The evolution of forced labour in Xinjiang
In a village near the ancient Silk Road town of Yarkand, on the edge of the Taklamakan desert in the far-western region of Xinjiang, the gongzuodui has been busy. The term means “work team”. In Xinjiang it refers to a group of officials dispatched to a poor rural area to change the way Muslim residents live and think. In this village, called Konabazar, the team has been engaged in “ideological mobilisation”. The aim is to persuade reluctant farmers to head off and do other forms of work.
It is all but impossible for journalists to find out what those ethnic-Uyghur farmers made of the work team’s efforts, which involved lecturing villagers at flag-raising ceremonies and holding night-school classes. Since early 2017, when China began sending a million or more people, most of them Uyghurs, to “vocational education and training centres” (detention camps, in effect), it has become increasingly difficult to get first-hand accounts from victims of China’s repression in Xinjiang. The state justifies its actions in the name of stamping out terrorism, separatism and religious extremism. Western scholars believe the camps were wound down around 2020. But they say official accounts, such as the report about Konabazar, suggest widespread forced labour is still being used for a similar purpose.
Western governments have grown increasingly wary of this. In 2021 President Joe Biden signed the Uyghur Forced Labour Prevention Act. It assumes that any product from Xinjiang may be tainted by forced labour—importers have to prove otherwise to get such goods into America. In April the European Parliament approved rules aimed at blocking imports to the European Union of goods made with forced labour (they are likely to take effect in 2027). The situation in Xinjiang animated the drafters: EU imports from the region were worth $641m in the first four months of this year, up 721% on the same period in 2016, before huge numbers began entering the camps (see chart).
Such legal barriers to Xinjiang-related trade are a headache for many companies. In 2022 James Cockayne and fellow researchers at the University of Nottingham produced a report called “Making Xinjiang sanctions work”. It estimated that Xinjiang-made polysilicon, a key ingredient in solar panels, accounted for about 95% of photovoltaic energy supplied to grids in the world’s top 30 solar-power-producing countries. The report also said Xinjiang was making about 18% of the globally traded volume of processed tomato products and that one in five garments made worldwide contained cotton from Xinjiang.
For firms seeking to exclude forced labour from their supply chains, the complexity of the way such abuses occur in Xinjiang compounds the difficulty. They have to be aware of different forms of forced labour. One involves workers who had been in the re-education centres. This group could number in the hundreds of thousands, says Adrian Zenz of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, an NGO in Washington. Some of them could still be working in factories that were set up around the camps, with limited access to the outside world and no freedom to leave.
Another form may involve prisons. Many of the camps’ inmates were put into formal detention, pending trial. Yalkun Uluyol, a Uyghur living abroad, describes how his father, a honey-melon trader, underwent such a transfer. He was given a 16-year prison sentence in 2022. The son, a researcher on Uyghurs’ rights, believes the punishment was merely related to his father’s connection with him. Other relatives were also given lengthy terms, he says.
In 2022 the Associated Press (AP), an American news agency, obtained a list of more than 10,000 people sentenced for offences such as terrorism, religious extremism or “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”, a common pretext for jailing dissidents. They all came from one county in southern Xinjiang: Konasheher, not far from Yarkand. The report did not say whether any had previously been held in re-education centres (most were arrested in 2017). But it hinted at the scale of incarceration as a weapon against the state’s perceived enemies in Xinjiang. The AP calculated that Konasheher had a rate of imprisonment 30 times higher than the whole of China’s in 2013, the most recent year for which national data are available.
Work is a common part of prison life in China, and sometimes involves products that enter global supply chains. America’s government says there is evidence that inmates in Xinjiang are forced to toil in various ways, including in agriculture and mining. Some factories related to polysilicon-production are next to prisons, possibly indicating a link, according to the academics in Nottingham.
But a large part of forced labour in Xinjiang may not involve obvious signs of compulsion. People are kept at work by an implicit message: leave a state-assigned job and you are in trouble. This is the type under way in Konabazar. It is often referred to as “poverty alleviation through labour transfer”. On the surface it sounds much like what has been happening across China since the economic reforms of the late 1970s, with people moving from poor villages into cities to work.
In the rest of China this has rarely smacked of forced labour (except, perhaps, in Tibet—though some experts dispute whether the term should be used even there). In Xinjiang, however, it is different. In recent years it has become clear that the government is using the process to tighten political control over rural Muslim communities, mainly of Uyghurs who form about 45% of Xinjiang’s population of 26m. It is likely that some Uyghurs have been joining labour-transfer schemes out of fear. That is because of the terror generated by the now-defunct re-education camps, by numerous arrests of suspected critics of the government, and by a clampdown on expressions of Muslim or Uyghur identity.
Mr Zenz calls this a “non-internment state-imposed form of forced labour”. The term was adopted in February by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), a UN body, in an updated handbook on forced-labour practices. The ILO did not mention Xinjiang, but referred to schemes sounding much like its labour-transfer system.
Xinjiang’s efforts appear to have been growing in recent years. In 2017, the year the camps opened, there were 2.75m transfers (a rural resident may take more than one job a year outside his or her village). There were more than 3m in 2022. Last year the government aimed for a number similar to that of 2017. But it reached 3.2m, official data show. Some of those affected work in factories near their villages; some are sent farther afield, including to other provinces (where they are often kept under close watch). They may also do seasonal jobs, such as harvesting cotton. Kicking them off their land helps to motivate them: officials often seize it to make way for projects such as industrial zones or to enable larger-scale farming. Konabazar has been promoting a “small-fields-merge-into-big-fields” campaign, a system that usually involves giving rent in exchange for land.
In 2020 an officially approved book, “Stories of Poverty Alleviation in Southern Xinjiang”, described the aims of a work team in another part of the region. One was to raise incomes in the village, in part by using labour transfers. Another was to eliminate “religious extremism” in a community riddled with “indolence”. It describes how the team leader confronted a particularly lazy villager. “You don’t want to work, right? Fine, I won’t give you a single pound of fertiliser, and I won’t build you a house,” the official said. “At the end of the year, when everyone else has escaped poverty and is living a good life, you can stay in your broken house and live your miserable life!” The team leader eventually succeeded in persuading the villager to work. They almost always do. ■
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