Shein's public embrace of China exposes the limits of Singapore-washing

When Shein founder and chief executive Chris Xu took to the stage at the 2026 Guangdong High-Quality Development Conference on 24 February 2025, the symbolism was unmistakable — and for those who follow China's technology industry, the sight itself was remarkable.

Xu is widely regarded as one of China's most secretive billionaires.

Photographs of him are almost impossible to find online, and public appearances have been exceedingly rare. He arrived in a white shirt and wine-red tie, a formal image that stood in sharp contrast to his years of near-total public invisibility.

His remarks at the conference — praising Guangdong's industrial ecosystem, disclosing that Shein's 2025 platform export value had exceeded 100 billion yuan, citing nearly 10,000 supplier partnerships in the province, boasting of 600,000 jobs supported locally, and pledging over 10 billion yuan (approximately US$1.5 billion) in smart supply chain investment over the next three years — amounted to a very public reversal for a company that had spent years presenting itself as a Singapore-headquartered multinational.

The political seniority of the occasion was not lost on observers.

Guangdong's Communist Party Secretary Huang Kunming addressed the same gathering, calling for coordinated development of manufacturing and services — a signal of the forum's importance to provincial and national leadership alike.

Mainland Chinese media outlets including Phoenix News ran articles framing the appearance as "China's most mysterious billionaire finally surfaces."

Those articles were subsequently deleted, a detail that captures the political sensitivity of the moment and the delicate line Xu is navigating between demonstrating loyalty to Beijing and avoiding any implication that the company's international standing is compromised.

According to a report by Fortune, analysts interpreted Xu's declaration as a calculated effort to court Beijing's approval as Shein pursues a listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, following failed attempts to go public in both New York and London.

"Given Shein's setbacks in the United States and Europe in recent years, it appears to be strengthening its ties to China and repositioning itself in the global market," Qu Feng, an associate professor of economics at Nanyang Technological University, told Fortune.

The episode is being read by experts not merely as a corporate about-turn, but as a signal that the broader strategy it once embodied — known as "Singapore-washing" — is running out of road.

From wedding dresses to the world's third-largest fashion retailer

Shein's origins are more modest than its current scale suggests. Xu was born in 1984 and founded the company in 2008 in Nanjing under the name Nanjing Dianwei Information Technology, initially trading in wedding dresses before expanding into women's clothing, accessories and homeware.

The company was originally known as ZZKKO before rebranding as Shein in 2012, when it pivoted decisively into fast fashion and began applying China's domestic e-commerce personalisation model to overseas markets, rapidly capturing the attention of younger consumers across Europe and the United States.

According to data from consulting firm Global Data, cited in Chinese-language reporting by Central News Agency Taiwan, Shein is now the world's third-largest fashion retailer. Its headquarters are formally registered in Singapore, but its actual operational centre is Guangzhou, a distinction the Chinese-language sources are notably explicit about.

Reporting by Forbes noted that Shein began the process of moving toward Singapore as early as 2019, earlier than the 2021 date more commonly cited in Western coverage, as it prepared for a potential overseas listing.

What Singapore-washing looked like in practice

The term describes a pattern that took hold towards the end of US President Donald Trump's first term and accelerated through the early 2020s.

Chinese-founded companies, seeking to distance themselves from Beijing's regulatory orbit and improve access to Western capital markets, began relocating part or all of their operations to Singapore.

The city-state offered a compelling package. Washington imposes tariffs of just 10% on Singaporean goods.

The country holds 28 free trade agreements, carries a globally trusted institutional reputation, and is culturally accessible to Chinese expatriates.

"The Singapore brand is trusted worldwide. Singapore is valued for its international flavour, neutrality, and is culturally easy for Chinese firms and their expats to adapt to," Maybank China economist Erica Tay told Reuters in a report published on 19 December 2024.

KG Tan, chief executive of InCorp Group, which helps companies relocate across nine Asia-Pacific markets, told Reuters that inquiries from Chinese firms were running approximately 15 to 20% higher year-on-year, with interest described as "very strong."

Firms that established Singapore presences span a wide range of sectors. Optical products maker Terahop, backed by China-based Zhongji Innolight, set up in Singapore as early as 2018.

More recent arrivals include data centre operator DayOne, spun off from GDS Holdings; artificial intelligence startup Manus, which originated from Chinese firm Butterfly Effect; and ChemLex, an AI-powered chemical synthesis company whose chief executive Sean Lin told Reuters he considers the Shanghai-founded startup a Singapore company. Neither Manus nor Terahop's websites reference their Chinese backers.

Shein and TikTok: the cautionary cases

For the strategy's most prominent practitioners, the results have been instructive. Shein encountered sustained political opposition when seeking listings in the United States and United Kingdom. Regulatory scrutiny focused on its labour practices and sourcing arrangements — concerns that Singapore incorporation did nothing to resolve.

Shein simultaneously required approval from Beijing for its listing plans, an acknowledgement of continuing Chinese influence that fundamentally undermined its claims to international neutrality.

Fortune reported that Shein's chair Donald Tang had sought to emphasise the company's "American values," even as the firm relied on nearly 10,000 suppliers concentrated in Guangdong province. Xin Sun, a senior lecturer in Chinese and East Asian business at King's College London, described the positioning as a "political miscalculation" that managed to antagonise Beijing without satisfying Western regulators.

Shein's difficulties in Western markets have also taken on a more concrete regulatory character.

In November 2025, the company was temporarily banned from operating its online business in France for selling illegal products.

In Taiwan, Control Yuan members Tian Qiujin and Cai Chongyi filed on 7 February 2025 for an investigation into the exemption regime for low-value imported parcels, citing evidence of harmful substances in Shein clothing sold in Germany and plasticiser levels exceeding legal safety thresholds in children's sandals.

Earlier, in February 2025, the Trump administration significantly raised tariffs on cross-border low-value parcels — a measure widely understood to target Chinese e-commerce platforms including Shein directly.

TikTok's experience followed a similar arc. ByteDance invested billions building TikTok's international headquarters in Singapore from around 2020, stationing key operational functions there.

TikTok chief executive Shou Zi Chew, a Singaporean citizen, repeatedly emphasised his nationality and the company's Singapore base during congressional testimony in Washington. US officials nonetheless continued to treat TikTok as controlled by its Chinese parent, leading to a protracted legal battle that resulted in ByteDance agreeing to sell TikTok's American operations to satisfy national security requirements.

A failed attempt in 2024 by Yuxiao Fund, a Singapore-registered Chinese investor, to increase its stake in Australian rare earths miner Northern Minerals — blocked precisely because of its Chinese connection — further illustrated the limits of a Singapore address when ownership structures remain visibly Chinese.

The firms that could not hide what they were

Beyond regulatory friction, several Singapore-domiciled Chinese entities have attracted more serious scrutiny, raising questions about whether the city-state's reputation is being used as cover rather than genuinely adopted.

Singapore-based data centre firm Megaspeed, which separated from a Chinese gaming company in 2023, faces a US government probe over allegations that it diverted Nvidia chips intended for artificial intelligence development. The case has drawn attention at a moment when Washington is intensifying efforts to prevent advanced semiconductor technology from reaching restricted Chinese entities.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) severed ties with PowerAIR, a Singapore-registered firm carrying a paid-up capital of just S$1, after identifying a potential breach of US export controls with a reported link to Huawei.

Investigations revealed that PowerAIR had no public-facing website and listed a British Virgin Islands-registered entity as its sole shareholder — a structure critics characterised as designed to obscure rather than disclose the firm's ultimate beneficiaries.

Singapore also recorded its largest money laundering case in 2023, involving individuals of Chinese origin. Separately, authorities are investigating a conglomerate owned by a Cambodian citizen of Chinese origins, accused of operating large-scale fraud centre networks.

When the strategy works — and when it does not

Experts are increasingly drawing a distinction between firms that have genuinely separated from China and those that have adopted a Singapore registration as a legal surface while retaining deep mainland dependencies.

Sun told Fortune that Singapore-washing is "only credible and effective for companies which fully cut off their operational ties to China."

He cited Manus as an example of a firm that had substantially closed its mainland Chinese operations before rebranding in Singapore. In December 2025, Manus was acquired by Meta in a deal valued at between US$2 billion and US$3 billion, with Meta announcing that Manus would sever its remaining ties to the mainland.

However, Chinese regulators subsequently launched a review of the acquisition on potential export-control and national security grounds, arguing that Manus was founded by Chinese engineers and retains a Chinese parent entity, and therefore remains under Chinese jurisdiction — a development that even a clean operational break could not prevent.

Chong Ja Ian, a political scientist at the National University of Singapore, told Reuters that the tactic tends to favour smaller, less visible entities. "It's the low-profile entities like family offices and trading companies which tend to have an easier time avoiding attention," he said.

Dou Changlin, chief operating officer of Shandong Boan Biotechnology, whose Singapore subsidiary funds the company's US operations, acknowledged the precariousness of that position. "We are very small in the US; I don't think we're on the radar of the US government yet," he told Reuters, while noting that a connection to the Chinese parent could eventually be drawn.

Pressure from both directions

What has changed most acutely, analysts say, is that Chinese firms now face competing demands from Washington and Beijing simultaneously, leaving diminishing room to satisfy either.

Le Xu, a lecturer at the National University of Singapore's business school, told Fortune that Western regulators have moved beyond examining legal incorporation addresses and now scrutinise the full operational picture — ownership structures, supply chains, data flows and management control.

Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, told Fortune that Beijing appeared to be demanding more explicit public loyalty from Chinese technology founders, further narrowing the space for neutral international positioning. "Chinese tech founders can no longer stay silent, as Beijing seems to be demanding public support from these companies," he said.

The deletion of mainland media articles about Xu's appearance encapsulates this tension precisely. His public re-embrace of China was carefully calibrated enough to satisfy provincial leadership — yet sensitive enough that detailed domestic coverage was subsequently removed, suggesting even Beijing's tolerance for transparency about the manoeuvre has limits.

Some Chinese artificial intelligence founders have responded to these pressures by bypassing Singapore entirely, establishing themselves as US-domiciled companies from the outset to preserve access to American venture capital and computing infrastructure.

For those that remain in Singapore, Fortune suggests the viable paths are narrowing: a formal and demonstrable operational split between domestic and international divisions, or a pivot towards more receptive listing markets — with Hong Kong the most obvious destination. Shein, it appears, has already made its choice.