International Hotel Giants Are Profiting Despite Genocide in Xinjiang

June 2, 2025 | Foreign Policy | By Peter Irwin and Henryk Szadziewski

In January 2021, the U.S. government declared that China was committing genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs in Xinjiang. The U.K. Parliament and the French National Assembly soon followed suit with their own such pronouncements.

The U.S., U.K., and French statements sought to employ a core tactic of modern human rights advocacy: the “naming and shaming” of abusive governments by other states, legislative bodies, and nongovernmental organizations. Naming and shaming entails identifying and criticizing governments for human rights violations in order to pressure them to change their behavior. By declaring a genocide, the United States hoped to galvanize the international community and push China to change course.

But sometimes, governments that name and shame other countries are silent when companies profit from those very same abuses.

This tension reveals a fundamental weakness within the current human rights playbook. Moral outrage directed at abusive states can only go so far in ending rights violations when corporate actors are given a free pass. If the naming and shaming of governments is not matched with constraints on business activities in regions where atrocity crimes are ongoing, the approach risks becoming an exercise in selective accountability—strong in calling out government abuses but quiet on capital.

Some prominent companies have accepted that operating amid atrocity crimes is untenable. They are often motivated by reputational or legal risks.

H&M stopped sourcing cotton from suppliers based in Xinjiang in 2020 because of forced labor concerns. Volkswagen decided to withdraw from the region last year following a deluge of criticism for continuing to operate a joint venture with SAIC Motor just a few miles from several internment camps in Urumqi holding Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples.

The German chemical giant BASF announced in 2024 that it would speed up its departure from Xinjiang after German public broadcaster ZDF and magazine Spiegel alleged that two of BASF’s partner firms, Markor Chemical Manufacturing and Markor Meiou Chemical, were involved in human rights abuses. According to the outlets, employees from Markor Chemical spied on Uyghur families, reporting “suspicious” behavior—such as religious belief—to the Chinese authorities. BASF recently completed its divestment from the joint ventures.

Predictably, the human rights audits that Volkswagen and BASF conducted prior to their withdrawals from Xinjiang turned up no evidence of violations by the companies. Conducting credible due diligence is nearly impossible in the context of atrocity crimes, where state surveillance is total and workers are constantly under threat of punishment.

China only recently freed five staff members, all Chinese nationals, of the Mintz Group, a U.S. due diligence firm that had been conducting investigations into forced labor risks in supply chains connected to Xinjiang. The employees were detained in a March 2023 raid on Mintz’s Beijing offices, accused of conducting “foreign-related statistical investigations” without required government approval.

In addition to the high-profile exits by H&M, Volkswagen, and BASF, some companies have restructured their supply chains to comply with the U.S. Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), which bars imports linked to Xinjiang unless forced labor can be explicitly ruled out. That has led some observers to describe Xinjiang as a “no-go” zone for Western companies.

But our own research at the Uyghur Human Rights Project suggests that one prominent industry continues to avoid scrutiny for operating in Xinjiang: major international hotel chains. Rather than reducing their exposure to the region, these companies are on a building spree.

In addition to the 115 hotels that are currently operational in Xinjiang, we identified another 74 in various stages of planning and construction from international hotel giants—Accor, Hilton, Hyatt, IHG, Marriott, Minor Hotels, and Wyndham. Marriott will open at least 13 hotels located in Xinjiang in 2026, including a Ritz-Carlton in Urumqi. IHG will open nine hotels in the region in 2025 and another seven in 2026, including InterContinentals in Urumqi, Kashgar, and Ghulja. (InterContinental is IHG’s flagship luxury brand.)

Moreover, we documented a long list of rights abuses connected to hotels in Xinjiang, including forced labor, presence on territories controlled by an entity under targeted human rights sanctions, financial and management links to Chinese state-owned enterprises, and hotels hosting Chinese state propaganda events. Hilton even opened a hotel on the site of the Duling Mosque in central Khotan, which local authorities demolished in 2018. None of the seven hotel chains responded to our repeated requests for comment.

When considering that hotels usually have a three-to-five-year time horizon from contract to opening, it’s reasonable to infer that these companies were making decisions to expand their presences in Xinjiang at a time when civil society, governments, and the United Nations were already speaking the language of atrocity crimes.

On average, around 10 hotels from these chains opened in Xinjiang each year from 2018 to 2023. The world learned about China’s mass internment of Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples in 2017; by 2018, knowledge of the campaign was widespread. In 2024, 18 hotels opened in Xinjiang; 32 are scheduled for 2025 and at least another 52 in 2026 and beyond. Do the math: International chains appear to have moved forward with construction in Xinjiang despite mounting evidence of systematic human rights abuses there.

The business model of international hotel chains means they have avoided the burden of supply chain regulations. A core operation involves licensing their brand name to Chinese companies through franchising agreements or management partnerships, making them virtually invisible to trade-focused rules, such as the UFLPA.

By operating and expanding in Xinjiang, multibillion-dollar hotel companies not only risk complicity in China’s abuses against Uyghurs, but they actively help normalize repression by supporting state-led efforts to promote tourism and investment. China’s central Ministry of Culture and Tourism plans to significantly boost tourism infrastructure in the region between 2024 and 2026—and has enlisted influencers to spread the word. Nonetheless, a February 2025 report from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum found that “all of the policies that led to accusations of mass atrocities in the Uyghur region continue, and some are expanding.”

All businesses have a responsibility to respect human rights at all times and in all circumstances. In high-risk areas where there are credible allegations of genocide, crimes against humanity, or widespread and systematic human rights violations—such as in Xinjiang—businesses cannot claim neutrality. The only way for these companies to uphold their human rights responsibilities is to completely exit the region.

This brings us back to the question of whether naming and shaming is an effective strategy. Leonard Benardo and Omar Waraich’s recent review in Foreign Policy of Kenneth Roth’s memoir, Righting Wrongs, critically examines the naming-and-shaming approach of Human Rights Watch, the organization Roth led for nearly 30 years. The naming-and-shaming advocacy strategy has undoubtedly been effective in changing the behavior of some governments, although Roth concedes that governments have grown more immune to shaming over time.

Governments try to insulate themselves from shame by tightly controlling information and leveraging economic incentives, as China has done. Companies work overtime to do the same. This is certainly the case when the governments in which they have jurisdiction—such as the United States, United Kingdom, or France—remain silent about companies’ risks of contributing to abuses.

If the naming-and-shaming approach is going to be effective, there must be consistency between what the U.S. government says about Xinjiang and how U.S.-based companies Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, and Wyndham behave. The same goes for the United Kingdom and France in relation to IHG and Accor, respectively. (Minor Hotels is based in Thailand, which has never spoken out about human rights abuses in Xinjiang.)

This disconnect undermines the credibility and effectiveness of international pressure campaigns based on human rights. For the Chinese government, internationally branded hotels are more than just commercial enterprises; they are the physical representations of the limits of Western moral condemnation. The hotels’ presence in Xinjiang signals that no matter how grave Western accusations of human rights abuses against China, corporations that operate in the region can skate by unchallenged.

Without consistent accountability, the naming-and-shaming approach is largely performative. To address the risk of atrocities in Xinjiang—or in Ukraine, Myanmar, Gaza, and elsewhere—governments must call out corporations profiting from abuses, not limit their selective condemnation to state actors. Otherwise, corporations cash in while abusive governments are let off the hook.

Read the article online: https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/06/02/china-xinjiang-uyghur-genocide-hotel-chains-marriott-ihg/