The Xinjiang cotton incident, which broke out some time ago, has put the spotlight on Xinjiang’s blood-soaked factories and forced labor. However, the outside world said that the Chinese Communist Party’s forced labor crimes do not only involve the cotton and fashion industry. For this reason, Bloomberg reporters visited two secret factories in Xinjiang.
File photo: A re-education camp in Kashgar, Xinjiang, June 2, 2019
In the Gobi Desert, about a four-hour drive from Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi, lie two factories that produce polysilicon. Polysilicon is an important raw material for solar panels. Bloomberg believes that as an emerging green energy source, solar power generation will grow nearly tenfold over the next 30 years, growing by about a quarter in the current year.
And outside of China, hardly anyone knows that these two plants in Xinjiang account for nearly half of the world’s polysilicon supply. In other words, millions of homeowners around the world who buy solar panels face moral uncertainty – no way to know if they are disguisedly supporting dirty forced labor while embracing so-called green energy.
For this reason, a Bloomberg reporter took the initiative to travel to Xinjiang in March after requesting a tour of the two factories but never being granted one. During the Xinjiang cotton controversy, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said at a press conference on Xinjiang-related issues on March 29 that “for foreign journalists to cover Xinjiang, the Chinese Communist Party has always maintained an open and welcoming attitude. So it seems logical that a Bloomberg reporter should visit Xinjiang, in line with the regulations.
But in fact, this report reveals that when the plane landed in Urumqi, two police officers boarded the plane, one of them with a machine gun on his chest, holding a photo, and after comparing them, they found the two journalists. After being taken to the tarmac for questioning, the two journalists were able to leave the airport, but for the next three days they were followed all the way by agents, and all efforts to talk to locals were shouted down, and eventually even their photos were forcibly deleted.
The report recounts some of the details: On the second day of the trip, the journalists’ vehicle was followed all the way by officials from the propaganda system in Urumqi’s Zhundong Economic Development Zone, even at gas stations. At Xinjiang East Hope Group Co, which has also started to join the polysilicon production ranks in recent years, the person in charge told reporters that executives at the Shanghai headquarters had given instructions forbidding the reception of journalists in Xinjiang. At another polysilicon major, GCL-Poly (GCL-Poly), its director said the interview was against the epidemic prevention regulations related to New Crown pneumonia, yet, the reporter wrote, “just a few hours ago, we just completed a Covid-19 nucleic acid test and the result was negative.”
Although barred from field investigations, foreign media believe that enough information can be found in public information to unsettle the world; for example, GCL-Poly had said in a report in 2019 that the plant had taken in 121 poor minority workers from the Uyghur-populated heartland of southern Xinjiang; in a photo released by the local government in June 2017, a group of workers in blue uniforms were neatly lined up Under the labor program, they will soon be sent to major factories, including Dongfang Hope Nonferrous Metals Co.
The persecution by the Chinese Communist Party in Xinjiang is becoming one of the focal points of conflict between Western countries and Beijing. Alleged crimes include concentration camps for Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities, forced labor, and forced sterilization. Although several countries have characterized the CCP as committing genocide in Xinjiang, observers believe that there is little hope that Western countries will be able to impose strong sanctions on the CCP, given that the United States, the flag bearer of the free world, is appeasing the CCP and pursuing a vague strategy.
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