U.S. media quoted informed sources as saying that after the Chinese Communist Party compelled the domestic public to launch a campaign to boycott foreign companies such as H&M that refused to use cotton from Xinjiang, officials from the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda ministry quietly held two days of “celebrations” in Beijing. They thought they had won, and were pleased that the fanning of the flames had worked against Western companies.
An H&M clothing store in Beijing, China.
When the boycott of foreign brands such as H&M, Nike and UNIQLO spread rapidly across mainland China, many questioned whether it was orchestrated by the Chinese Communist government. A March 31 report in the Wall Street Journal seems to provide a new clue as to how this came about.
The China Daily reported that the campaign against H&M and other companies was a result of the CCP’s so-called “successful experience” in cracking down on Hong Kong, and that it had planned at least two schemes.
According to sources, the Chinese Foreign Ministry and the Communist Party’s Central Propaganda Department met in late February to discuss the international situation, citing the Hong Kong incident and the need to “fight back” when international attention turned to the Uighur people.
The CCP’s so-called “victory experience” in suppressing the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong refers to the fact that when pro-democracy protests erupted in Hong Kong in 2019, the CCP began its efforts to block and delete images of Hong Kong people’s protests on the mainland. Later, the CCP changed its tactics and instead spread censored and inaccurate images of Hong Kong people’s protests on the mainland, falsely claiming that they were evidence of Western countries’ “attempts to destabilize China”. The falsified propaganda confused some mainlanders and won them some so-called “support.
Two China Daily sources said a Communist Party official discussed applying this “victory experience” to the Xinjiang issue, using similar tactics to hype up the topic of Xinjiang cotton, and that those present also discussed the possibility of putting pressure on foreign companies that depend on the Chinese market.
According to sources, some of the participating CCP “scholars” argued that the CCP should loudly refute all “fake news” about Xinjiang (accusations of human rights violations, genocide and other related news), while others “scholars” and “political advisors” suggest that pressure from “civil society” should be mobilized to deal with foreign companies’ “inappropriate statements “rather than the government itself.
So far, the Communist Party’s attacks on H&M and other Western brands appear to follow the second opinion.
On March 24, the Communist Party of China said on its official Weibo account that H&M “wants to make money in China while creating rumors to boycott Xinjiang cotton? You’re delusional!” Then, starting with the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League, almost all official media outlets, including CCTV and People’s Daily, launched an all-out attack on H&M at about the same time, which later spread to Nike and many other brands.
Free Asia reports that the Communist Youth League is a veteran of boycotts. Looking up information, the Communist Youth League launched a boycott of Lotte when the South Korean group transferred land to the U.S. military for the deployment of the SAD missile defense system in 2017; the Communist Youth League also threatened to boycott Apple when it listed Taiwan as a country on its website in 2019. Pulin, a doctoral student in the Department of Political Science at Tulane University who worked at Taiwan’s National Defense and Security Research Institute, believes that most of these actions were operated by the YCL and the party media system.
However, Bloomberg analyst Marquez said, “[Boycotting foreign companies over human rights] is a problem that comes with authoritarian leaders who subject the population to significant economic losses in pursuit of other goals, just like Burma, North Korea or Russia.”
She added, “For now, there is only one clear outcome to this mess, and that is noise. The boycott will keep the spotlight on allegations of brutal abuse against China’s Uighurs and other minorities, which are now getting too little exposure. But that must not be what Beijing, and its war-wolf attacks, want.”
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