Country: China

Ethnic Group: Uighur

Date Finalized: 27 November 2020

Team: Zeenat Hammond (lead), Rebekah Kamer, Vianney Mancilla

Content Warning: forced labor; internment; forced religious conversion; forced assimilation; torture; abuse

Approximate Time Period: 2017-present

There is ample evidence that the Uighur ethnic group of China experiences forced labor, and the data quality is rated at a 3.

The Uighurs are a primarily Muslim ethnic minority group in China who currently face large-scale, organized forced labor by the Chinese government. The systematic forced labor affecting factories and farms across the region makes up a key part of the Chinese government’s system of control (UN News, 2019). The Uighur people were granted an autonomous zone in 1955 called the Uighur Autonomous Region, or Xinjiang. However, the Han people of China began moving into the area and now make up two-fifths of the population of Xinjiang (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2020). This has caused tension between the two groups (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2020).  Since 2017, the Uighurs have been detained in mass internment camps in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) (Congressional-Executive Commission on China, 2020). Supported by a report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), between 2017 and 2019, in the Xinjiang region In Northwestern China, authorities have implemented forced labor programs that have interred more than a million Uighurs and other largely Islamic minorities. The inmates are forced under factory job training and take positions at little or no pay (Paton et Ramsy, 2020). There are “re-education” camps designed to strip them of their religious and ethnic identity and replace it with loyalty to the state. The Uyghurs have been subjected to “abuses, torture, political indoctrination, forced renunciations of faith, and widespread and systematic forced labor” (Congressional-Executive Commission on China, 2020). In fact, in the province of Fujian, after a day’s work, a roll call is performed on the Uyghur workers to ensure that no one has left (U.S. Department of Labor, 2020). Approximately 82 foreign and Chinese companies benefit from Uyghur forced labor (Xiuzhong et al., 2020). Recently, more than 190 organizations have united and demanded that China put an end to garments made by forced labor and various Uyghur and human rights organizations have called on companies that produce such textiles to ensure that the products made as a result of the forced labor of these ethnic minorities do not enter supply chains (UN News, 2019).

Due to the amount of information including the reputable evidence coming from official government reports supporting this phenomenon, the data quality is rated a 3. 

Sources

  1. Congressional-Executive Commission on China. (2020). Global Supply Chains, Forced Labor, and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Retrieved from https://www.cecc.gov/sites/chinacommission.house.gov/files/documents/CECC%20Staff%20Report%20March%202020%20-%20Global%20Supply%20Chains%2C%20Forced%20Labor%2C%20and%20the%20Xinjiang%20Uyghur%20Autonomous%20Region.pdf
  2. Paton, E., & Ramzy, A. (2020, July 23). Coalition Brings Pressure to End Forced Uighur Labor. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/fashion/uighur-forced-labor-cotton-fashion.html
  3. UN News. (2019, December 26). Independent UN rights experts raise alarm over ‘incommunicado detention’ of Chinese scholars. Retrieved from https://news.un.org/en/tags/uyghur
  4. U.S Department of Labor, Bureau of International Affairs. (2020). Against Their Will: The Situation in Xinjiang. Retrieved from https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ilab/against-their-will-the-situation-in-xinjiang
  5. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. (2020, August 3). Uighur. Retrieved from, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Uighur
  6. Xiuzhong, V., Cave, D., Leibold, J., Munro, K., and Ruser, N. (2020). Uyghurs for sale. Retrieved from https://www.aspi.org.au/report/uyghurs-sale .