Editorial Illustration for Vox
"How your favorite jeans might be fueling a human rights crisis: Cotton’s connection to forced labor by Uyghurs in Xinjiang ought to have you rethinking fast fashion."
Reported by Sofi Thanhauser and edited by Lavanya Ramanathan.
pub. September 3, 2021
Read the article here.
“Twenty years later, Xinjiang has a cheaper workforce than planners in the ’90s could have dreamed, and the reason is disturbing…Beijing has turned to a policy of forcefully interning Uyghurs in massive, heavily guarded camps, subjecting them to what it has described as “reeducation” but is believed to include sterilization and forced labor. They are actions that, when taken together, constitute what the US State Department has termed a genocide.”
“Slave cotton is far from new. The use of forced labor by an authoritarian communist regime to grow cotton can — and ought to — inspire the ire of the democratic West. But “free market” cotton has generally entailed very little freedom for most of those involved in its production. There is no global cotton trade outside of brutal colonial or neocolonial relations of power. Cheap cotton has been morally compromised for several hundred years. The history of European imperialism, industrialization, and cotton are so intertwined as to be nearly identical.“