Swedish H&M stops appearing on Chinese e-commerce sites

Several e-commerce sites in China today stopped displaying the digital store of Swedish clothing brand H&M, just months after the company announced it would discontinue use of Xinjiang cotton.

The brand was decided because of the alleged use of forced labor in the sector in that autonomous province in northwest China.

According to the Spanish news agency EFE, searches for the Swedish brand on JD.com, Daoba, Tamal and Pintudo sites yielded no results.

On Wednesday, the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League of China posted a message on the social networking site Weibo (called “Chinese Twitter”), in which it asked: “Did you want to make money in China when rumors spread that Xinjiang was ignoring cotton? You wanted to!”.

Accompanying the text was a statement from H&M, which stated that the brand would ban “any forced labor” on its production chain “regardless of country or region”.

The company also pointed out that it would end its employment relationship with the Chinese supplier until the allegations in a statement were clarified, according to which 82 Chinese and foreign companies have benefited by forcibly relocating members of the Uyghur minority.

As of 11:30 a.m. (04:30 in Lisbon), the Communist Youth League’s message already had more than 40,000 shares and more than 411,000 “likes” and 16,000 comments, many of which were in favor of expelling the brand from the country.

Other companies, such as US Nike, which released a similar report to H&M last year, have also been hit by calls to boycott some Chinese internet users, which led to the termination of the advertising deal with actor Wang Yibo Nike.

The calls for boycott came months after H&M and Nike’s statements on the issue, the same week the EU announced sanctions against four individuals and a Chinese company for human rights abuses in Xinjiang.

The United Kingdom, Canada and the United States have announced similar sanctions.

On Monday, the same day that the measures were announced, China responded with sanctions against ten individuals and four EU companies.