A US supplier of T-shirts and other team apparel to college bookstores has cut ties with a Chinese company that drew workers from an internment camp holding targeted members of ethnic minority groups.
In recent years, authorities in the far west Chinese region of Xinjiang have detained an estimated 1 million Uighurs and Kazakhs in heavily secured facilities where detainees say they are ordered to renounce their language and religion while pledging loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party.
Last month, an Associated Press investigation found the Chinese government had also started forcing some detainees to work in manufacturing and food industries.
The investigation tracked shipments from one such factory, the privately owned Hetian Taida Apparel (和田泰達), located inside an internment camp, to Badger Sportswear, a leading supplier in Statesville, North Carolina.
In a statement posted to its Web site, Badger on Wednesday said that it would 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 (吳宏波), rang unanswered.
In a previous conversation, Wu said that 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.
However, Wu said his company employed 20 to 30 “trainees” from the center as part of the region’s efforts to alleviate poverty.
Asked about the case, Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Lu Kang (陸慷) on Thursday said that while the ministry does not generally comment on individual business decisions, Badger appeared to have been acting on “misinformation.”
The vocational training centers in Xinjiang are “totally different from so-called forced labor,” Lu said, referring further questions on the camps to statements made by the regional government, which maintains that the centers help poor Uighurs gain employable skills.
“It’s a tragedy for that business,” Lu said.
Universities stocking Badger clothing began pulling items from their shelves and Web sites after the report appeared in December last year.
Hetian Taida was certified as complying with good business practices by Worldwide Responsible Accredited Production (WRAP), 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 said.
However, 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 said that the facility they investigated was not the same place AP wrote about.
“Our model centers around factories approaching us requesting to be audited,” Lennon wrote in an e-mail. “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 US 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 that 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.
The collapse of the Swiss Birch glacier serves as a chilling warning of the escalating dangers faced by communities worldwide living under the shadow of fragile ice, particularly in Asia, experts said. Footage of the collapse on Wednesday showed a huge cloud of ice and rubble hurtling down the mountainside into the hamlet of Blatten. Swiss Development Cooperation disaster risk reduction adviser Ali Neumann said that while the role of climate change in the case of Blatten “still needs to be investigated,” the wider impacts were clear on the cryosphere — the part of the world covered by frozen water. “Climate change and
Poland is set to hold a presidential runoff election today between two candidates offering starkly different visions for the country’s future. The winner would succeed Polish President Andrzej Duda, a conservative who is finishing his second and final term. The outcome would determine whether Poland embraces a nationalist populist trajectory or pivots more fully toward liberal, pro-European policies. An exit poll by Ipsos would be released when polls close today at 9pm local time, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. Final results are expected tomorrow. Whoever wins can be expected to either help or hinder the
DENIAL: Musk said that the ‘New York Times was lying their ass off,’ after it reported he used so much drugs that he developed bladder problems Elon Musk on Saturday denied a report that he used ketamine and other drugs extensively last year on the US presidential campaign trail. The New York Times on Friday reported that the billionaire adviser to US President Donald Trump used so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that he developed bladder problems. The newspaper said the world’s richest person also took ecstasy and mushrooms, and traveled with a pill box last year, adding that it was not known whether Musk also took drugs while heading the so-called US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) after Trump took power in January. In a
It turns out that looming collision between our Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies might not happen after all. Astronomers on Monday said that the probability of the two spiral galaxies colliding is less than previously thought, with a 50-50 chance within the next 10 billion years. That is essentially a coin flip, but still better odds than previous estimates and farther out in time. “As it stands, proclamations of the impending demise of our galaxy seem greatly exaggerated,” the Finnish-led team wrote in a study appearing in Nature Astronomy. While good news for the Milky Way galaxy, the latest forecast might be moot