by Ruth Ingram
Both business and forced labor are booming in Northwest China despite the best efforts of governments and international organizations set on curbing human rights abuses in the Uyghur region.
Measures designed to prevent products made by millions of Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples corralled against their will into factories around China from reaching western markets appear to have hit a wall with news of the latest trade figures from Xinjiang, showing a 49 percent rise in the first three quarters of 2023, driven by a 50 percent increase in exported labor-intensive products.
More exports, more forced labor
The figures reported by the South China Morning Post on October 24, 2023, are accompanied by even more startling numbers from Beijing’s mouthpiece China News, citing Kashgar Prefecture, located at the far southwestern edge of the Taklimakan Desert in the Uyghur heartland, whose foreign trade had increased by an unprecedented 113 percent.
Asking how this can be happening is Dr Adrian Zenz, director and senior research fellow for China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, whose latest findings on forced labor in the region were published recently. The only explanation for a surge in exports, he suggests, must be increased coerced labor in the Uyghur region.
Zenz’s dogged probes into the human rights abuses in Xinjiang since Chen Quanguo became governor of the mainly Muslim province in 2015 have shone the spotlight on a raft of atrocities whose form might be changing but whose nature is still deeply concerning, he maintains.
Speaking to Bitter Winter, Zenz said, “We are seeing a very dedicated effort to increase exports from the Uyghur prefectures in Southern Xinjiang. The exports were just a percentage. What in fact we are seeing are massive increases in manufacturing in the Uyghur heartlands.”
The labor-intensive products, according to Zenz, were “the types of goods most at risk of involving forced Uyghur labor.”
Omer Kanat, executive director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project, had doubts about Beijing’s capacity for reliable export data but told Bitter Winter: “Adrian’s research makes it very clear; the Chinese government is succeeding step by step in its plan to have 100% control of Uyghurs’ lives and 100% control of their work. It is also using economic subsidies to make production shift to East Turkistan.”
A more insidious atrocity
In his paper “The conceptual evolution of poverty alleviation through labor transfer in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region,” published on October 25, 2023, Zenz probes more deeply into the nature of forced labor in the region. He reveals a state plan not only to channel hundreds of thousands of ex-“vocational camp” trainees into coerced employment but also, under a separate scheme, to normalize forced labor in the region. Millions of “rural surplus laborers” are swept up into forced labor placements throughout China.
While the use of Uyghur forced labor in China’s so-called “re-education camps” has been well documented by journalists, scholars, and nonprofit organizations—based on eyewitness accounts, leaked official documents, and on-the-ground reporting—less transparent has been the separate but even more pervasive push to coerce farmers and villagers into factory work around China under the Chinese government’s poverty alleviation programme.
Hiding beneath the incontrovertible swathe of 380 internment camps scattered across the region visible on Google Earth, the kilometers of razor wire, and millions of surveillance cameras that transformed the region into little more than an open prison, is a more insidious and creeping atrocity taking place under the radar of international condemnation, Zenz reveals.
Minus the watchtowers and machine-gun toting guards, the factories taking on the rural laborers give the appearance of business as usual. Zenz proves, however, that these work details are far from voluntary and that refusal to join has serious consequences.
His report provides the first eyewitness testimonies that Uyghurs who refuse to toe the line have been sent to camps on the basis that passing up city factory jobs due to family commitments at home implied that they were “harboring extreme thoughts.”
The fine print
Chen Quanguo’s six-year tenure as governor of Xinjiang from 2015 until his sudden ousting by Ma Xingrui, governor of Guangdong, in December 2021, saw at least one and a half million Turkic, mostly Uyghur peoples swept into so-called “vocational training camps,” millions corralled into forced labor around China, and countless numbers into extrajudicial lengthy jail terms; or simply “disappeared.”
Zenz’s new paper takes a deep dive into Xi Jinping’s National Poverty Alleviation through Labor Transfer program rolled out in Xinjiang, under which “surplus rural laborers” are trapped in state-choreographed labor transfers under the banner of poverty alleviation and de-extremification.
The fine print, which those rounded up for work are never privy to, is that the placements often include tight surveillance, political indoctrination, compulsory Mandarin classes after a day on the shop floor, and the impossibility of returning home before the contract ends. They refuse this chance to “better themselves” at their peril.
With the closure of many euphemistically named vocational skills education and training centres, the Poverty Alleviation through Labor Transfer policy is assuming more importance in Beijing’s long-term plan, which is to strengthen and institutionalize its policy of compulsory labor among the entire rural Uyghur population of Xinjiang, according to Zenz.
The above is excerpted from the complete article by Ruth Ingram published at Bitter Winter. Reprinted with the permission of Bitter Winter and the author. The China Project notes that Ruth Ingram “is the pseudonym of a researcher who has lived and traveled in the Central Asian region for a couple of decades, with a particular interest in the Xinjiang area. She writes under a pen name to protect her sources.”
Also see:
The Outlaw Ocean Project: “The Uyghurs Forced to Process the World’s Fish” (a story produced in collaboration with The New Yorker)
“China forces minorities from Xinjiang to work in industries around the country. As it turns out, this includes processing much of the seafood sent to America and Europe.”
StopTheChinazis.org: “China’s Latest Atrocity Tours in Xinjiang Target Children”
“People who take this kind of tour are supposed to say, later, if anyone tries to tell them of atrocities in Xinjiang, ‘Atrocities in Xinjiang? What atrocities? I have been there. I have firsthand experience. I didn’t see any atrocities.’ If the guided tourists like these unfortunate children also imbibe any Chinese propaganda, they may even angrily decry ‘rumors’ and ‘lies’ about what the Chinese government has been doing to Uyghurs and other Muslims in Xinjiang.”
The New York Times: “The Xinjiang Papers: ‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims”
“The authorities in the Xinjiang region worried the situation was a powder keg. And so they prepared.
“The leadership distributed a classified directive advising local officials to corner returning students as soon as they arrived and keep them quiet. It included a chillingly bureaucratic guide for how to handle their anguished questions, beginning with the most obvious: Where is my family?”
