Located in the western suburbs of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, the Volkswagen plant has become a textbook example of the sensitive nature of western brands doing business in China. On Wednesday November 27, the company finally announced the sale of its assembly plant as well as a vehicle test track in a desert area 240 kilometers away, in a region known for the repression of the Uyghur minority.

The German giant opened the Urumqi industrial site in 2013, in association with its legally obligatory Chinese partner the state-owned Shanghai automotive group SAIC, in order to assemble the Santana model that at the time, was a symbol of social standing. But after 2016 when a massive system of internment camps was established in China's far west regions, the presence of Western production lines became difficult to justify..

A series of terrorist attacks, resulted in about 1 million members of the Muslim minority in the region being sent to Xinjiang and subjected to China's policy of systematic indoctrination. Detention and reeducation followed by forced labor with no free time allowed, further complicated the equation for companies in the area.

By 2019, changing market conditions led Volkswagen to cease assembly at its plant and devote its operations to technical testing that resulted in a drop of 650 employees to 197. That same year, the Süddeutsche Zeitung revealed a good neighbor agreement with the police providing for patriotic and military training for the plant's workers, a quarter of whom were Uyghurs. The Wolfsburg-based group was the largest multinational in the area, and has been stongly criticized by human rights associations and the exiled Uyghur community for an inadequate social audit that concluded that there had been no human rights violations

In February 2024, an investigation by the anthropologist Adrian Zenz, whose research formed a major part of the revelations published by the business newspaper Handelsblatt, told how the subcontractor, on the pretext of a poverty alleviation policy, transferred Uyghurs from the south of the region to the huge test track site, near the town of Turpan. In 2017 and 2018, at the height of the repression, the Uyghurs in military uniform, would show up at the site for ideological training sessions before starting work.

However, it is not a simple procedure for foreign companies to pull out from Xinjiang, as the authorities want to see their willing involvement in the Chinese market as an international validation of Chinese policy. In 2021, after the Swedish brand H&M announced that it would stop using Xinjiang, it was wiped off the Chinese internet for sixteen months. Its products were no longer shown on online sales sites, and its stores were no longer listed on geolocation or cab reservation apps.

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