Marjorie Yang has staked much of her textile empire on being socially responsible, and yet her firm, Esquel Group, ended up on the Entity List. Has the U.S. government gone too far by sanctioning Esquel Group?
When Marjorie Yang took the stage in a grand, wood-paneled room at Hong Kong University, she was in high spirits. The 65-year-old business executive joked about being a nerd (she graduated from M.I.T. with a math degree), told stories about smoking cigarettes out of dormitory windows at boarding school, and explained to the assembled students that she had volunteered to speak first at the event because, as a rare woman among the ranks of Hong Kong tycoons, she was always fighting to make her voice heard.
With 35,000 employees producing 100 million garments each year, her company, Esquel Group, is one of the world’s largest shirtmakers and a supplier for premium brands like Patagonia, Calvin Klein, and Tommy Hilfiger. A few minutes into her speech, Yang even made a quip about her nickname: “The Cotton Princess from Xinjiang.”
It was September 2017, and to the international community, Xinjiang was not yet a flashpoint of human rights and forced labor
Exclusive longform investigative journalism, Q&As, news and analysis, and data on Chinese business elites and corporations. We publish China scoops you won't find anywhere else.
A weekly curated reading list on China from David Barboza, Pulitzer Prize-winning former Shanghai correspondent for The New York Times.
A daily roundup of China finance, business and economics headlines.
We offer discounts for groups, institutions and students. Go to our Subscriptions page for details.
The guanxi game has defined China's modern business culture — and no one played it better than Xu Jiayin, the CEO of Evergrande. Now, however, the game seems to have changed on him.
The member of European Parliament talks about being sanctioned, a new EU Taiwan report, and why the CAI was a slap in the face of the incoming Biden administration.
