centres, which have been targeted by over 30 human rights activist groups.

The Chinese government has been expanding these detention camps in an effort to suppress the minority Muslim Uighur community in Xinjiang. According to western reports, at least one million Uighurs have been ‘interned’ since 2017 in more than 85 identified camps. The Chinese government have long denied the existence of camps, but after images emerged of construction, with watch towers and barbed wire fences, the government acknowledged the building of what they call ‘re-education centres’ for Uighurs. But members of the Muslim minority say that they were detained, interrogated, and beaten because of their religion.

There are around 11 million Uighurs in Xinjiang. Uighurs speak several dialects of two languages divided by territory – Standard Xinjiang and Standard Soviet. The former is heavily influenced by Mandarin Chinese, while the latter is spoken mostly in neighbouring Kazakhstan, once part of the former Soviet Union. Xinjiang has been under the control of China since it was annexed in 1949, but many Uighurs still identify their homeland by its previous name, East Turkestan. Their land sits on a designated ‘special economic zone’ due to its rich oil and mineral supplies, with Xinjiang being China’s largest producer of natural gas and a key part of the country’s Belt and Road Initiative.

China claims that the Uighurs hold extremist views that are a threat to national security. They point to attacks in 2013 and 2014, for which Uighur militants claimed responsibility. In 2017, the CCP passed a law prohibiting men from growing long beards and women from wearing veils, and dozens of mosques have also been demolished.

Now, following western sanctions on China and growing concerns over Uighur forced labour in Xinjiang, the CCP has blocked some of the biggest fashion retail platforms from operating in China, calling for a boycott of brands associated with the Better Cotton Initiative (BCI), a non-profit group promoting sustainable cotton production. One of its members, H&M, has all but disappeared from Chinese webspace, with Nike, Burberry, Adidas, and Converse also targeted, to name a few.

With this ongoing crisis in Xinjiang and the significant backlash it has received and continues to generate, the outsourcing and subsequent boycotting of materials sends a strong message about human rights and freedom when it comes to industry work. China’s swift and extreme response is only further evidence of this. Forced labour is not a new concept in the fashion industry, which has always been profit-motivated, but consumer complicity plays a significant role in its continuation. Although recent years have seen a growing demand for more sustainable fashion (see my recent article on Hermès’ mushroom alternative), modern slavery and exploitation is still largely unchallenged due to a lack of brand transparency. Consumers are on a budget, and brands capitalise off this knowledge when cutting costs even further, but it is worth questioning the value of a garment when the value of human lives are at stake. If you see a product that is very cheap and made, for instance, in China or India, I would question its integrity and how much the workers who made it were paid. Consumer awareness goes a long way in generating change, as these recent events only demonstrate.  

“Use your purse politically, and brands will fall when they produce through the eyes of exploitation.”