How are products blatantly labeled as from Xinjiang being sold on U.S. supermarket shelves?
Illustration by Sam Ward
One weekend in March, a casual shopper in an Asian supermarket in Falls Church, Virginia, came across a surprising discovery in the fruit aisle.
Innocuously labeled “SWEET DATES” in English, it was the Chinese that caught her eye: 兵团红红枣 — “Bingtuan Red red dates.”
Bingtuan is another name for the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC): the Chinese state-run paramilitary conglomerate with sprawling powers in government, prison management, media, and education, as well as agricultural and industrial production. Its operations are key to what the U.S. government has labeled a genocide against Uyghur Muslims in China's Xinjiang region and the company's leaders have been sanctioned by a phalanx of Western countries.
Credit: The Wire
So why are the Bingtuan’s dates being sold less than half an hour from the White House?
It turns out that red dates — small fruits also known as jujubes — are the third largest agricultural pr
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