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?
Illustration by Luis Grañena
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 concerns. At
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