HOTAN, China -- Chinese men and women locked in a detention camp where authorities are "re-educating" ethnic minorities are sewing clothes that have been imported all year by a U.S. sportswear company.
The camp, in Hotan, China, is one of a growing number of internment camps in the Xinjiang region, where by some estimates 1 million Muslims are detained, forced to give up their language and their religion and subject to political indoctrination. Now, the Chinese government is also forcing some detainees to work in manufacturing and food industries. Some of them are within the internment camps; others are privately owned, state-subsidized factories where detainees are sent once they are released.
The Associated Press has tracked recent, ongoing shipments from one such factory -- Hetian Taida Apparel -- inside an internment camp to Badger Sportswear, a leading supplier in Statesville, N.C. Badger's clothes are sold on college campuses and to sports teams across the country, although there is no way to tell where any particular shirt made in Xinjiang ends up.
The shipments show how difficult it is to stop products made with forced labor from getting into the global supply chain, even though such imports are illegal in the U.S. Badger CEO John Anton said recently that the company would halt shipments while it investigates.
Hetian Taida's chairman, Wu Hongbo, confirmed that the company has a factory inside a re-education compound, and said the company provides employment to those trainees who were deemed by the government to be "unproblematic."
"We're making our contribution to eradicating poverty," Wu said.
Chinese authorities say the camps offer free vocational training for Uighurs, Kazakhs and other minority groups, mostly Muslims, as part of a plan to bring them into "a modern civilized" world and eliminate poverty in the region. They say that people in the centers have signed agreements to receive vocational training.
The Xinjiang Propaganda Department did not respond to a faxed request for comment. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman recently accused the foreign media of making "many untrue reports" about the training centers, but did not specify when asked for details.
"Those reports are completely based on hearsay evidence or made out of thin air," the spokesman, Hua Chunying, said.
Late last week, the Chinese government lashed out at the U.S. media reports about forced labor of mostly ethnic Muslim detainees in China's far western Xinjiang region.
The stories are "a malicious attack that severely distorts the fact," Chunying said at a daily news briefing in response to a question from the state-run People's Daily newspaper.
Hua said China has abolished re-education through labor and described the camps as vocational training centers that help families shake off poverty. The trainees participate voluntarily, she said, contradicting former detainees and friends and relatives of detainees who have told the AP that they have no choice.
However, a dozen people who either had been in a camp or had friends or family in such camps told the AP that detainees they knew were given no choice but to work at the factories. Most of the Uighurs and Kazakhs, who were interviewed in exile, also said that even people with professional jobs were retrained to do menial work.
Payment varied according to the factory. Some got paid nothing, while others earned up to several hundred dollars a month, they said -- barely above minimum wage for the poorer parts of Xinjiang. A person with firsthand knowledge of the situation in one county estimated that more than 10,000 detainees -- or 10 percent to 20 percent of the internment population there -- are working in factories, with some earning just a tenth of what they used to earn before. The person declined to be named out of fear of retribution.
A former reporter for Xinjiang TV in exile said that during his monthlong detention last year, young people in his camp were taken away in the mornings to work without compensation in carpentry and a cement factory.
"The camp didn't pay any money, not a single cent," he said, asking to be identified only by his first name, Elyar, because he has relatives still in Xinjiang. "Even for necessities, such as things to shower with or sleep at night, they would call our families outside to get them to pay for it."
Rushan Abbas, an Uighur in Washington, D.C., said her sister is among those detained. The sister, Dr. Gulshan Abbas, was taken to what the government calls a vocational center, although she has no specific information on whether her sister is being forced to work.
"American companies importing from those places should know those products are made by people being treated like slaves," she said. "What are they going to do, train a doctor to be a seamstress?"
Mainur Medetbek's husband did odd repair jobs before vanishing into a camp in February during a visit to China from their home in Kazakhstan. She has been able to glean a sense of his conditions from monitored exchanges with relatives and from the husband of a woman in the same camp. He works in an apparel factory and is allowed to leave and spend the night with relatives every other Saturday.
Though Medetbek is uncertain how much her husband makes, the woman in his camp earns about $87 a month, less than half the local minimum wage and far less than what Medetbek's husband used to earn.
"They say it's a factory, but it's an excuse for detention. They don't have freedom, there's no time for him to talk with me," she said. "They say they found a job for him. I think it's a concentration camp."
U.S. Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J. a member of the House Foreign Relations Committee, called on President Donald Trump's administration last week to ban imports from Chinese companies associated with detention camps.
"Not only is the Chinese government detaining over a million Uighurs and other Muslims, forcing them to revoke their faith and profess loyalty to the Communist Party, they are now profiting from their labor," said Smith. "U.S. consumers should not be buying and U.S. businesses should not importing goods made in modern-day concentration camps. "
Information for this article was contributed by Martha Mendoza and Ken Moritsug of The Associated Press.
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