Worn: A People's History of Clothing
by
Sofi Thanhauser
Published 25 Jan 2022
* * * — In 2019 two Japanese brands, Muji and Uniqlo, came under fire for their ad campaign advertising the softness of the Xinjiang cotton in their flannel shirts. “What?! They’re actually using that as a slogan?!” fumed Sophie Richardson of Human Rights Watch. One Twitter user declared, “Many Uyghurs love and idolize Japan, but this is a betrayal.” The truth was, however, that Xinjiang cotton had spread so deeply in the global supply chain that there were few global brands that could have accurately claimed their clothes did not contain it. Xinjiang was by then the source of an estimated 20 percent of the world’s cotton. Because this cotton would be spun, knit, or sewn by an international web of producers, it was as likely to be present in a garment marked “Made in Vietnam” as in one marked “Made in China.”
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Because this cotton would be spun, knit, or sewn by an international web of producers, it was as likely to be present in a garment marked “Made in Vietnam” as in one marked “Made in China.” Xinjiang cotton appeared for a time to be guilty merely by association—with a region rife with human rights violations. It was soon revealed to be directly bound up in those violations. While it had already become clear that Uyghur forced labor was being used in garment production, in December 2020 German anthropologist Adrian Zenz released an intelligence briefing directly linking the Xinjiang’s cotton harvest with the forced-labor regime, too. Shortly after the release of Zenz’s report, U.S. Customs and Border Protection issued a Withhold Release Order (WRO) on all Xinjiang cotton and tomato products.
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On the other hand, the similarities between America’s history with slavery and China’s practice of forced labor in Xinjiang are undeniable. The past repeats, but with variations. In the annals of remaking land to grow cotton, what is occurring in Xinjiang does not precisely follow what had happened in America, where indigenous inhabitants were eliminated and replaced with vast numbers of slaves forced to grow cotton. Nor does it perfectly follow the model of the British in India, who forced the native inhabitants to grow cotton themselves. In Xinjiang, cotton agriculture is replacing native people with uninhabitable desert. Cotton is the means, rather than the ends, of elimination.
Making It in America: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A. (And How It Got That Way)
by
Rachel Slade
Published 9 Jan 2024
Reports of concentration-camp-like conditions had been trickling out of the cotton-producing region, Xinjiang, in northwest China, where the Uyghurs have lived for more than 1,200 years. Those who managed to escape spoke of forced labor, child-separation practices, lifetime internment, and forced sterilization. The Chinese government repeatedly blocked auditors and U.N. inspectors from confirming reports. And still, horror stories leaked out. Dependency on Chinese cotton goods kept some international brands from crying foul or working too hard to uncover what was happening in Xinjiang. Instead, they hired independent auditors to confirm that their supply chain was “clean,” but those auditors knew where their bread was buttered and tended to look the other way—giving the thumbs-up even when they suspected tainted cotton was somewhere in the supply chain.
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Human rights groups, on the other hand, continued issuing reports that were becoming too damning to ignore. Mainstream media finally began reporting on the Uyghurs’ plight, which made brands nervous. Chinese retaliation was a real concern. When fashion giant H&M announced that it was severing ties with some Xinjiang cotton suppliers due to concerns that it might be associated with Uyghur slave labor, the Chinese government quickly unleashed a youth army to attack the company on social media. Chinese influencers went to work smearing the Swedish multinational brand for hypocrisy. Their thorniest campaigns focused on America’s history of slavery in an effort to highlight Westerners’ apparent hypocrisy.
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“Today’s China is not one that just anyone can bully,” a television star wrote to his nearly seven million followers. “We do not ask for trouble, but we are not afraid of trouble either.” Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, announced, “These foreign companies refuse to use Xinjiang cotton purely on the basis of lies. Of course this will trigger the Chinese people’s dislike and anger.” Whether China’s 2021 cotton buying spree was motivated by supply concerns or rigging the market in retaliation for embarrassing Western sanctions was above Ned’s and Gary’s pay grade. All they knew, as Gary said, was that “the ground game has changed.
The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future
by
Geoffrey Cain
Published 28 Jun 2021
Our ongoing diligence has not found evidence of employment of Uyghurs, or other ethnic minorities from XUAR, elsewhere in our supply chain.”21 Xinjiang supplies 20 percent of the world’s cotton used in products such as garments and footwear. In 2018, three regions within Xinjiang forcefully transferred at least 570,000 people to do grueling cotton picking by hand for the bingtuan, Xinjiang’s paramilitary force.22 After the findings became public in December 2020, the United States banned cotton imports from the bingtuan, accusing it of “slave labor.”23 “The reported situation is of a scale, scope, and complexity that is unprecedented during the modern era of global supply chains,” the Retail Industry Leaders Association, a trade lobbying group consisting of leading clothing brands, announced in a statement with other industry groups, after the details of the labor transfers were made public.
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“Nike Statement on Xinjiang,” undated, https://purpose.nike.com/statement-on-xinjiang. 22. Adrian Zenz, “Coercive Labor in Xinjiang: Labor Transfer and the Mobilization of Ethnic Minorities to Pick Cotton,” Center for Global Policy, December 14, 2020, https://cgpolicy.org/briefs/coercive-labor-in-xinjiang-labor-transfer-and-the-mobilization-of-ethnic-minorities-to-pick-cotton/. 23. David Lawder and Dominique Patton, “U.S. Bans Cotton Imports from China Producer XPCC Citing Xinjiang ‘Slave Labor,’” Reuters, December 3, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-china-idUSKBN28C38V. 24. National Retail Federation, “Joint statement from NRFA, AAFA, RILA, and USFIA on Reports of Forced Labor in Xinjiang,” press release, March 10, 2020, https://nrf.com/media-center/press-releases/joint-statement-nrf-aafa-fdra-rila-and-usfia-reports-forced-labor. 25.
Wasteland: The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, and Why It Matters
by
Oliver Franklin-Wallis
Published 21 Jun 2023
More and more clothing brands have recently started to incorporate recycled polyester and other plastic-based textiles into their products, advertising it as more ‘sustainable’ than alternatives. (Another reason for the pivot, which you won’t see in the ads: it reduces the use of exploitative cotton from Xinjiang.) In actuality, clothing made from blends of recycled plastics and organic fabrics – cotton and polyester, say – are typically less recyclable than those made from a single fibre; while a PET bottle can be easily recycled into a T-shirt, a T-shirt cannot be recycled back into another T-shirt, or even a bottle. Where the technology does exist, it does not exist at anything approaching scale, and there is little to no collection infrastructure for clothing outside of the charity shop industry.
Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside
by
Xiaowei Wang
Published 12 Oct 2020
After the harvest, Wei takes some time off and works with XAG directly to train new drone operators and talk to potential drone buyers. This year, Wei has driven more than thirty thousand kilometers in his SUV, working all across the country. Since the demand for drone operators is high, he helped spray crops everywhere from his home province of Anhui to the cotton fields of Xinjiang. He says he loves all the travel, and the unexpected situations that arise on the job—drone breakdowns with immediate fixes required in remote regions. I imagine Wei’s story in California, the largest agriculture-producing state in the United States, with its markedly different system of industrial-farming infrastructure.
The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China
by
David Eimer
Published 13 Aug 2014
It was established in 1954, when soldiers from the defeated nationalist armies, demobilised PLA troops and workers willing to go west in return for better salaries were recruited to form a paramilitary reserve to the PLA that was also designed to take control of Xinjiang’s economy. Based in Shihezi, a small city close to Urumqi, the XPCC is in effect a parallel regional government, running whole towns and industries, including the lucrative tomato and cotton farms scattered across rural Xinjiang. The bingtuan has its own university, newspaper and TV station and currently accounts for around 10 per cent of Xinjiang’s GDP. An unknown amount of that comes from the sweat of laogai labour. We went through a bingtuan settlement an hour outside of Charklik, the last town of any size on the southern Silk Road.
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Miran’s residents seemed to be all Han, living in neat little houses surrounded by the cotton fields which justify the town’s existence. The presence of so many Chinese in the middle of nowhere was a sure sign I was in bingtuan territory. Just 6 per cent of the 2.5 million employees of the XPCC are Uighurs, while the 700,000 seasonal workers it hires annually to pick cotton are mostly recruited from outside Xinjiang. Charklik had been a lunch stop. Ma and I arrived in the early afternoon, after a miserable night in Cherchen. I had planned to sleep in Charklik, leaving early the next morning to ensure I crossed the Altun Mountains and reached Huatugou, the first town in Qinghai Province, the same day.
Deep Sea and Foreign Going
by
Rose George
Published 4 Sep 2013
Sending a container from Shanghai to Le Havre emits fewer greenhouse gases than the truck that takes the container to Lyon. The Natural Resources Defence Council calculated the emissions involved in the journey of a typical T-shirt from a Chinese factory to an American back. This imaginary TEU was packed with 16 tons of cotton in Urumqi, Xinjiang, and sent to Denver, Colorado. If it went by truck to Shanghai, by air to Los Angeles and by truck again to Denver, its emissions were 35 times more than the same journey using rail and sea. On the ocean leg only, a retailer could save 99 tons of emissions by sending the cotton by ship and not plane.
Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order
by
Bruno Maçães
Published 1 Feb 2019
Thus “China can make the most of the Pakistani market in cheap raw materials to develop the textiles and garments industry and help soak up surplus labor forces in Kashgar to develop the city into an industry cluster area integrating textiles, printing and dyeing, cloth weaving and garment processing.” By 2023, Xinjiang will become the largest cotton textile industry base of China and the most important clothing export base in Western China. The largest city, Urumqi, will turn into the fashion capital of Central Asia. Finally, fibre-optic connectivity between China and Pakistan will prepare the ground for new digital television services disseminating Chinese culture, and electronic monitoring and control systems ensuring the security of the project.
Empire of Cotton: A Global History
by
Sven Beckert
Published 2 Dec 2014
And in 1983 3.27 million tons poured out of its huge state-owned cotton mills.11 The growth of India’s industry followed suit.12 The dominance of China, a self-proclaimed peasants’ and workers’ state, would have seemed like a hallucination to the cotton kings of the early nineteenth century—to the Hammonds of South Carolina, the Rylandses of Manchester, the Dollfuses of Mulhouse, the Barings of Liverpool, and the Volkarts of Winterthur. They could not have imagined that by 2008 a semimilitary unit of the People’s Republic of China, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, would grow 1.3 million tons of cotton, or 5 percent of the world’s total. Yet the coupling of state building and industrialization was the norm. That marriage would succeed in other parts of the world as well, such as the Soviet Union, which further recast cotton agriculture in Central Asia to facilitate a truly spectacular increase in the output of raw cotton.