A U.S. supplier of t-shirts and other team apparel to college bookstores cut its ties on Jan. 9 with a Chinese company that drew workers from an internment camp holding targeted members of ethnic minority groups.
The Chinese regime has used the excuse that Xinjiang faces a serious threat from Islamist militants and separatists who plot attacks and stir up tensions with the ethnic Han Chinese majority to crack down on the local population in Xinjiang.
In a statement posted to its website, Badger said Wednesday it will no longer do business with Hetian Taida, nor import any goods from the same region “given the controversy around doing business” there.
“Furthermore, we will not ship any product sourced from Hetian Taida currently in our possession,” the company said, adding that the supplier accounted for about 1 percent of Badger’s total annual sales.
Repeated calls to Hetian Taida’s chairman, Wu Hongbo, rang unanswered Wednesday. In a previous conversation with the AP, Wu said while Hetian Taida was located in the same compound as one camp that the government calls a “vocational skills education and training center,” Hetian Taida was not involved in the camp’s activities.
Universities stocking Badger clothing began pulling items from their shelves and websites after the report appeared in December.
Hetian Taida was certified as complying with good business practices by Worldwide Responsible Accredited Production, which sent an auditor to a different Hetian Taida facility, not the one inside the internment camp. That factory “is not engaged in the use of forced labor,” WRAP and Badger concluded. But Badger added that “historical documentation provided by Hetian Taida regarding their prior facility was insufficient to conclude with certainty” that it had met Badger’s sourcing standards.
WRAP spokesman Seth Lennon confirmed to AP that the facility they investigated is not the same place AP wrote about.
“Our model centers around factories approaching us requesting to be audited,” Lennon wrote in an email. “We do not seek out any factories whatsoever to audit unsolicited.”
The Washington-based Workers Rights Consortium (WRC), which has agreements with many educational institutions across the U.S. to ensure the products they sell on campus are ethically manufactured, conducted its own investigation and found additional evidence confirming the factory supplying Badger was inside an internment camp.
WRC executive director Scott Nova said Wednesday’s announcement reinforces that finding.
“There is nothing in Badger’s statement, or WRAP’s, that calls into question the conclusion that Hetian Taida used detainee labor while producing for Badger,” he said.
Any item that is the product of forced labor is illegal and subject to seizure by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which said in December it was reviewing the reports. A CBP spokesperson had an automatic message Wednesday that they were unable to respond to emails or telephone calls due to the government shutdown.
Western countries including Canada, France, Germany, and the United States have urged China to shut down camps in Xinjiang.
