Forced labor still haunts China’s Xinjiang, report finds

The Chinese region of Xinjiang continues to subject members of the Uyghur ethnic group to forced labor two years after a damning U.N. report detailed the abusive practice, according to new research previewed exclusively by POLITICO. The findings will likely pressure Western lawmakers to further restrict imports of products from the region.

According to a report by Beijing-sanctioned academic Adrian Zenz, due to be published this week, “forced labor transfers” of the Uyghur Muslim workforce in 2023 “exceeded those from the previous year and surpassed state-mandated quotas.” 

The study, which focuses on 2023 and early this year, adds to a growing body of evidence that Beijing is using forced labor and mass internment camps to control the Uyghurs — and ramps up pressure on the European Union to finalize plans for a bloc-wide ban on imports of products made with forced labor.

Such a ban, currently in the hot phase of negotiations, would allow customs authorities in EU countries to take products off the market if they are found to have been made using forced labor. 

Autonomous in name only

While the Uyghur region in China's northwest is nominally autonomous, the Communist Party has consistently appointed Han Chinese to the post of party secretary, the top political position. Uyghurs officially make up about 45 percent of Xinjiang’s population, with Han Chinese at about 42 percent.

What sets the region apart from other provinces is the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a paramilitary unit that oversees economic output as well as law and order. Researchers have referred to the entity as a colonial agency, and both the U.S. and EU have sanctioned senior XPCC officials.

Reports of forced sterilization and involuntary ethnic integration have emerged in the last few years, while up to 1.5 million Uyghurs are believed to have been sent to internment camps, calling into question the West's increasing reliance on Xinjiang as a source for their global supply chains.

In his report, Zenz, director of China Studies at the Washington-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, argues that the regional Xinjiang government has conducted mass re-education internment campaigns and other policies aimed at assimilating the Muslim group under the mantra of “high-quality development.” 

“Under this new strategy, the state prevents people from returning to an unapproved state of low measurable income based on traditional livelihoods, including through abandoning state-arranged jobs,” Zenz said, adding that Beijing has made forced labor “less visible and more challenging to conceptualize.”

Xinjiang’s “Poverty Alleviation Through Labor Transfer program continues to expand,” Zenz continued. 

The labor transfer scheme, according to the report, “is the only forced labor policy that has been directly linked to the production of cotton, tomatoes and tomato products, peppers and seasonal agricultural products, seafood products, polysilicon production for solar panels, lithium for electric vehicle batteries, and aluminum for batteries, vehicle bodies, and wheels.” 

He described China’s industrial parks as “premier destinations for the most coercive forms of labor transfers and the forced work placements of re-education detainees.”

The 2023 work plan for one Xinjiang county, Karakax, outlines a continued acceleration of industrial park expansion and the promotion of “labor-intensive industrial clusters,” including the “vigorous development” of “labor-intensive enterprises” such as textile and clothing producers, or electronic product assembly lines and light industrial manufacturing, he writes. 

Europe has been mulling an appropriate response to documented human rights abuses in Xinjiang, which is a top supplier of solar panels crucial to the EU’s green transition.

Five years after it first came under pressure from the United States to strengthen its countermeasures, however, Brussels is still searching for a solution — and time is running out.

The EU’s ban on imports of products made with forced labor is at risk of falling through the legislative cracks as policy business in Brussels winds down before June’s European election, with the next round of political negotiations scheduled for early March.

Negotiators from the European Parliament are pushing for the law to address state-imposed forced labor. The European Commission, they argue, should create a list of geographical areas and economic sectors at high risk of using forced labor. For goods produced in these areas, the authorities would then no longer have to prove forced labor, with the burden of proof falling on companies instead — mirroring similar U.S. provisions. 

The Chinese mission to the EU did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication. 

Beijing has previously accused Zenz of spreading disinformation — even though the U.N. revealed similar findings in 2022 — adding that the policies used in Xinjiang were effective in rooting out what it called terrorists, extremists and secessionists.