China has faced very few consequences for its continued detainment and torture of Uighur Muslims, in large part because its concentration camps provide something many corporations aren’t willing to pass up: profit.
Add Apple to the list of companies benefiting from China’s horrific human abuses. The Washington Post reported this week that Apple’s oldest and most well-known supplier has been accused of using forced Muslim labor in its factories. The Tech Transparency Project, a human rights group, alleged that thousands of Uighur workers detained in China’s Xinjiang region were sent to work for Lens Technology, which supplies not only Apple, but Amazon and Tesla as well.
This will come as no surprise to anyone remotely familiar with the spinelessness of our corporate leaders. Top global clothing brands, such as Gap, Adidas, H&M, and Calvin Klein, have all taken advantage of the cheap cotton picked by detained Muslims in Xinjiang. One of the United States’s most profitable sports industries, the NBA, built an entire academy just miles away from China’s concentration camps and left only after the public pressure became too great. And now that Congress is moving to hold U.S. companies accountable for their complicity, Big Tech is pouring lobbyists into Washington in an effort to water down legislation that would impose sanctions on companies that use Xinjiang’s forced labor.
It does not matter that China has imprisoned, sterilized, and brutalized thousands upon thousands of innocent men and women, not as long as there’s money to be made.
What makes this moral failure so much worse is the fact that the private sector has more power to check China than any other institution, including the government. China needs the U.S.’s business, and if our corporations were to withhold that business, China would more than likely be forced to act. But because this ultimatum would result in massive profit losses, our corporations remain silent.
If only they had the courage to see past themselves.
