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[Brett-Butler]

I've been reading about China's enslavement of millions of Muslim minority Uighurs in "re-education camps" in Xinjiang for a few years now, and have been surprised how rarely this shocking story has pierced the mainstream consciousness. Thankfully this week the BBC have highlighted this horrific story on its homepage, where they are forced to pick cotton, which ends up in the supply chain of clothes that make their way to our shores. Here's a few horrifying extracts from the story -

China is forcing hundreds of thousands of Uighurs and other minorities into hard, manual labour in the vast cotton fields of its western region of Xinjiang, according to new research seen by the BBC.

Based on newly discovered online documents, it provides the first clear picture of the potential scale of forced labour in the picking of a crop that accounts for a fifth of the world’s cotton supply and is used widely throughout the global fashion industry...

Alongside a large network of detention camps, in which more than a million are thought to have been detained, allegations that minority groups are being coerced into working in textile factories have already been well documented.

The Chinese government denies the claims, insisting that the camps are “vocational training schools” and the factories are part of a massive, and voluntary, “poverty alleviation” scheme.

But the new evidence suggests that upwards of half a million minority workers a year are also being marshalled into seasonal cotton picking under conditions that again appear to raise a high risk of coercion.

“In my view the implications are truly on a historical scale,” Dr Adrian Zenz, a senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington who uncovered the documents, told the BBC.

The BBC approached 30 major international brands. Three – Marks and Spencer, Next, and Tesco – told us they have policies in place that ensure products sourced from China do not use raw cotton from Xinjiang. Burberry said they do not use any cotton from China at all. Others, including those who don't source direct from Xinjiang, were unable to guarantee its cotton didn't enter supply chains elsewhere. Nine companies gave no response.

Read the whole story, (as well as this chilling New York Times story from last year), and be amazed that slavery & internment on this scale can happen in 2020.