.. INTERNATIONAL EDITION | WEDNESDAY, APRIL 7, 2021 VACCINE SKEPTICS U.S. EVANGELICALS OPT OUT OF SHOTS PAGE 5 | WORLD NISH KUMAR FAN OF BBC, EVEN AS SHOW ENDS PAGE 13 | CULTURE PUPPY PARENTING WISDOM TRAINERS AND THEIR TIPS ARE IN HIGH DEMAND PAGE 15 | LIVING companies invite legal enforcement from Washington under an American ban on imports. Labor activists will charge them with complicity in the grotesque repression of the Uyghurs. But forsaking Xinjiang cotton entails its own troubles — the wrath of Chinese consumers who denounce the attention Faced with accusations that it was prof- iting from the forced labor of Uyghur people in the Chinese territory of Xin- jiang, the H&M Group — the world’s sec- ond-largest clothing retailer — prom- ised last year to stop buying cotton from the region. But last month, H&M confronted a new outcry, this time from Chinese con- sumers who seized on the company’s re- nouncement of the cotton as an attack on China. Social media filled with angry demands for a boycott, urged on by the government. Global brands like H&M risked alienating a country of 1.4 billion people. The furor underscored how interna- tional clothing brands that rely on Chi- nese materials and factories now face the mother of all conundrums — a con- flict vastly more complex than their now-familiar reputational crises over exploitative working conditions in poor countries. If they fail to purge Xinjiang cotton from their supply chains, the apparel on the Uyghurs as a Western plot to sab- otage China’s development. The global brands can protect their sales in North America and Europe, or preserve their markets in China. It is in- creasingly difficult to see how they can do both. “They are being almost at this point told, ‘Choose the U.S. as your market, or choose China as your market,’” said Nicole Bivens Collinson, a lobbyist who represents major apparel brands at Sandler, Travis & Rosenberg, a law firm in Washington. In an age of globalization, interna- tional apparel brands have grown ac- customed to criticism that they are prof- iting from oppressed workers in coun- tries like Myanmar and Bangladesh, where low costs of production reflect alarming safety conditions. The brands have developed a proven playbook: They announce codes of con- duct for their suppliers and hire auditors to ensure at least the appearance of compliance. But China presents a gravely elevated risk. Xinjiang is not only the source of 85 percent of China’s cotton, it is also syn- onymous with a form of repression that the U.S. government has officially termed genocide. As many as a million Uyghurs have been herded into deten- tion camps and deployed as forced labor. The taint of association with Xinjiang is so severe that both the Trump and Bi- den administrations have sought to pre- vent Americans from buying clothing produced with the region’s cotton. For the apparel brands, the dilemma is heightened by the Chinese govern- ment’s weaponizing of China’s con- COTTON, PAGE 7 Picking cotton in Xinjiang, a Chinese region where as many as a million Uyghurs have been herded into detention camps and deployed as forced labor. AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES ‘Moral test’ for global apparel An H&M store in Beijing. Chinese consumers have seized on the company’s renouncing of cotton from Xinjiang as an attack on their country. KEVIN FRAYER/GETTY IMAGES Brands can forsake cotton from repressed region, but at cost of Chinese market BY PETER S. GOODMAN, VIVIAN WANG AND ELIZABETH PATON C. Tangana, one of Spain’s biggest rap stars, two years ago hit “a little bit of a crisis.” He was riding a wave of fame, known for provocative songs and equally pro- vocative interviews. But he was fast ap- proaching his 30s, he said in a recent Zoom interview, and risked becoming one of those “cringe-y, embarrassing” rappers who act a decade younger than they are. So C. Tangana — real name Antón Ál- varez Alfaro — did a U-turn and decided to try his hand at other styles of music that he had loved since childhood, like flamenco and rumba — even Spanish folk. “I was opening a window I’d kept closed,” he said, adding, “I assumed it would go wrong.” Álvarez’s experiment appears to have paid off. In February, he released “El Madrileño,” an album that mixes tradi- tional Spanish and Latin American styles, including rock, with electronic sounds and beats more familiar to his trap and reggaeton fans. It’s turned him from Spain’s biggest rapper into one of its biggest pop stars. One of the album’s early tracks, “Tú Me Dejaste De Querer” (“You Stopped Loving Me”), has over 100 million views on YouTube. “You can listen to his music anytime, in any shop” Pablo Gil, a music journal- ist at El Mundo, a Spanish daily newspa- per, said in a telephone interview. Some of the musical styles it features were last popular in Spain in the 1970s, when the country was under Franco’s dictatorship, Gil added. Álvarez, he said, was taking old-fashioned sounds, “sub- verting their meaning and making them modern.” In a review for the newspaper El País, the music critic Carlos Marcos wrote, “It remains to be seen whether this is the birth of a new Spanish pop, or some- thing that we will forget in a few years.” “But who cares?” he added. “Let’s en- joy it today, and we’ll see tomorrow.” On YouTube, C. Tangana’s videos now attract comments from older music fans who would presumably never have gone near his records before. “I thought the music my son listened to was for land- fill,” wrote Felix Guinnot, who said he was in his 50s, “but this boy is changing my musical perception.” Álvarez’s road to fame has been wind- ing, with multiple changes of name to re- flect new musical personas. Born in Ma- drid, he started rapping in his teens, he said, but twice gave up on music en- tirely. When the 2008 global financial crisis hit Spain particularly hard — its lingering effects are still felt by the country’s youth — he stopped rapping to work in a fast-food restaurant. Later, he got a job in a call center selling cell- phones. He started rapping again after falling C. TANGANA, PAGE 2 A rapper’s latest gig: Spanish pop star LONDON His winding path to fame leads to a musical style more rumba than rap BY ALEX MARSHALL Antón Álvarez Alfaro, who performs as C. Tangana, shows Spain his folksy side. JAVIER RUIZ The New York Times publishes opinion from a wide range of perspectives in hopes of promoting constructive debate about consequential questions. It has been Day 1 at Amazon ever since the company began, more than a quar- ter-century ago. Day 1 is Amazon short- hand for staying hungry, making bold decisions and never forgetting about the customer. This start-up mentality — un- derdogs against the world — has been extremely good for Amazon’s shoppers and shareholders. Day 1 holds less appeal for some of Amazon’s employees, especially those doing the physical work in the ware- houses. A growing number feel the com- pany is pushing them past their limits and risking their health. They would like Amazon to usher in a more benign Day 2. The clash between the desire for Day 1 and Day 2 has been unfolding in Ala- bama, where Amazon warehouse work- ers in the community of Bessemer have voted on whether to form a union. Gov- ernment labor regulators are getting ready to sort through the votes in the closely watched election. A result may come as soon as this week. If the union gains a foothold, it will be the first in the company’s history. Attention has been focused on Besse- mer, but the struggle between Day 1 and Day 2 is increasingly playing out every- where in Amazon’s world. At its heart, the conflict is about control. To maintain Day 1, the company needs to lower labor costs and increase productivity, which requires measuring and tweaking every moment of a worker’s existence. That kind of control is at the heart of the Amazon enterprise. The idea of sur- rendering it is the company’s greatest horror. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, wrote in his 2016 shareholder letter: “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrele- vance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.” For many years, Amazon has man- aged to maintain control and keep Day 1 going by dazzling with delivery, and it has counted on the media, regulators and politicians to ignore everything un- pleasant. The few stories about workers rarely got traction. But Amazon is now the second-larg- est private employer in the country. There is widespread pro-worker senti- ment in the United States and a pro-un- ion president. In Bessemer, many of the pro-union workers are Black, which makes this a civil rights story as well. So the costs associated with Day 1 are finally coming into view. And it is show- ing up not only in Alabama, but in the form of lawsuits, restive workers at other warehouses, congressional oversight, scrutiny from labor regula- tors and, most noisily, on Twitter. In recent weeks, a heated discussion AMAZON, PAGE 7 Workers at Amazon grow tired of start-up pace Wringing out inefficiencies has meant tight control of employees’ every move BY DAVID STREITFELD The most harrowing story I’ve read in The Times in recent days was Miriam Jordan’s account of a car crash last month in Southern California involving a Ford Expedition that had come from Mexico, straight through a breach in the border wall. The Ford was crammed with 25 people when it hit a tractor-trailer rig on Route 115, 110 miles east of San Diego. “Few of the survivors have been able to describe what happened next,” Jordan writes. “The crunch of metal and glass, the bodies flung dozens of feet across the pavement. Twelve people died on the spot, a 13th at a nearby hospital.” Jordan follows the stories of the victims and survivors, and there’s a heartbreak- ing sameness to them: people who have been driven by fear or want from their homes in Mex- ico and Central America, and who are willing to take grave risks and pay exorbitant sums to make it to the United States. These are not terrorists, gang mem- bers, lowlifes, benefit seekers or — except in their willingness to violate U.S. immigration laws — lawbreakers. They are seekers of the American dream, worthy of our compassion and respect. Yet those 13 people — along with others who have recently lost their lives in dangerous crossings — might not have met their grisly fate if the Biden administration’s concept of compassion wasn’t also an inducement to recklessness. And they would not have been killed if a wall had been standing in their way. That’s a conclusion I’ve come to reluctantly, and not because I’ve aban- doned my disgust with Donald Trump. Walls are ugly things: symbols of defensive, suspicious, often closed- minded civilizations. Walls are, invari- ably, permeable: Whatever else a border wall will do, it will not seal off America from unwanted visitors or undocumented workers — roughly half of whom arrive legally and overstay their visas. Walls also cannot address the root cause of our immigration crisis, which Why Biden must finish Trump’s wall OPINION A physical barrier could actually help Democrats win immigra- tion reform. STEPHENS, PAGE 9 Bret Stephens GEM DIOR COLLECTION dior.com Y(1J85IC*KKOKKR( +%!"!$!=![ Issue Number No. 42,940 Andorra € 5.00 Antilles € 4.50 Austria € 4.00 Belgium € 4.00 Bos. & Herz. 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