From Norwegian salmon to basketball, a brief history of China’s patriotic consumer boycotts

In China, the fate of a foreign company can change overnight.

Brands including H&M, Nike, and Zara are learning this lesson the hard way, as they face consumer boycotts for comments they have made expressing concern over the use of forced labor in Xinjiang, or pledges not to use cotton from there. And despite their flip-flops, and efforts to tell one story to Western consumers and another to Chinese ones, the backlash is only growing.

Beijing is accused of having detained around 1 million Uyghurs and members of other ethnic minority groups in camps in the far western region, prompting sanctions of firms including apparel and tech suppliers by the US last year. The authorities have defended the camps as necessary for eradicating extremist indoctrination (the Uyghurs are largely Muslim). More recently Europe, the US and others last week sanctioned a number of Chinese officials in connection with alleged abuses in Xinjiang, and the boycotts began soon after.

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