At least 15 Bangladeshi factories that imported hundreds of tons of cotton fabric in 2024 from two companies linked to a Chinese forced labour programme are supplying some of Ireland's major clothing retailers, an RTÉ investigation has found.
Behind the "sustainable" labels on Ireland's high streets, concerns are being raised that cotton from China’s Uyghur region is still slipping through — showing how forced labour is woven into global supply chains, and how the trail begins in Xinjiang, a region that produces at least a fifth of the world’s cotton under conditions described by the UN as constituting possible crimes against humanity.
In October 2023, in a cotton yard in Aksu prefecture in China's Xinjiang province, workers wearing white cloth caps loaded tonnes of cotton onto trucks and tractor-trailers, the raw fabric spilling over the sides.
Around the yard, stretching for acres to the horizon, were Aksu’s vast fields of cotton. The workers’ caps bore a distinctive spiral logo and the word Esquel; the yard belonged to a huge clothing and textile company of the same name.
Many of those working in the yard were part of Xinjiang’s Uyghur minority, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group. About 12 million Uyghurs live in Xinjiang province, and figures from 2020 show they make up less than one percent of China’s population.
Xinjiang grows about 90% of China’s cotton, and at least one-fifth of the world’s, and Aksu prefecture is Xinjiang’s cotton-growing heartland.
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As a result, many of China's most important textile companies, such as the Esquel Group, have set up farms and factories across Aksu.
But an enormous trove of evidence, compiled from eyewitnesses and survivors, government documents, state media reports, and social media footage, shows that a system of severe repression and forced labour underpins the region’s cotton industry.
READ: Suppliers to major Irish retailers linked to forced labour cotton
Some, including Seanad Éireann, have described the system as a form of genocide. A landmark report by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, published in 2022, concluded that China’s widespread human rights violations in Xinjiang could constitute crimes against humanity.
Uyghurs who have fled China recall discrimination as being ever-present throughout their lives, but, under President Xi Jinping, the system of repression has escalated enormously.
In 2014, ostensibly as a response to increased militancy among the Uyghur population, China implemented an extensive program of persecution targeting Muslim minorities called the Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism. People could be detained for extended periods for "offences" like reciting Quranic verses at funerals or growing long beards.
Across Aksu prefecture, the evidence of the system can be seen in the widespread destruction of mosques, graveyards and other Islamic sites, and in the enormous high-security prisons built over the past decade.
By 2017, the government was collecting biological samples, fingerprints, iris scans, and blood types from all Xinjiang residents over the age of 12.
This data was augmented with mass surveillance information gathered from Wi-Fi trackers, CCTV cameras, and routine home visits by officials, turning Xinjiang into one of the most surveilled societies in human history.
Under this system of repression and surveillance, China has forcibly placed millions of Uyghurs in re-education camps and detention centres. Those who have escaped have reported widespread torture, beatings, and forced sterilisation.
A system of state-backed forced labour, meanwhile, has seen millions of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities transferred to work both inside and outside of Xinjiang, with many thousands forced to work in the cotton industry.
State-imposed forced labour is intrinsic to the Chinese government's broader repression of the Uyghur people, and it facilitates forcible migration, familial separations, mass surveillance, land expropriation, cultural erasure, and resource exploitation.
"The Uyghurs constitute a relatively small minority of 11 million people," said Kenneth Roth, the former director of Human Rights Watch and a long-time critic of China’s repression of the Uyghurs.
"And beginning in 2017, the Chinese government detained one million of those 11 million people, essentially to force them to abandon their culture, their religion, and their language. No one else has tried anything like this. And they have decimated Uyghur society," Mr Roth added.
The Uyghurs in Esquel’s yard are just tiny cogs in this enormous system. For them, the threat of the state is never far away. In the footage verified by RTÉ, watching them load the cotton from a seat in the shade was a man in combat fatigues, his peaked cap bearing a distinctive symbol of China’s power – a yellow star emblem of the People’s Liberation Army.
But the story of those Uyghurs in Esquel's yard does not end in Xinjiang. An RTÉ investigation has found that Esquel and another Chinese textile company that uses Uyghur forced labour, Jiangsu Lianfa Textiles, supply hundreds of tons of cotton each year to at least 15 Bangladeshi factories that manufacture millions of items of clothing for major high-street brands.
Both Lianfa and Esquel have long-established operations in Xinjiang, with state media reports and other documentation showing their use of Uyghur forced labour.
RTÉ Investigates conducted new research to establish both companies’ ongoing links to Xinjiang, scouring Chinese social media to find videos of Uyghur workers at their sites, accessing up-to-date corporate records to show their ongoing ownership of Xinjiang companies, and trawling through thousands of state media and government records to establish their links to state-backed labour transfer schemes.
RTÉ Investigates also examined export records, collated by a third-party data provider from bill of lading data and customs records, to establish their supply of cotton and cotton fabrics to factories in Bangladesh.
And, by linking unique labelling codes to specific factories that source Uyghur cotton, RTÉ was able to walk into Penneys, Tesco, Marks and Spencer, and Dunnes Stores, and buy clothing manufactured by those same factories.
Walk into any major clothes retailer in Ireland, and you’ll be presented with signs and labels that highlight how they source their clothes ethically and sustainably.
WATCH: What your clothing labels really tell you
In correspondence with RTÉ, retailers highlighted their membership of certification systems like the Better Cotton Initiative and their use of isotopic testing from a company called Oritain to ensure their clothes are free of links to Uyghur forced labour. Tesco, Dunnes Stores, and Marks and Spencer are all members of the Better Cotton Initiative; Marks and Spencer and Penneys work with Oritain.
The claims underpinning these systems appear compelling. Better Cotton – it's sustainably sourced.
We see it on the labels in Tesco, on huge billboards in Marks and Spencer. Isotopic testing – looking at the fundamental atomic makeup of the cotton to identify the environmental and climatic conditions it grew in. Hard science.
These are the systems retailers use to help us to feel safe about the clothes we buy and wear. But do the systems stand up under scrutiny?
What the retailers say and what RTÉ Investigates found
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Patricia Carrier is a human rights lawyer with the UK-based Coalition to End Forced Labour in the Uyghur Region. The organisation was launched in 2020, and its first area of focus was the clothing industry because of the prevalence of Xinjiang cotton in global supply chains.
"That was around the time that the coalition started to engage Better Cotton privately in a series of meetings and letters to try to understand better what the initiative was doing, to raise awareness and provide guidance and resource, really to its membership on this issue," Ms Carrier said.
The coalition had a major concern; that Better Cotton's mass balance system was not intended to address issues around forced labour.
"The mass balance model is a system whereby farms are licenced as Better Cotton farms if they meet certain sustainability standards, and brands and retailers are able to acquire or source certain volume of that cotton from those farms.
"The issue arises in that the Better Cotton can be mixed or blended with what they call conventional cotton very early on in the supply chain, and that includes cotton from the Uyghur region," Ms Carrier added.
The Better Cotton Initiative is clear that none of the cotton sourced under mass balance is traceable to its origin. It told RTÉ Investigates that.
So, when Tesco cites the fact that its cotton is "100% Better Cotton Initiative," as it did in its response to RTÉ, is that a fair defence against allegations that its cotton is not tainted with forced labour?
"Absolutely not," Ms Carrier said.
"That is not a valid argument or way to show that a brand is doing all that they can to ensure they are not using Uyghur region cotton. Really, all that brands can be doing and should be doing is doing that mapping and tracing down to raw material level, which in this case means a cotton farm. Better Cotton already acknowledges that they don't have a traceability protocol or standard that goes back to the farm level."
So, could isotopic testing firms like Oritain solve the problem?
Dr Len Wassenaar was one of pioneers of isotopic testing back in the 1990s, and the former head of the isotope lab at the International Atomic Energy Agency.
"It's possible to get an accurate result [with testing], but you always have to be aware of the snakes in the grass," Dr Wassenaar told RTÉ from his lab at the University of Ottawa. "You would always have to have this constant vigilance to ensure that the fingerprints of that product, however it's come by, accurately reflect its origin."
And one of those so-called snakes in the grass is the mixing of cotton, as happens in the mass balance system.
"Mixing and blending, that is going to be a huge problem for using any isotopic or geochemical fingerprint because you're just literally mixing up sources," Dr Wassenaar said.
"So yes, you can get numbers, but the numbers would be very difficult to interpret because you don't know what the proportions of those different components would be. So you could have a cotton from the US mixed with a cotton from China. I'm just using an extreme example. They might be very different from each other isotopically. And if you mix them together, of course, it's just going to be a mixture of the two, which is a meaningless result."
If those systems are ineffective, all that retailers have left are written and verbal assurances from their supplier factories that their cotton is not from the Uyghur region, and those factories rely on those same assurances from their downstream suppliers.
Those suppliers that include companies known to be benefitting from Uyghur forced labour, like Jiangsu Lianfa Textiles and the Esquel Group.
And reliance on the Better Cotton Initiative is further undermined by a set of companies that are registered as mass balance suppliers: Jiangsu Lianfa Textile and its subsidiaries.
Experts including Carrier and Laura Murphy, an academic and specialist in Xinjiang supply chains who worked to identify companies linked to Uyghur forced labour for the United States government, say that sourcing from factories that are known to buy cotton from companies like Jiangsu Lianfa Textile and the Esquel Group is an "unacceptable risk".
Nevertheless, RTÉ was able to walk into stores in Ireland and purchase clothing it could trace back to these factories, and those items are still on the racks today.
The supply chain links behind the labels
Lianfa's links to Xinjiang are long established.
It has two wholly-owned subsidiaries in Xinjiang’s Aksu Textile Industrial City, according to Chinese corporate records retrieved in November 2024, named Aksu Tianxiang Home Textile and Aksu Tianxiang Cotton Industry.
Lianfa works closely with a European Union-sanctioned state-backed paramilitary called the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, operating farmland in areas under its control and receiving funding from a Corps-run bank, and it has been a long-term beneficiary of Uyghur forced labour, with rural Uyghurs forcibly transferred from their farms to work in Lianfa’s Aksu factory "under the mobilisation and organisation of the local government," according to government documents.
One state media report, from May 2023, gives a troubling insight into the process, describing the transfer of a Uyghur couple to work in Aksu Tianxiang Home Textile. The couple, farmers from a rural area called Onsu County, are portrayed as backwards and undesirable: lazy, poor, drunk, and looked on with derision by their community. The husband "felt ashamed" and "could not raise his head in front of his neighbours".
That is until the state stepped in. Local Communist Party officials "mobilised" the pair to leave their farm and their family to work in a factory in Aksu City, 30km to the south.
"At first, they were a little hesitant about whether to go out because they were worried that the children and the elderly at home would be left unattended, and the land and livestock would be left unmanaged," the article said. "What would happen to the family after they left?"
The solution? The state would take control of their land, the couple would cease being farmers, becoming factory workers, and, as the article states, they would "get rid of the history of their ancestors" to become "citizens" of a modern China.
The story gives a snapshot of some of the key goals of China’s Xinjiang policy - the acquisition of cheap labour, and the erasure of "undesirable" cultures, under what the Party describes as "poverty alleviation" schemes.
Footage posted to Chinese social media by local authorities in February 2024 shows dozens of other Uyghurs from Onsu County in the process of being "absorbed" into Aksu Tianxiang’s factory.
And videos of Uyghur workers, obtained from Chinese social media and verified by RTÉ, were posted from the Tianxiang factory site as recently as December 2024. The company, under its former name Aksu Sufa Textiles, is still registered as a mass balance supplier with the Better Cotton Initiative.
China’s actions in Xinjiang have been described as a genocide by many observers, including the United States State Department, the parliaments of Canada and the Netherlands, and human rights organisations including the Ireland-based Global Legal Action Network.
Laura Murphy agrees.
"The Chinese government has explicit directives that indicate that the police can lawfully detain a person who chooses not to go on a poverty alleviation programme or a labour transfer programme," Ms Murphy said.
"We see children being ripped from their parents and being trained to be different from their parents, we see people being forcibly migrated to places they don't want to go. These are all the hallmarks of a genocide."
The Chinese Embassy said any allegations of human rights abuses in Xinjiang were "lies and disinformation cooked up by anti-China forces." It said allegations of forced labour were "a convenient false narrative for some to create media hype and attack Xinjiang".
'You can make an enormous difference'
Tesco, Marks and Spencer, and Penneys all say that their suppliers are prohibited from using cotton from Xinjiang, with Primark saying that its suppliers are prohibited from "using or sourcing products, materials, components, or labour originating in any way from Xinjiang".
RTÉ's findings, however, show that the prevalence of Xinjiang cotton in Western supply chains is still widespread almost a decade after the human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang were first revealed.
As individuals, we can often feel powerless in the face of abuses of the scale committed by China in Xinjiang. But Kenneth Roth thinks that consumers can exercise their voices when it comes to Uyghur forced labour.
"Now, an individual consumer might say, Well, what difference can I make?" Mr Roth said.
"But you can make an enormous difference. If you go to your apparel store and say, Where are the clothes that are made without Uyghur forced labour? They're probably going to look at you like, I have no idea what you're talking about. But if enough people say that, if you post on social media what their response is, if you turn this into a public issue about Company X can't guarantee us anything about their apparel... that's precisely the thing that will force the company to change. That in turn will put pressure on Beijing to ease the use of Uyghur forced labour," he added.
But from a legislative point of view, the real power lies with the European Union.
"China cannot afford to retaliate against the entire European Union because China is a much bigger exporter than it is an importer," Mr Roth said.
"It doesn't want to get into a tariff or a trade battle with Europe because China will lose. It'll lose this huge market for its overproduction of goods that it needs in order to maintain a Chinese workforce. I actually think that the leverage is on the part of the Europeans. They're just not exercising it."
That may change in the coming years with new European legislation – the Forced Labour Regulation - set to come into force in 2027. The law will prohibit products from being imported, sold within, or exported from the European Union if forced labour has been used at any stage in the supply chain, with fines to be imposed if a company fails to take the items off the shelves.
"We are seeing quite a bit of movement in terms of regulation, and we are seeing that companies, including apparel brands, want to see more robust legislation in place," Patricia Carrier said.
"We do know that the European Commission and others are quite keen to enforce the regulation on goods that may be made with Uyghur forced labour."
For now, however, there is nothing to legally prevent goods made with forced labour from being sold in the European Union. "I suspect most consumers in the UK and the EU would assume that the government wouldn't allow products we know to be made with forced labour into the country," said Laura Murphy.
"And yet today, as it stands, you could send a box in, a cargo's container in, and put a made with slave labour stamp on the outside, and it would still be admissible into port in the EU."
As it stands, retailers are continuing to source from high-risk factories that use cotton from companies like Jiangsu Lianfa Textile and the Esquel Group. And the bottom line is this: these retailers can offer no guarantee to consumers of where the cotton came from.
"[Chinese companies] know that if they can get some Bangladeshi apparel company to sew the clothing that people may not ask, where did the cotton come from?," Mr Roth said.
"But a retail store has a duty to ask. If it cannot assure that a particular apparel manufacturer in some third country is not using cotton that is produced by Uyghur forced labour, it should not be buying from that factory. It should be as strict as that."
RTÉ Investigates: Forced Fashion is broadcast tonight, 24 September at 9:35 on RTÉ One and RTÉ Player. Documentary produced/directed by John Cunningham.
