OP-ED: The fashion industry is complicit in Uyghur human rights abuses in China

By Roxana Khan Williams, HOPE not hate

This has been a year where we have all been forced to stop and ask: how can we do things differently? How can we do things better?

Coronavirus has radically changed how we think about work and community. Black Lives Matter made us confront the real impacts of racism. And recent forest fires have served as warnings for the planet's wildlife, highlighting that time is running out to stop the clock on climate change.

Yet while it seems the whole world is in flux, a familiar story can still be told of the fashion industry's complicity in both human and environmental harm. From Boohoo's Leicester clothing sweatshop scandal, big brands leaving garment makers in the global south unpaid, and ever-increasing evidence of the environmental impacts that the fashion industry has on our planet.

But is the industry really responding? Like the rest of the corporate world, the fashion industry pledged itself to racial equality and fairness in the wake of Black Lives Matter – yet just months earlier a report published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute revealed that over 83 well-known brands from the fashion, automobile and technology sector were implicated in the use of Uyghur forced labour in Chinese factories.

Between one and three million Uyghur people are believed to being interned in re-education camps – forced to renounce their Muslim faith, pledge allegiance to the Chinese state and work as slave labourers. Women are forcibly sterilised and subject to forced abortions, children are separated from their parents and put into orphanages, as well as reports of state-sanctioned sexual violence. Uyghur cultural sites are demolished, and the entire population has been placed under mass surveillance. Make no mistake – this is a cultural genocide under the pretext of fighting terrorism.

This summer a coalition of 190 human rights groups, trade unions and civil organisations said the entire fashion world was tainted by this industrial-scale human rights abuse. They claimed that 84% of cotton production from China comes from the Uyghur Region – that's 20% of the world's cotton. This week, America banned certain garment products made in the Uyghur homeland (Xinjiang) from being imported into the country.

With yesterday marking the start of London Fashion Week, we at HOPE not hate are trying to bring the issue to wider attention and force the industry to take action. More than 10,000 people co-signed our open letter to the CEOs of Nike, Adidas, Puma and Fila as well as non-fashion brands Apple, BMW and Jaguar Land-Rover, demanding that they prove that there is no Uyghur forced labour anywhere in their Chinese supply chain. 

It's time for fashion to take a stand against what's happening, not just post activist chic messages on social media. We can't tolerate human rights and labour exploitation for the sake of cheaper clothes. 

We need systemic change in the way the fashion industry models itself and a cognitive shift in how we view our clothes. If we want clothes that cheap, then we must question why? To put it simply: new t-shirts should not be cheaper than your flat white. Let us de-stigmatise wearing the same dress twice, take pride in finding a bargain in a charity shop and gracefully accept hand me downs.

The fashion world can't sit by whilst the industry is implicated in the biggest human rights abuse so far this century. The hashtag for this year's London Fashion Week is #LFWReset – and it's time to reset our relationship with forced labour and stand in solidarity with the Uyghur people, whose plight is not on show but being hidden from the world.