Opinion: Are Olympic uniforms being worn by volunteers tainted by forced labor? IOC says it looked into it.

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BEIJING – Everywhere you turn at these Olympic Games, friendly staff members and volunteers are impeccably dressed in uniforms depicting white snow peaks and blue Chinese skies. As the competitions get underway in full force, we will see hundreds of technical officials wearing similarly attractive grey and white gear with red accents on their sleeves.

But it’s the logo over the right breast that your eyes should be drawn to.

The nondescript symbol, which looks vaguely like the silhouette of an impala’s head or perhaps a pickaxe, represents Anta Sports, a Chinese sporting goods giant that endorses several NBA players, including Klay Thompson and Gordon Hayward. It is also the parent company of a subsidiary that owns legacy American brands like Wilson and Louisville Slugger. The founder of Lululemon, Canadian billionaire Chip Wilson, is heavily invested in the company.

In China, the world’s second-largest economy, Anta is a very big deal. It’s also at the center of arguably the biggest political controversy surrounding these Olympics involving alleged genocide and human rights abuses in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of northwest China.

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More than 80 percent of China’s cotton production, and about 20 percent of the world’s supply, comes from Xinjiang. Activists and human rights watchdogs have claimed for several years that the region’s supply chain relies on forced labor as part of a systemic targeting of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities.

The U.S. government now agrees with that characterization. Last July, the State Department put out an advisory to American businesses stating that “the abuses include widespread, state-sponsored forced labor and intrusive surveillance, forced population control measures and separation of children from families, mass detention and other human rights abuses amidst ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity.” Then in December, President Biden signed a bill banning all imports from the Xinjiang region unless it can be proven that forced labor wasn’t involved.

China, of course, denies that any of this is happening. Its government has accused the U.S. of making up lies to undermine China’s economic prosperity. Anta, meanwhile, continues to source cotton from Xinjiang and made clear in a statement last year it had no plans to stop.

But that’s where things start to get murky when it comes to these Olympics. Are the uniforms being worn by thousands of people at the Games and goods being sold with the Olympic logo on them tainted by slave labor?

After members of Congress started asking those questions publicly, the IOC put out a statement Jan. 19 saying it had commissioned a third-party audit to ensure any products with the Olympic logo conformed to the IOC Supplier Code, which expressly rejects goods made with forced labor or child labor. It focused specifically on Anta and Hengyuanxiang Group, which was announced in 2019 as the supplier of the formal uniforms for the IOC bigwigs.

The IOC’s statement is reliant on two talking points. The first is that their third-party audit relied on “meaningful engagement with workers on their working conditions.” The second is that Anta’s uniforms do not contain cotton and the Hengyuanxiang uniforms use cotton that doesn’t come from China.

“We did not find any extreme violations against our IOC Supplier Code, including no forced, bonded, indentured or child labour,” the statement said.

Beyond those broad strokes, details are scant. So scant that it would be more than fair to view anything the interminably corrupt IOC says about this issue with a healthy dose of skepticism. After all, what exactly was the IOC going to do if human rights violations were found? Pull the Games out of Beijing? Threaten one of their major corporate partners? Get real.

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“I hope people don’t buy it,” said Jewher Ilham, an author and Uyghur activist whose father, economics professor Ilham Tohti, was detained in 2014 and sentenced to life in prison on charges of separatist activities.

As Ilham points out, the IOC’s statement disclosed no names of factories that were searched, nor any details about which so-called “third party” was used or when this supposed audit was conducted. We’re just supposed to take its word for it. Beyond that, Ilham said, it wouldn’t even be possible to do a legitimate investigation of how these materials were sourced.

“The due diligence mechanisms that work elsewhere in the world simply don’t work in China because it’s not possible for workers to speak candidly to independent investigators without the fear of retaliation or being subjected to punishment,” she said. “So in the absence of being able to definitely prove there’s no forced labor, we need to operate with the assumption the entire region is tainted by forced labor."

Not only does that mirror the U.S. government’s assessment, the idea that anyone could prove no forced labor was used to make these goods – least of all the IOC – strains credulity. In fact, the Chinese haven’t even granted the United Nations’ lead human rights commissioner, Michelle Bachelet, access to the region despite requests going back to 2018 when allegations of Uyghur concentration camps first arose.

The South China Morning Post out of Hong Kong reported just last week, citing unnamed sources, that Bachelet would be approved for a friendly visit – not an investigation – and only after the Olympics.

How convenient for everyone, most of all the IOC.

By then, the Olympic circus will be gone from Beijing. The howling about cotton production and accusations of genocide will fade into a cacophony of indignities in the IOC’s wake. And those mysterious, potentially tainted uniforms will be nothing more than souvenirs the IOC will no longer have to answer for.