Rights groups blast Skechers over new store in East Turkestan
Rights groups are condemning U.S. footwear and apparel company Skechers as it used the star power of martial arts actor Donnie Yen to open a new store in occupied East Turkestan, also called Xinjiang.
It did that despite allegations that Uyghur Muslims in China’s far west are being used for forced labor.
In a video Yen posted to Instagram, crowds inside a glitzy shopping mall in the regional capital of Urumqi clamored to catch a glimpse of the Hong Kong actor.
Yen is a Skechers brand ambassador and is known to have pro-China sympathies.
Skechers promoted its Sept. 28 Urumqi store opening heavily on Chinese social media.
The brand is big in China.
Of Skechers’ 5,200 retail stores worldwide, China has the most with more than 940.
Jewher Ilham, the forced labor project coordinator at the Worker Rights Consortium, said the big promotional event showed Skechers was “completely tone deaf” to concerns about the use of Uyghur forced labor in Xinjiang.
“Skechers isn’t yet taking seriously the need to extricate its business from the Uyghur region, even after it was previously linked to forced labor by U.S. Customs and other institutions,” Ilham said.
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