Online advertising boasted of newly trained ethnic minority adolescents as if they were products for sale. Factories could reserve workers online for a “minimum order of 100 people,” according to the announcement, and have them delivered to their door within 15 days.
The announcement was included in a report released this week by the Australian Strategy Policy Institute (ASPI), which advises the Australian government, alleging that Uighurs belonging to a Muslim minority have been sent from “re-education” camps in the Xinjiang province of China to factories across China. , where they are forced to manufacture consumer goods for the world.
The report used government documents, Chinese media, and independent reports in collaboration with the Washington Post to track transfers of at least 80,000 Uighurs from Xinjiang to Chinese factories that supply 83 global brands, including Nike, Apple, Dell, Adidas, BMW, Gap, Huawei, Samsung, Sony and Volkswagen.
“The Xinjiang government has organized about 1,000 Xinjiang interns who have already passed political and medical exams,” said an announcement posted on a Chinese human resources forum and cited in the report.
“They are between 16 and 18 years old and are run by executives appointed by the Xinjiang government. Factories can request that the current Xinjiang police be posted 24 hours a day for factory management! Said the announcement, which was posted on November 27, 2019.
Many Uighurs are forced into these programs by surveillance, police control and the threat of detention or detention of family members, according to the ASPI report, contrary to claims by the Chinese authorities that the programs work are voluntary.
This is the last step in a campaign of forced assimilation into Han Chinese culture through mass detention, “re-education” and the work that Beijing has put in place in Xinjiang since 2017 – a strategy that reaches now global supply chains and American consumers.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lijian Zhao criticized the report, saying it followed “U.S. anti-China forces “to” spread China’s efforts in the fight against terrorism and deradicalization in Xinjiang “.
“All of the participants in the deradicalization training graduated and found stable employment with government assistance. They live a happy life, ”said Zhao.
Labor transfers from Xinjiang to the interior provinces date back more than a decade. Uighur workers were already sent to coastal industrial cities in the early 2000s as part of programs that drew similar criticism from human rights groups for their coercion.
These programs slowed down after 2009, when clashes between Uighur workers and Han in a factory in Guangdong sparked deadly ethnic riots in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang.
But the desire to “help” Xinjiang through forced assimilation methods intensified again after Xi Jinping came to power in 2013. It accelerated after 2016, when the hard line of Communist Party Chen Quanguo, the former secretary of the Tibet party, took office as party secretary in Xinjiang.
Chen’s safety-oriented policies also included indoctrination of Uighur children in boarding schools separated from their detained parents, sending Han Chinese “big brothers” and “sisters” to live in Uighur houses, and employment of “re-educated” Uighurs as workers in factories often owned by Han Chinese settlers from inland China.
A Chinese factory owner Han told state media in November 2019 that he had considered Southeast Asia and the Sino-Korean border before deciding to open his new clothing factory in Xinjiang, where he could employ a large number of young Uyghurs at low wages.
“The North Korean workers are pretty good, but I didn’t want my salary to go abroad,” he said. “In the end, I chose Xinjiang. It is in line with national strategies, and this place needs labor-intensive companies to boost employment. “
Uighur workers at a shoe factory in Qingdao that supplies Nike, waving the Chinese flag in October 2019.
(“Strengthening education in patriotism and building a bridge of national unity”, China Ethnic Religion Net, November 7, 2019, quoted in “Uighurs for sale” by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, March 1, 2019.)
Eli Friedman, a sociologist who studies work in China at Cornell University, said that the Uyghur work program was the state’s attempt to “kill two birds with one stone: the first bird being the so-called counter-extremism, and the second, the labor shortage problem. “
Chinese manufacturers in low-labor intensive industries have struggled to reduce their workforce in the past decade. Rising wages, changing social expectations, falling birth rates and the development of inland cities like Chengdu and Chongqing have all reduced the mass of rural workers who filled Chinese factories at almost zero cost.
Labor rights also improved in the early 2000s, when a new law on labor contracts came into force, minimum wages were established and civil society emerged, particularly in the south of the country. China, where union activists and social workers publicized workers’ rights.
“This has all changed under Xi Jinping,” said Friedman, noting the arrests of union organizers, the stagnation of the minimum wage and more workers without contract in the past five years.
“This is not an optimistic time for workers, nor for Uighurs and minority workers in particular,” he said.
China has a history of “re-education through work”. In Mao Tse-tung’s day, those deemed to be in need of “thought reform” were sent to Soviet-inspired work camps. But the state generally made them work on infrastructure or agricultural projects, not in private factories for foreign companies.
James Leibold, a specialist in Chinese ethnic politics at La Trobe University in Australia, compared work programs to a decades-old system in which minority students as young as 10 were sent from Xinjiang and Tibet in Han majority boarding schools. provinces. The intention is “very similar,” said Leibold.
“It is a question of disciplining, it is a question of inculcating the Han cultural norms, it is a question of increasing the capacities as regards Mandarin, of encouraging interethnic mixture … It is part of the agenda of the party-state for several decades, “he said.
The difference is that these school programs were voluntary and even oversubscribed, because Uighur parents wanted their children to receive better quality education in indoor schools. The work programs, however, seem to be much more coercive. But Leibold added that the party could change its strategy after realizing that the mass incarceration camps are under financial and logistical pressure.
“We are entering a sort of phase of rehabilitation 2.0 where the party is trying to think about how it pursues the mission in the long term, but does so in a more sustainable way than a massive internment,” he said. declared. “It is extremely expensive and labor intensive.”
The ASPI report indicates that some of the companies mentioned in the report have already promised to end supplier relationships through the use of Uighur forced labor.
Others, including Adidas, Bosch and Panasonic, told ASPI that they had no direct contractual relationship with suppliers using Uighur labor transfers. But no one could rule out links further down their supply chains.
Apple, whose supply chain relies on Chinese labor and has been criticized for years for poor worker protection, released a statement saying the company is “dedicated to ensuring that everyone in our supply chain is treated with the dignity and respect it deserves. We have not seen this report, but we are working closely with all of our suppliers to ensure our high standards are met. “
Jim McGovern, a Democrat representative from Massachusetts, wrote on Twitter on Tuesday that he would announce legislation with Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida next week to ban imports from Xinjiang to the United States.
“The members of the Congress stand in solidarity with Uighurs and other Muslim ethnic groups in China. American and Chinese companies should not profit from or be complicit in forced labor and possible crimes against humanity, “McGovern wrote.
