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简体中文In northern Chile, the Atacama Desert unfolds its surreal, scorched-earth-colored landscapes. A few kilometers from the international port of Iquique, toxic fumes drift above an illegal clothing dump. Some items are still sealed in their Shein plastic packaging, tagged, never tried on. Trucks make their way up the chaotic dirt track; young drivers are paid €20 to unload the bales, pour on gasoline, light a cigarette, and drive off. This scheme, exposed last year by the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, is clearly illegal. But the authorities in Santiago look the other way. And Shein claims to know nothing about this trafficking.
One of the distinguishing features of this ultra-fast-fashion giant, which operates in 160 countries, is its opacity compared with its major rival, Spain’s Inditex, which by contrast is listed on the stock exchange. “Shein is expert at diluting its responsibility,” confides a former executive speaking on condition of anonymity. The company owns no manufacturing plants of its own. It presents itself as an intermediary between manufacturers and customers. This fragmented structure lets it claim to be unaware of any wrongdoing.
Shein’s executive chairman, Donald Tang, can thus repeat, interview after interview, that his business generates almost zero unsold stock. When asked about the bales found in Chile or elsewhere, he clams up. There’s the same denial when it comes to human resources policy: Shein claims to “have put in place a code of conduct for its suppliers, and zero tolerance for forced labor and child labor.” Fine. But footage filmed in China by our partner “Complément d’enquête” nonetheless shows employees paid less than 30 euro cents per piece, chained to their sewing machines for twelve hours a day, sometimes working thirty days in a row.
According to internal data, profits stood at $1 billion in 2024, on revenue of $37 billion. Beyond that, it’s all opaque. It isn’t even clear who really runs the group, which has 16,000 employees. The founder’s name is Chris Xu, or “Sky” Xu as he’s called internally. Very few photos of him exist. He is so rarely seen that his own employees wouldn’t recognize him if they passed him.
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This fortysomething, a graduate in international trade who founded Shein in 2012 in southeastern China, the cradle of the country’s textile industry, is said to still hold 37% of the company’s shares (recently valued at €26 billion), housed, according to the Swiss NGO Public Eye, in a structure based in the Cayman Islands, a well-known tax haven. The rest of the capital is said to be spread among international financial funds, such as America’s Sequoia Capital, General Atlantic, Tiger Global Management, and Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund.
Donald Tang, the face of Shein whose name appears nowhere
In 2021, the group’s headquarters were moved from Guangzhou to Singapore, another tax haven, and Donald Tang was appointed. This financier has spent almost his entire career in the United States and holds US citizenship. Chris Xu initially asked him to act as an adviser whilst he was considering a listing in New York, a plan that has since been abandoned.
Donald Tang has gradually become the public face of Shein, its official spokesperson, “even though his name does not appear anywhere in the annual report of the parent company in Singapore”, notes David Hachfeld, the investigator at Public Eye. Chris Xu has no doubt learnt from the misadventures of other Chinese billionaires who ‘disappeared’ for a few months (such as the founder of Alibaba, the Chinese equivalent of Amazon), after stepping too far into the limelight. “A Chinese proverb says, ‘The mountains are high and the emperor is far away’,” quotes Laure Pallez, co-founder of the think tank La France et le monde en commun, who lived in China for many years, adding:
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
Xu belongs to this new generation of Chinese capitalists who keep their distance from those in power in order to retain maximum room for manoeuvre.
Although the company’s management is no longer based in China, the operational heart of the business remains in Guangzhou, where Shein benefits from a very dense network of small workshops, each employing just a few people, which are capable of responding extremely quickly. Locally, the authorities are, to say the least, lax when it comes to enforcing labour laws. The NGO China Labor Watch, in a report published last July, also notes that Shein sources a small proportion of its cotton from the Xinjiang region, where the Uyghur population is subjected to forced labour. Xu belongs to this new generation of Chinese capitalists who keep their distance from the authorities in order to retain maximum room for manoeuvre.
What are the consequences for Shein, which has once again refused to appear before MPs in the National Assembly?
When questioned in January by British MPs as part of a parliamentary committee, a Shein representative, Yinan Zhu, failed to provide assurances on this matter. Following the hearing, the committee chair, Labour MP Liam Byrne, said he was “horrified” and had “virtually no confidence in the integrity” of the fabric supply chain.
Products that are not of a high enough standard to be sold in China
The ultra-fast-fashion giant, which operates through 26 warehouses in China, four in Brazil and one in Wroclaw, Poland, benefits from the formidable logistics infrastructure provided by the Chinese government. “Ever since China decided that international e-commerce was a route to expansion, it has been pursuing a policy of massive investment,” points out Sandrine Zerbib, co-author of an essay on Chinese entrepreneurs, *Dragon Tactics* (Dunod, 2022). The government has created free trade zones around airports, within which export procedures are simplified and inexpensive.
The company is also benefiting from the extensive national training programme in future technologies, which is now enabling Chinese engineers to outperform their Western counterparts.
A pioneer in the use of artificial intelligence in the textile industry, Shein is said to be several years ahead of the rest of the industry in this field. Ironically, however, Shein’s products are not sold in China, as local customers do not consider them to be of high enough quality, as Laure Pallez explained to us: “Chinese customers today are looking above all for quality, with their eyes fixed on the Western craftsmanship of the major luxury brands.”