The Xinjiang autonomous region has been under Chinese control since 1949. It’s home to around 10 million Uyghurs. The Uyghurs are an ancient Turkic ethnic group who largely adhere to the Muslim faith.

Since 2016 China has been criticised for allegations of the mass detention of the Uyghur community. It is estimated that so far China has detained up to 1.8 million Uyghurs in ‘re-education centres’.Initially, the Chinese government denied the camps existed, but since 2018 have defended them, claiming that the camps are actually training centres to combat extremism and to teach detainees useful skills. However, leaked documents and first-hand accounts tell another story.

A key component of the government’s strategy to dominate Uyghurs is a vast system of forced labour. It happens both inside the internment camps and beyond them, affecting factories and farms across the region and the rest of China.

The government is transporting Uyghur workers to other parts of China, where they are working under conditions that strongly indicate forced labour at factories exporting garments and other products. Simultaneously, a number of key Chinese suppliers selling to well-known global brands are deeply implicated in the government’s abuses, having accepted subsidies to set up or expand factories in Xinjiang, or receiving workers under the government’s coercive training programmes.

Associated Press, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Axios, Congressional-Executive Commission on China, Global Legal Action Network, and the Wall Street Journal have linked at least 83 brands to cases of Uyghur forced labour, but the involved industries have failed to take effective action. In February 2020 The Washington Post visited a factory reported to be supplying 8 million pairs of Nike shoes annually, where it said that around 700 Uyghur peoples were being forced to work. The factory was said to have been a Nike supplier for more than 30 years.

While there has been global outrage at China’s abuses towards Uyghurs many leading global apparel brands are not just complicit, but actively benefiting from the Chinese government’s actions. Brands source millions of tons of cotton and yarn from the Uyghur Region, more than 80% of which is grown in Xinjiang. China, the largest cotton producer in the world, has 84% of its cotton coming from the Xinjiang region. One in five cotton products sold globally is tainted with forced labour and human rights violations in Xinjiang. That’s how embedded this genocide is in the global fashion chain. We’re talking brands like Gap, Adidas, Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, H&M, Nike, Uniqlo, Zara, and more.

Most major corporations claim not to tolerate forced labour by their suppliers but have offered no credible explanation as to how they can meet this standard while continuing to do business in a region where forced labour is rife. Furthermore, many apparel brands actively maintain lucrative partnerships with Chinese corporations implicated in forced labour. This includes corporations that benefit from the forced labour transfer of victims from the Uyghur Region to work in factories across China.