Thousands of Muslims from China’s Uighur minority group are working under coercive conditions at factories that supply some of the world’s biggest brands, a new report says.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute said this was the next phase in China’s re-education of Uighurs.
China has already detained about a million Uighurs at internment camps, punishing and indoctrinating them.
Officials say the camps are aimed at countering extremism.
The ASPI report comes after a senior Chinese official told reporters in December that members of the minority group being held in the camps had now “graduated”.
What does the report say?
Between 2017 and 2019, the ASPI think tank estimates that more than 80,000 Uighurs were transferred out of the far western Xinjiang autonomous region to work in factories across China. It said some were sent directly from detention camps.
ASPI said the Uighurs were moved through labour transfer schemes operating under a central government policy known as Xinjiang Aid.
According to the report, the factories claim to be part of the supply chain for 83 well-known global brands, including Nike, Apple and Dell.
The report said it was “extremely difficult” for Uighurs to refuse or escape the work assignments, with the threat of “arbitrary detention” hanging over them.
It added that there was evidence of local governments and private brokers being “paid a price per head” by the Xinjiang government to organise the assignments, which ASPI describes as “a new phase of the Chinese government’s ongoing repression” of Uighurs.
“Our report makes it really clear that the dispossession of Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang also has a really strong character of economic exploitation,” the report’s co-author Nathan Ruser told the BBC.
“We have this unseen and previously hidden contamination of the global supply chain.”
Reports of widespread detentions at internment camps in Xinjiang first emerged in 2018. Chinese authorities said the “vocational training centres” were being used to combat violent religious extremism. But evidence showed many people were being detained for simply expressing their
faith, by praying or wearing a veil, or for having overseas connections to places like Turkey.
Chinese state media says participation in labour transfer schemes is voluntary. Officials have denied any commercial use of forced labour from Xinjiang, according to ASPI.
Where are they working?
ASPI said it had identified 27 factories in nine Chinese provinces that had been using Uighur labour transferred from Xinjiang since 2017.
At the factories, ASPI said the Uighurs were typically forced to live in segregated dormitories, have Mandarin lessons and “ideological training” outside of working hours, were subjected to constant surveillance and banned from observing religious practices.
