U.K. lawmakers grilled executives from Chinese e-commerce giant Shein at a hearing in parliament, where leaders scolded Shein's general counsel for dodging questions about whether the company sources cotton from China's controversial Xinjiang region. 

The January 7 hearing in front of parliament's Business and Trade Committee was initially called in response to Shein's impending IPO listing on the London Stock Exchange in the first quarter of 2025. According to Reuters, British lawmakers repeatedly pressed Shein's general counsel attorney Yinan Zhu on the company's sourcing practices for its cotton. Zhu declined to comment on each occasion, and refused to clarify whether Shein's code of conduct bans its suppliers from sourcing cotton from Xinjiang, a province in China reputed for its use of forced labor of ethnic and religious minority groups.

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Tensions boiled over when Zhu also refused to comment on Shein's upcoming IPO.

"For a company that sells a billion pounds to U.K. consumers, and for a company which is seeking to float on the London Stock Exchange, the committee has been pretty horrified by the lack of evidence that you have provided today," said committee chair Liam Byrne, who went on to describe Zhu's reluctance to answer questions as "bordering on contempt." 

"You've given us almost zero confidence in the integrity of your supply chains," he added. 

Shein has frequently come under fire for its labor practices over the course of its meteoric rise in the global fast fashion industry. A 2023 report from the U.S. House of Representatives claimed that the company had failed to declare that it had sourced cotton from Xinjiang for a variety of its products. The report also found that employees at multiple Shein factories had consistently worked 18-hour days in poor conditions, with no overtime pay and one day off a month. In August 2024, the company admitted to at least two cases of child labor in its supply chain, and found that 0.5% of suppliers it had audited in the previous year either weren't paying workers the local minimum wage, or were delaying wage payments.