Status: 05.01.2022 8:26 a.m.
Hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs are imprisoned in re-education camps in the Chinese province of Xinjiang and are forced to do hard labor. Tesla has now opened a new showroom in this region. That causes outrage.
On New Year’s Eve, Tesla announced the opening of new exhibition rooms in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang province, via the Chinese social media platform Weibo. “We will meet in Xinjiang on the last day of 2021,” said Tesla’s Weibo channel.
This is now causing displeasure – with a delay of a few days. Human rights activists and US politicians criticize Tesla for choosing the location of its new branch. After all, according to Western governments and human rights groups, Beijing is supposed to be suppressing the Uighur Muslim minority there with the help of so-called re-education camps and forced labor. China denies this.
Violent allegations from the USA
The American-Islamic Relations Council, the largest Muslim organization in the United States, has accused Tesla of “supporting genocide.” The Republican US Senator Marco Rubio also sharply criticized the opening of Tesla’s new store in Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi. “Stateless companies are helping the Chinese Communist Party cover up genocide and slavery in the region,” he wrote on Twitter.
Sanctions and a new law
A spokeswoman for US President Joe Biden said yesterday when asked that she did not want to comment on individual companies. The government is clearly of the opinion that the private sector should reject the “human rights violations and the genocide in Xinjiang”. Firms that engage in forced labor or human rights abuses through doing business in China will be held accountable, she warned.
The US has already imposed sanctions on the situation in Xinjiang. It was not until December that the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act came into force with President Biden’s signature. On the basis of this law, imports from there can now also be prohibited.
VW operates its own plant in Xinjiang
Meanwhile, Tesla is not the only international automaker active in Xinjiang. The German car company Volkswagen even operates its own plant there, for which it has repeatedly been heavily criticized in the past. Even after the new law, VW does not have to fear import bans on the part of the USA. The cars that are being built at the Volkswagen plant in Xinjiang are destined for the Chinese market.
The bottom line is that it is becoming increasingly difficult for international companies to operate in the field of tension between foreign sanctions and human rights violations in China. Only recently, the US chip manufacturer Intel announced that it would no longer use goods and services from Xinjiang. Strong criticism and calls for a boycott from China were immediately followed by an apology from the company on Weibo.