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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20326500

Archived

The pursuit of net zero has relied on Uighur Muslims forced to work in appalling conditions. Experts say Britain should follow other countries and take tougher stance.

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Many of the Chinese workers who are helping us to go green do not want to be at those factories. They do not arrive at work to manually crush silicon and load it into blazing furnaces because of a love of renewables, much less to earn a decent wage.

They are there as part of a mass forced labour programme by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that critics describe as a genocide. A reliance on men and women from the Uighur Muslim minority living in detention centres has helped the Xinjiang region to become the epicentre of the solar industry over the last 15 years.

At its peak, analysts believe that 95 per cent of the world’s solar modules were potentially tainted by forced labour in the region [of Xinjiang, in northwestern China]. This reliance on products partly made through working conditions that would be unfathomable in modern Britain represents what the Conservative MP Alicia Kearns calls an ethical “blind spot”.

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It is not only solar panels that are linked to widespread human rights abuses in the so-called Xinjiang Uighur autonomous region. Fuelled by an abundance of cheap, coal-driven electricity, the region produces vast amounts of everything from cotton to the lithium batteries that are ever more essential to our tech-driven lives.

But as governments across the world invest in solar energy in the race to reach net zero, experts have described a critical opportunity to curtail what has been one of Xinjiang’s champion industries.

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Alan Crawford, a chemical engineer who authored a 2023 report that exposed several companies with ties to forced labour, said that transparency from Chinese producers had decreased as a result. “Transparency has gotten worse because the Chinese know that people like us are looking,” he said.

While the Chinese authorities maintain that the Uighur community is free, images of internment camps have shown razor-wire fences manned by police. Leaked police files revealed a shoot-to-kill policy for escapers.

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The pervasiveness of forced labour across the early stages of the production process makes it difficult to find polysilicon from Xinjiang that has not been contaminated by forced labour. Hoshine Silicon, the dominant MGS producer in Xinjiang and a major supplier to the region’s polysilicon producers, has engaged in “surplus labour” programmes at its factories.

One propaganda account from 2018 details how a married couple were engaged in a “poverty alleviation” scheme in which they were moved 30 miles from their home in the rural Dikan township to work at a Hoshine factory in Shanshan county, leaving behind their children. The couple were described as being “relieved” of their worries by transferring their seven-acre grape farm to the state.

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[Laura] Murphy, a senior associate at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said legislation introduced in the US in 2021 showed how supply chains can be cleaned up. The Uighur Forced Labour Prevention Act, which bans the import of goods linked to the region, has led to thousands of solar panel shipments being stopped by US customs.

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It is for this reason that Murphy believes the UK should mirror the US approach, a strategy already being pursued by the European Union. If the UK’s controls against forced labour are not robust, there is a high probability that the UK will simply become a “dumping ground” for the tainted goods not wanted by the US.

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Andrew Yeh, executive director of the China Strategic Risks Institute, said relying too heavily on China for solar energy products could also leave Britain vulnerable in a geopolitical crisis.

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For Murphy, legislation is the only meaningful response to the issue. [...] She said: “Whatever it is that other countries think they might be doing to discourage it, shy of legislation, shy of enforcement, it is not working.

“We can be morally outraged all we want and we can express our desires not to have forced labour-made goods, even at governmental level. But until we actually put it in law and enforce it, companies will continue to import goods made with forced labour into the UK.”

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/19515148

Archived version

The Chinese fast-fashion brand Shein has spent more than a year working on a plan to list its shares on the London Stock Exchange, and successive British governments have tried to help.

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Yet this business deal could have huge ramifications that stretch far beyond the Square Mile.

That’s not just because of the many accusations that have dogged Shein for years – including forced labour in its supply chain, environmental recklessness, and tax-loophole exploitation at the expense of traditional retailers.

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Jeremy Hunt did his best to reel in Shein in his final months as chancellor last year, and his successor [Rachel Reeves] has continued those efforts. Having proclaimed that economic growth is the “number-one mission” of her Government, Reeves wants to demonstrate to China that the UK is open for its business.

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Shein and claims of forced labour

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An undercover investigation by Channel 4 in 2022 found that labourers making Shein’s clothes in contractors’ factories were often working up to 18 hours a day, and being paid as little as 3p per item, with no weekends and only one day off per month.

The revelations led some influencers to refuse any further work with Shein, and the Rolling Stones cancelled a licensing deal with the brand after The i Paper alerted them to the scandal.

The company vowed to invest millions to improve standards after confirming that some suppliers were abusing workers. But last year another investigation by the Swiss campaign group PublicEye concluded that “illegal working hours” were still common for many workers in Guangzhou. Shein said it takes “firm action” if suppliers break local laws.

Just last week it admitted that audits had uncovered two cases of child labour in supplier factories. Shein terminated contracts with the firms involved immediately, saying it would “work tirelessly to ensure that these isolated cases are removed from our supply chain entirely in future”.

The UK’s Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, Eleanor Lyons, warned last year: “Encouraging a company like Shein to float on the UK market inadvertently implies endorsement of poor labour practices.” Human rights campaigners fear that we could all become complicit if UK pension funds buy shares in the company.

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In January, a senior Shein lawyer repeatedly refused to tell the Commons Business Committee whether its products contain cotton from Xinjiang. She also failed to answer questions about the flotation, leaving committee chairman Liam Byrne “pretty horrified by the lack of evidence” presented to MPs by the firm.

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Shein has been laying the ground carefully in London. It has employed Global Counsel, the lobbying firm owned by Lord Mandelson – now British ambassador to the US – to approach ministers on its behalf. Another lobbyist – Kamella Hudson of FGS Global – accompanied Shein executive chairman Donald Tang to meetings with Labour ministers last year, just months after she assisted Reeves during last summer’s election campaign, according to Bloomberg.

However, revelations about this private courtship have increased the sense of alarm among Labour backbenchers. They have joined the likes of former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith and ex-security minister Tom Tugendhat warning against the flotation, with the latter previously calling the retailer “a sinister cross between surveillance and capitalism”.

Labour MP Rachael Maskell, who served as shadow employment secretary under Jeremy Corbyn, became concerned about Shein after one of her constituents – a painter who runs a small stationary firm in York – complained it had copied one of her designs, a copyright breach costing £100,000.

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Blair McDougall, the Labour MP who chairs the all-party parliamentary groups on both Hong Kong and Uyghurs, agrees. “Nobody can have any confidence that this is a company whose products are free from slave labour,” he says. “The City of London cannot be a soft touch for unethical companies.”

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Asked about the Chancellor’s apparent support for a London listing, Maskell says ministers “should think again, because it will undermine businesses on all sorts of fronts”. She said it would be a step towards the UK becoming a “bargain-basement economy,” which Starmer himself warned against in 2017.

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Shein hoped to go public in London by Easter, but that is expected to be postponed until the second half of the year after a troubling few months for the company.

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“Investors who have a keen eye on environmental, social and governance issues will be nervous and less inclined to invest in Shein,” says Susannah Streeter [head of money and markets at investment platform Hargreaves Lansdown], calling the company a “laggard” on these issues compared to rivals.

Then again, “listing in London may force it to clean up its act,” she says. “There will be a spotlight trained on it, and Shein appears to have already taken some steps to ensure its supply chain is more transparent.”

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/19172804

Four former British ambassadors to the United States have expressed concern about the future of intelligence sharing with the US following the re-election of Donald Trump.

Sir David Manning, who served as ambassador between 2003 and 2007, told a parliamentary committee some of Trump's appointees had "strange track records" which would create a "problem on the intelligence front".

Dame Karen Pierce, who only left the role last month, said intelligence sharing would continue "even if at the top level there might be things we might wish to be circumspect about".

Sir Nigel Sheinwald, ambassador from 2007 to 2012, said the relationship would be "trickier to handle than probably at any other time".

He said some of the people appointed by Trump to lead intelligence and security could "present some difficulties in terms of their view of us and views of co-operation".

He did not specify who he was referring to, however concern has been raised about the US president's pick to be his director of national intelligence.

Tulsi Gabbard has previously echoed Russia's justification for invading Ukraine and her appointment to the role was welcomed by Russian state media.

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Sir Peter Westmacott, who was in Washington from 2012 to 2016, said problems might be caused by a changing culture in US government institutions adding that "a lot of very good people are being thrown out because they do not pass the [Trump] loyalty test."

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