Why I’m sitting out the Xinjiang cotton boycott

What may have begun as a genuine attempt to improve the lot of Uygur detainees seems to have become embroiled in a wider diplomatic exercise to attack China

Mike Rowse

Published: 4:00am, 5 Apr 2021

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In 1862, Lancashire mill workers at great personal sacrifice took a principled stand and refused to touch cotton picked by slaves on American plantations. They had been among the best-paid workers in Britain but many were subsequently driven into poverty. Their decision had a great impact on the course of the American civil war as it weakened the economy of the slave-owning south and contributed to the unionist victory in the north.

In 1863, president Abraham Lincoln wrote to thank “the working men of Manchester” for their “sublime Christian heroism, which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country”. His words are inscribed on the pedestal of his statue standing in Lincoln Square, Manchester today.

The great boycott effort of my youth involved South Africa’s apartheid regime. On the initiative of the Anti-Apartheid Movement, people around the world were urged not to buy South African products. I remember our family, though not well off, would not choose fruit from South Africa in the supermarket though it was cheap and of high quality.

An academic boycott began in 1965; England’s cricket tour to the country scheduled for 1968-69 was cancelled after the intending visitors selected a non-white player Basil D’Oliveira as a team member; the US Congress in 1986 enacted disinvestment legislation. Finally, the apartheid system was scrapped in the early 1990s and the leader of the African National Congress, Nelson Mandela, became president.

One key feature of these two early examples of boycotts is that they involved ordinary people and a degree of self-sacrifice.

A sculpture of the mascot for the 1980 Moscow Olympics, Misha the bear, is seen near the Luzhniki stadium in Moscow in December 2019. The US led calls for a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics in protest against Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. Photo: AFP

My next memory of a large-scale boycott was the American-led effort to persuade the world’s athletes not to go to the 1980 Moscow Olympics. This was to punish the Soviet Union for its invasion of Afghanistan. In addition to the opprobrium being drawn to Russian heads, the Central Intelligence Agency armed the mujahideen against the invaders.

What irony! The next country to invade Afghanistan was of course the United States, supported by Western allies such as Britain.

More recent boycott efforts tend to be started by well-meaning activists on the basis of principle. The latest one, concerning cotton grown in Xinjiang, has generated something of a storm in a teacup as two sets of activists urge boycotts in opposing directions.

Several famous international fashion brands use Xinjiang cotton, which one group of activists claim is picked by slave labour. International brands have become very sensitive about this sort of subject in recent years. Any suggestion of child labour, low wages or poor working conditions has them running scared. They want to distance themselves from such allegations and demonstrate “ethical sourcing” to protect their reputation. Some brands subsequently issued statements to the effect that they would not use Xinjiang cotton, to avoid a boycott of their products in Western markets.

01:08

Xinjiang, China’s top cotton producer

In response, an opposing group in the Chinese mainland said the slave labour claims were false and libellous, and its members urged a boycott of the brands concerned. At least one brand seems to have been dropped from the more popular e-commerce websites there.

It is not easy for the neutral observer to get to the bottom of this. On the one hand, there is a report that most cotton in Xinjiang is harvested by machine nowadays. But that still leaves a large amount to be picked by hand. We know this is hard unpleasant work: that is why the plantation owners of the southern American states bought African slaves to do the work in the first place. Organisations established precisely to help brands source ethically have investigated and found no evidence of slave labour, but this has not stopped the original activists who claim the investigations were flawed.

The political background to the subject complicates the search for an easy answer. Following a series of terrorist incidents, China established detention camps in Xinjiang to deradicalise Muslim extremists from terrorist organisations such as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement. Western critics have referred to the centres as “concentration camps” (though inmates are released and some have emigrated) and have started to use the term “genocide” to describe China’s treatment of its Uygur ethnic minority. The first to do so, on his last day in office, was then secretary of state and former CIA director Mike Pompeo.

02:27

US declares China has committed genocide in its treatment of Uygurs in Xinjiang

Another development was the change in attitude towards the East Turkestan Islamic Movement. Since 2002, this had been designated as a terrorist organisation by the United Nations and as recently as July last year the Security Council estimated the group had in excess of 1,100 fighters. Suddenly in November, Washington delisted the group.

It is instructive that the US is now urging a boycott of the Winter Olympics due next year in Beijing over the alleged human rights violations in Xinjiang. Perhaps China’s real crime is being the only major power not to have invaded Afghanistan in living memory. What may have begun as a genuine attempt to improve the lot of detainees seems to have become embroiled in a wider diplomatic exercise to attack China.

As any observer of my wardrobe will readily testify, I am not a fashionista. I think I’ll sit this particular boycott out.

Mike Rowse is the CEO of Treloar Enterprises