In China’s western province of Xinjiang, barbed wire fencing surrounds the multiple factory compounds. Inside these factories, a multitude of workers are bruised and beaten, whipped, exhausted after toiling long hours of labor for little or no pay, and some show the scars of electrocution. 

The victims of such abuses are predominantly Uyghurs — a Muslim minority group in China’s Xinjiang region long persecuted for their cultural differences.

The arbitrary detention and enslavement of China’s Uyghur population is not some distant matter. It is directly intertwined with Western supply chains and consumer society through a vast network of state-sanctioned internment camps and forced-labor factories. It is about time we take action.

A History of Oppression: From 1949 to Internment Camps

The Chinese government’s persecution of Uyghurs is by no means a recent phenomenon. Uyghur attempts for self-determination at the start of the Communist takeover in 1949 and at the collapse of the Soviet Union during the 1990s are still fresh in the memories of Chinese Communist Party policymakers. 

The beginning of the Global War on Terror in 2001, the deadly Uyghur extremist riots in Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi, in 2009, and reports of Uyghurs moving to Syria to fight for various militant groups in 2011 gave the Chinese government an excuse to label the entire Uyghur population — men, women, and children included — as terrorists or terrorist sympathizers in need of re-education and ideological purification. According to Dr. Darren Byler, a Xinjiang researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder, the internment camp system was primarily built in 2017 as an escalation of previous measures to control and re-educate the Uyghur population.

Peter Irwin, senior program officer for advocacy and communications at the Uyghur Human Rights Project, told the HPR that officially one to two million, but potentially three million, Uyghurs are currently detained in internment camps. For context, the Uyghur population totals around 12 million. In recent years, the Chinese government has expanded these remote detention facilities into a system of closely-connected camps, forced-labor pipelines, and industrial exploitation. 

Experts have estimated that at least 500,000 Uyghurs are subject to forced labor in the cotton and apparel industries alone. According to Irwin, Xinjiang cotton comprises 84% of China’s cotton production and over 20% of the world’s supply. He concluded, “[International] apparel companies, in particular, many of which source from China, are very likely, or at a very high risk of using cotton that has gone through the facilities where forced labor is rampant.” 

Uyghurs can be detained indefinitely for almost any reason. Any signs of religious affiliation, including praying, fasting, attending religious lectures, and even avoiding alcohol are reasons for detainment. Other arbitrary reasons include having WhatsApp installed on their phones, having relatives who live abroad, having a full beard, and speaking their own language in public settings. Once detained, Uyghurs have no access to legal counsel, and their families are often not informed of their detention.

To guard these camps, Chinese government agencies purchased thousands of spiked clubs, police batons, electric cattle prods, and handcuffs. Inside the camps, Uyghur detainees are subject to violent indoctrination and gruesome torture. Alarmingly, Mihrigul Tursun, a former detainee, reported that Uyghurs in the camps were being drugged with unknown pills, having their heads forcibly shaved, being subject to solitary confinement, whipped, beaten, and even electrocuted. Every day, they are forced to recite Communist ideology and denounce their Muslim faith, at the threat of additional torture. Most appallingly, Kuzzat Altay, an Uyghur human rights activist, recounts that Uyghur children are sent to state-run orphanages where they are subject to endless brainwashing and may not be reunited with their parents.

Even outside of the camps, Uyghurs are subject to what is effectively an Orwellian state. In Xinjiang, the CCP has vastly increased its network of digital and bioforensic surveillance. CCTV cameras are trained on Uyghur homes and marketplaces. DNA, voice samples, and iris scans are collected to amplify surveillance efforts. Digitally coded ID cards are mandatory for all. The Chinese government also plans to sterilize at least 80% of Uyghur women to reduce Uyghur population growth to virtually zero. Those who refuse are sent to the camps. Irwin concurs that “What is going on right now very likely meets the criteria for genocide.” The goal is to eliminate an entire culture.

Connecting the Dots: Internment Camps, Forced Labor, and the West

While the expansion of Uyghur internment camps into a forced-labor network is a relatively recent development, Irwin noted that “Forced labor is a manifestation of Chinese government policy that has gone back the past thirty years.”

“Forced labor is defined [as] any work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of penalty, and for which that person has not offered himself or herself voluntarily,” explained Chloe Cranston, business and human rights manager at Anti-Slavery International, to the HPR. Given the massive surveillance, torture, and constant threats, it is very clear that Uyghurs are working involuntarily and under the “menace of penalty.” 

The internment and subsequent extraction of forced labor is not primarily for monetary gain, but rather to confine Uyghurs to the factories, to uproot them from their homes, and to indoctrinate them with political reeducation and Mandarin language classes. 

According to James Millward, professor of History at Georgetown University, the most direct links between Western brands and the Uyghur human rights violations are the forced-labor factories in Xinjiang that are built adjacent to or even in the reeducation camps themselves. To keep these projects economically profitable, local Xinjiang government officials have started strong-arming “graduated” detainees directly from the reeducation camps to fill these facilities: “To say no, is … to say you are an extremist.” 

Irwin elaborated, “Local governments have been incentivized to provide funds from the regional government to literally build these factories for Chinese companies.” Reports indicate that some of these factories are even paid $260 for each Uyghur they add to their assembly lines.

Byler added that factory owners would often come to the camps and select prisoners for their facilities, with over 4,400 companies building “satellite factories” to take advantage of this new source of labor. One of these factories, the Hetian Taida Apparel factory, located inside a Xinjiang internment camp, produces athletics apparel for Badger Sports. Badger directly supplies American colleges including the University of Pennsylvania and Texas A&M University. Hetian Taida also contracted with Costco to produce children’s pajamas for import to the U.S., all while workers reported being treated like slaves and earning a tenth of their previous income. 

The next link is the transfer of Uyghur detainees from the internment camps to factories in eastern China, many of which produce goods for international brands. In the Foxconn Zhengzhou factory, also known as “iPhone City,” over 2,700 Uyghurs have been transferred into Apple’s supply chain since 2018. In addition, O-Film, which produces Apple camera modules, transferred 700 Uyghur workers to another factory days before Tim Cook was scheduled to visit. O-Film also contracts with Lenovo, Dell, HP, LG, and Huawei. Moreover, Qingdao Taekwang Shoes Co., a factory surrounded by barbed wire and cameras in Eastern China, allegedly employs at least 600 Uyghur workers from Xinjiang. It produces nearly 7 million pairs of shoes from Nike’s signature Air line. Finally, a factory that produced face masks, some of which arrived in the United States, was discovered to have used Uyghur labor to satisfy the increased pandemic demand. 

The nature of the garment industry, as well as significant state and corporate deceptive behavior, significantly obstruct efforts towards due diligence and transparency. According to Byler, the difficulty of conducting factory inspections and interviewing workers in a reprisal-free environment gives companies cover to claim that they were unaware of the abuses in their supply chains. Cranston adds that the garment industry is particularly opaque because significant amounts of raw cotton material from the Uyghur region are exported to factories in nearby Asian countries like Vietnam and Pakistan for manufacturing. Through this route, products made with Uyghur forced labor may indirectly snake their way into global supply chains, bypassing many inspectors’ audits. Labor camp authorities in Xinjiang have also been caught changing the names of prison factories and creating shell companies to disguise the true natures of labor structures.

Because China requires foreign companies to operate in a joint-venture with domestic entities, the Esquel Group, a Hong Kong-based firm that makes shirts for major Western brands including Calvin Klein and Hugo Boss, partnered with the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC) to operate cotton-producing factories in the Xinjiang Region. One of its subsidiary factories, Xinjiang Jinliyuan Garment Co., has openly admitted to using Uyghur workers offered by local party authorities, and was shown on Xinjiang TV to be producing pink Minnie Mouse children’s parkas for Disney. 

While the XPCC seems to be a corporation, given its listing on the Hong Kong stock exchange, Millward described the XPCC as a “state-owned enterprise on steroids” and a “state-within-a-state … [that] answers to Beijing, to the party.” A remnant of China’s past system of “bingtuan” military corps, the XPCC is responsible for running large state-owned cotton farms, industrial parks, commercial zones, and — most notably — the Uyghur prisons and internment camps.

Because all companies with Chinese suppliers are mandated to collaborate with local authorities, the number of corporations involved with Uyghur forced labor may be much higher than we expect.

Irwin suggested that a “constellation of efforts” is necessary to produce meaningful change. In his words, “essentially what we’re trying to do is inflict a cost — an economic cost, a political cost, a cost in terms of how China is seen on the global scale — inflict a cost that is so high that China is forced to stop doing what they’re doing.”

One major impediment to meaningful human rights progress is the U.S.’s withdrawal from global institutions. Byler explained that in 2018, the U.S. withdrew from the UN Human Rights Council, surrendering “control of [this] really important body in the UN to China and Chinese allies.” Byler suggested that, as a first step, the U.S. should reassert itself at the UN.

In addition, Millward proposes restoring regional partnerships like the Trans Pacific Partnership, which the Trump Administration left in 2017. He advocates for the creation of a new Pacific regional consortium of countries to discuss economic, environmental, labor, and human rights issues. Furthermore, Millward believes that inviting China to join such a consortium would greatly amplify the effects of current sanctions and human rights campaigns. 

In October 2019 and May 2020, the U.S. Department of Commerce imposed economic sanctions on eleven Chinese companies complicit in human rights violations in Xinjiang, preventing these implicated firms from doing business with U.S. companies. A month later, President Trump signed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020 (UHRPA) into law, which allows the U.S. government to freeze assets and impose visa restrictions on individuals and entities complicit in Uyghur human rights abuses. 

Irwin believes the next step is the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), which is currently in Congress right now. He explained that the UFLPA would shift the burden onto importers to prove that goods imported from the Uyghur region are not sourced from supply chains implicated in forced labor instead of on Customs and Border agents to prove the presence of forced labor. 

But it is not enough for the U.S. to take unilateral action or revitalize existing alliances and partnerships. To counter Chinese claims of a Western political conspiracy, the U.S. must reach out to not only Western nations, but also more noncommittal states regarding their relations with China, like Turkey and Tunisia. This must be a fully global effort.

A fully global effort does not just mean global governments taking action. We, the public, must also take action. 

One good place to start is by boycotting companies which are involved in the Uyghur forced labor pipeline. The goal is to pressure corporations to cut all ties with the human rights violation infrastructure, and with the entire Xinjiang region as a whole. The mere act of maintaining a supply chain presence in Xinjiang is itself a signal of support for the Chinese government and its policies, and must be stopped. Ultimately, the objective is to render the forced labor system completely and utterly unprofitable — economically, socially, and politically.

Another action item is to speak out to friends and family. An international movement to end the Uyghur forced labor system can only succeed if it is sustained in the mainstream.

If financially-able, members of the community can also directly donate to the Uyghur Human Rights Project and other organizations working to put an end to these atrocities.

The plight of the Uyghurs is not one that the West can ignore. Western consumers’ credit cards are directly funding the systemic oppression and mass torture of the Uyghur people. It’s about time we stepped up.

Image Credit: “A guard watchtower” by Reuters is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

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