What the West can do about China’s Uyghur labour camps

Coca-Cola’s most controversial bottling plant is a huge factory located in an industrial zone just outside the city of Urumqi in western China. Logistically, the factory is well situated: the international airport is a short drive away, as is the high-speed train station close to the fashionable Wyndham hotel. But the problem for Coca-Cola — and other western companies such as Volkswagen and BASF, which operate plants in the same region — is the existence of hundreds of facilities not mentioned on any official map. The Cofco Coca-Cola plant, a joint venture with a Chinese state company, is surrounded by prisons and re-education camps in which China suppresses local ethnic minorities, according to human rights experts. Many of those minorities are forced to work for factories or farms making products also sold in the UK.

Xinjiang, a huge area of remote deserts and rich mineral resources, is the centre of what world religious leaders, including five Church of England bishops, have named as ‘one of the most egregious human tragedies since the Holocaust’.