If You Wear Clothes, You Need to Know What’s Happening to the Uighurs (and how we can act NOW)

Today we’re talking about the genocide of Uighurs in Northwest China’s Xinjiang region – not because it’s fun, or it’s art, or it’s fashion-mixed-with-philosophy, or even because it’s it’s political. It’s because WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT IT. 

If you haven’t heard of the Uighurs (pronounced wee-gers, also spelled Uyghurs, Uygurs or Uigurs), it’s likely because they haven’t been in the press as much as they should be. With a pandemic, an election, an attack on the US capitol, and now historic snowstorms in Texas, the news has directed our attention elsewhere. That’s understandable. But now you and I are here, and we’re talking about it. 

I get really wordy in this post – blame the noxious combination of an International Relations background and inflated ego – but stick with me because the language here is important. We’re talking about issues that are simultaneously amorphous and weighty, questions of philosophy, identity, politics, and economics. They feel intangible but they have very real consequences for an unfathomable number of people around the globe, including you and me. 

At any point, you can always scroll down to the all-important list of action items!

Who are the Uighurs?

The Uighurs are a Muslim Turkic minority group of nearly 14 million people occupying Central and East Asia, 12 million of whom live in China’s Xinjiang region. It’s important to note that these numbers – and indeed, any data regarding the Uighurs, for reasons that will soon become apparent – are highly disputed. Some Uighur cultural groups such as the World Uyghur Congress and the Uyghur American Association assert that their population is over 20 million in China alone. It stands to reason that China would downplay population data – the Uighurs have lived in the region in some capacity for 4,000 years or more. They have a cohesive ethnic and religious identity that amounts to a not-inconsequential perceived threat to the sovereignty of the Chinese nation-state.

What China is Up To

This is where things become difficult. Since 2014, China has been developing various and specialized controls on the Uighurs in the Xinjiang region, including increased police surveillance using facial recognition technology and genetic surveillance American-made equipment.

If “genetic surveillance” brings the foul stench of German efforts to apply pseudoscience to ethnic-based value judgements in the Holocaust, or the foundations laid for the Rwandan genocide by the Belgians, follow your nose. Generally, political scientists’ sniffers get going at these first whiffs , these being the brazen efforts to identify and track a certain ethnic group, that, by the way, lives on oil and mineral rich land. It’s important to note China’s justifications for increased surveillance: religious extremism, evidenced by such “red flags” as growing a beard, owning a Quran, wearing a t-shirt with a crescent and star, quitting cigarette smoking, or having a relative who’s committed any perceived act of religious fervor, says the New York Times. Ethnic labeling, persecution, amplification of a perceived existential threat to national identity, and access to economic resources (particularly oil), are the hallmarks of the beginnings of ethnocide or perhaps even genocide. Is that odor putrefying yet?

Vocational training for Uighurs?

So, enter the issue of “reeducation camps. ” Reeducation camps are massive compounds constructed by the government with the purported goal of providing vocational training and cultural literacy courses for the Uighur population in Xinjiang. There is a turnover of over a million inmates per year. China has denied that these … vocational training centers … are in any way akin to concentration camps. 

Claiming that these reeducation camps aren’t concentration camps follows the same logic as Multi-Level Marketers claiming their strategies aren’t illegal pyramid schemes. The semantics may be mutable, but the truth of the situation is not. Reports from the camps indicate that inmates are subject to verbal and physical abuse, brainwashing, forced labor, and forced sterilization. Which of these have pedagogical merit in a vocational training program? 

There is a lot more to be said about the experiences of the Uighurs in these camps. I by no means want to minimize or gloss over their stories. I can’t recommend enough John Oliver’s 20-minute piece on this topic, which includes incredibly impactful testimony from inside the camps:

Uighurs and Fashion

Knowing what you know now, you may want to sit with this for a moment: 1/5 of the world’s cotton is supplied from the Xinjiang region, with strong evidence that forced Uighur labor is involved with production. 

Y’all, that means that if you pulled five random socks from the laundromat, two of them would have been made in a concentration camp. In a concentration camp. 

The fact is that launching a reeducation campaign genocide is expensive, not only monetarily but politically. In the grimmest of terms, it has to be worth the offending government’s effort. During 1930s Germany, this meant economic control of Europe through coordination with corporations and slave labor (sound familiar?). In Darfur, this means control of oil fields (also controlled by China, by the way, and ongoing because humans are monsters). In Xinjiang, it means not only oil and natural gas, but also cotton. 

Note that these resources are insidious: we all use oil and natural gas. 

We all use cotton. So why don’t we just not buy cotton from China? Here’s the thing – fashion has a supply chain problem.

We Need to Talk About Supply Chains

Until I was about 30, I thought that fashion manufacturing worked something like this: you make your design, buy your fabric from Mood Fabrics, have dreamy design meetings with the head honchos of a nearby factory, where you take a nice tour (for some reason, I picture hairnets and lab coats involved). You know who’s making your product and where the materials are coming from. What’s more, you’ve chatted with the big cheeses at the fabric factory, who know exactly where, how, and by whom it was made (at this point, I picture a montage of wheat fields and babbling brooks). If unpaid labor was manufacturing your product or some part of it, you’d know – and it would be your choice to employ such labor. You’d be stroking your Persian cat in a giant leather wing-back chair, you’d have minions. You’d get your jollies off by tipping 10% every time and for writing bad Yelp reviews for the county animal shelter who wouldn’t let you take home a garbage bag full of puppies. Your favorite restaurant would be Arby’s. It would just be obvious that you were bad, it was bad, the whole situation was just BAD, just bad things everywhere. 

Right? 

Yeesh, of course not. It turns out that supply chains are very complex, especially for big companies like Adidas, Calvin Klein, or Zara, among many others. Orders are contracted out, and may be subcontracted out from there one or more times. Raw materials for fabrics, even for something as simple as straight-up cotton, can be sourced and pooled from many different suppliers, who themselves may be sourcing from many different places. Fulfilling a contract has little to nothing to do with how you do it, just as long as it’s done with passable quality and – most important – on time. 

Keep in mind that although standards for quality across brands may differ, the murky supply chain is ubiquitous. This isn’t just a fast-fashion problem, it’s a luxury fashion problem, a contemporary brand problem, and everything in between (read this New York Times article for more info). 

An opaque supply chain has its benefits to companies because it creates plausible deniability when faced with virtually any kind of criticism of their manufacturing – environmental impact, worker’s rights, animal rights, you name it. The blame can be shifted from the corporation to their contractors, who can say in all honesty that they subcontracted the work out to someone else. The whole process is a giant black box. It functions because consumers, no matter what, are consistently bombarded with new products. They are quite literally so bedazzled that they are utterly distracted from thinking about where the supply is coming from. Consumers are happy, CEOs are happy, and everything in between is a means to an end. 

Hence, the issue with cotton coming out of Uighur forced labor centers: it’s a huge quantity and it is parsed out to countless companies and suppliers. It is subsequently mixed with cotton from other origins so it is nearly impossible for some companies to say with any certainty that there is no tainted cotton in their product. 

If you’re like me, you’re thinking, “well sh*t, now what?” 

Next Steps

The good news is that, technically speaking, the sale of goods made from forced labor has been illegal in the US since 1930 (although I have a feeling this doesn’t apply to domestic prison labor, but that’s a different subject). Now, because of our supply chain opacity plus political pressures to appease the Chinese government, the practical enforcement of this law has been underwhelming. Still, it’s an important precedent for US lawmakers to build upon. And that leads us to more good news: US Homeland Security sanctioned four different mega-suppliers out of Xinjiang and banned their imports in September of 2020. Two months later, the US Customs and Border Protection issued a ban on sales of products from a major cotton manufacturer in the region. 

Currently, there’s a bill in the House of Representatives called The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act which would unequivocally ban imports from the Xinjiang region to the United States. By passing this bill, Congress would be stating that any goods coming from the region are presumed to be made with forced labor unless there is compelling evidence otherwise. This may seem like an inconsequential semantic point, but politically, it’s huge. The implication here is that by passing this bill the US government would be acknowledging the scope and malevolent intent of the Chinese government in Xinjiang with tangible action. Taking any sort of antagonistic stance in a trade relationship as delicate, complex, and weighty as that of the US and China is risky for the China-dependent US economy. Once done, it cannot be undone. Still, the House of Representatives has so far shown broad support of the bill, an indication that even in Washington there are veins of empathy yet untapped and poisoned by the corporate lobby.

Not that the corporate lobby isn’t trying: Nike, Apple, Coca-Cola, and other large corporations have had lobbyists working against the bill since last fall, according to The New York Times. This is Bad News. In general, in the US lobbyists make the Law of the Land. This is most critically so in the Senate. In other words, where the money goes, so goes the law. 

Unless, that is, there is broad and strong public support for bills like The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. That’s where we come in!

How You Can Help – like, right now, and it’s FREE

If you live in the US, there is one VERY IMPORTANT (!) step you can take, and it’ll take you less than five minutes: Call your senator!

This is what you do:

1. Have your cell phone at the ready
2. Go to saveuighur.org/congress/ and fill out their form with your basic info (address, phone number, email)
3. The Save Uighur site will place a call from your phone (!) to your senator (!)
4. You’ll likely get your senator’s message machine. Read from the Save Uighur script (or make your own).
5. Hang up and tell a friend!

Calling your senator is the single most effective thing you can do right now. If you’d like to do more, consider contacting companies directly. Here is a list of major corporations implicated in Uighur forced labor, along with their public responses from The Business and Human Rights Research Centre.

Whether or not you decide to abstain from purchasing from certain companies is up to you. Part of the tragedy of this whole thing is that the global supply chain is implicated in the suffering of millions, and it has its dirty little fingers everywhere – so do your best with what you have. And call your senator.

Resources for More Info and Action

• PBS News Hour’s interactive piece “What’s happening with the Uighurs in China”
• The New Yorker’s haunting mixed-media piece “Inside Xinjiang’s Prison State”
• John Oliver’s reporting, posted above, or you can view it on YouTube
• The World Uyghur Congress’s action page
• Donate to Amnesty International, Save Uighur, or World Uyghur Congress
• Check out this list of brands implicated in forced Uighur labor, along with the list from The Business and Human Rights Research Centre

Please, share this information with friends and family – it is crucial that you do so.

-Stig