Experts from the United Nations (UN) have released a statement expressing their alarm over the number of Muslim minorities in China, namely the Uyghur, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz, working in forced labour camps across the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China.
Across the Xinjiang Uyghur region of China, or occupied East Turkestan, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has faced allegations of state-imposed forced labour on its mostly Muslim ethnic minority populations. The allegations affect the primarily Uyghur inhabitants of Xinjiang, as well as other Turkic Muslims such as the Kazakh and Kyrgyz, and Tibetan minorities.
According to the UN experts, forced labour in China is enabled through the state-mandated “poverty alleviation through labour transfer” programme, which coerced Uyghurs and other minorities into jobs within Xinjiang and outside of it.
Within the alleged forced labour environments, the workers are reportedly subject to systematic surveillance, monitoring, exploitation, and suppression of religious rights.
The workers have no option when it comes to refusing the work due to fear of punishment and almost indefinite detention.
“In many cases, the coercive elements are so severe that they may amount to forcible transfer and/or enslavement as a crime against humanity,” the experts said in the UN statement.
Demographic re-engineering
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Statistics from the CCP’s Xinjiang five-year plan (2021–2025) reveal that there were 13.75 million instances of labour transfers, with the actual numbers expected to have reached new heights.
“The labour transfers are part of a government policy to forcibly re-engineer Uyghur, other minorities’ and Tibetans’ cultural identities under the guise of poverty alleviation,” the experts warned.
“Labour and land transfers forcibly change their agriculture-based or nomadic traditional livelihoods by displacing them to locations where they have no choice but to pursue wage labour,” the experts said. “Consequently, their language, chosen communities, ways of life, as well as cultural and religious practices are eroded, which causes irreparable harm and loss.”
Complicity of global brands
An investigation led by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) estimates that more than a hundred global brands are linked to factories using Uyghur and other minority workers in what authorities call forced labour camps.
Brands such as Apple and Volkswagen can be linked to factories owned by those who have participated in the Chinese government programme.
According to many researchers and human rights watchdogs, the mass transfer of mostly Muslim minority workers constitutes state-imposed forced labour, where the targeted minorities live in a police state-like environment and are coerced to work in key industries.
Laura Murphy, a former senior policy adviser to the Biden administration on Xinjiang forced labour, said: “When a government official knocks on the door of a Uyghur person and says they should take a job far from home, the person knows this is not merely a request.”
“They know there are directives that say refusal is punishable by detention. And they know how horrible detention is. Every Uyghur in Xinjiang has either been in detention themselves or has someone close to them who has been. This is not a choice. This is not consent,” Murphy continued.
Systematic persecution of Uyghurs
Uyghurs have long been suffering under the restrictive policies of the CCP since 2014, when the government introduced mass arrest campaigns under the “Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism.”
This campaign has been known to facilitate crimes against humanity, specifically aimed at the Turkic Muslim population of Xinjiang.
Stanford Law School’s Human Rights & Conflict Resolution Clinic, Human Rights Watch, and various other groups have produced reports on the issue of human rights abuses against China’s Uyghur minority.
It is estimated that millions of Uyghurs and other Muslims have passed through such prison and labour camps, where torture, forced labour, political indoctrination, and other human rights abuses allegedly occur.
