or forced labour and that company executives during an earnings conference call similarly avoided such references and "did not comment on the impact of the controversy on sales, except to state that around 20 stores in China were currently closed." Xu Guixiang, the Xinjiang spokesman, along with other Chinese media outlets, celebrities, and businesses have rejected the allegations from the companies and spoken in defense of their cotton industry in Xinjiang while simultaneously accusing Western companies of aiming to destabilize China through accusations of genocide in Xinjiang. Marketing Publishers and other media in the Western world have sometimes used the "Banned in China" label to market cultural works, with the hope that censored products are seen as more valuable or attractive. The label was also used by Penguin Books to sell Mo Yan's novel The Garlic Ballads, which had been pulled from bookshelves because of its themes (anti-government riots) being published so close to a period of actual riots. However, the book was allowed to be sold in China in a few years. Political scientist Richard Curt Kraus criticized Penguin for falsely portraying Mo Yan as a dissident in order to increase his marketability, as well as the underlying assumption that if the United States bans some work, that it must be genuinely obscene, but that if the Chinese government does the same, it is acting on purely political grounds. On the Internet, people use proxy websites that allow anonymous access to otherwise restricted websites, services, and information. Falun Gong and others have been working in the field of anti-censorship software development. Circumventing censorship Chinese citizens frequently use many techniques to circumvent Internet censorship in order to discuss social and political current events on online platforms and gain access to web pages blocked by the Great Firewall of China. Public relay servers such as virtual private networks (VPNs) and The Onion Router nodes (Tor nodes) are widely used by Chinese netizens in order to visit blocked web pages. Typically, Internet Service Providers can view an internet user's traffic and data; however, virtual private networks connect internet users to a server through an encrypted connection. This prevents Internet Service Providers from being able to access the internet users' IP addresses, data, activity, and physical location. As a result, the internet user can access blocked websites through this external server. VPNs are so widely used by Chinese netizens that many journalists, both