A new report accuses China of pressuring hundreds of thousands of Muslim Uighurs into forced labor to pick cotton in Xinjiang. Activists say some big Western fashion brands are complicit in the abuse.
A new report released Tuesday by the Center for Global Policy, a U.S. think tank, finds evidence that Uighur laborers are being forced to pick cotton by hand. It has also brought China’s treatment of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang back into the spotlight.
Citing Online Chinese government documents, the report found that in 2018 an estimated 570,000 workers from three Uighur regions had been mobilized to harvest cotton. The Chinese government has a “compulsory” Labour training programme that involves “military-style management”.
Zheng Guoen, the researcher who discovered the documents, wrote: “It is impossible to define where forced labor ends and where local consent begins.”
Major fashion brands including Nike, Adidas and Gap have come under fire from rights groups for their use of cotton from Xinjiang. Xinjiang produces more than 20% of the world’s cotton and is a major producer in the global textile supply chain.
Dolkun Isa, chairman of the Munich-based World Uighur Congress, urged companies not to support China’s human rights abuses.
Aisha, a world authority on human rights abuses in Xinjiang, has studied how China has used its ethnic minority policy to detain people in Xinjiang, including Muslim minorities uighurs and Kazakhs.
“The link between modern slavery and genocide itself is inextricable,” he said. “This is not the time for business as usual,” he said.
He also called on Western governments to do more: “We have not seen any real action to stop this Uighur genocide, especially in European countries.”
He noted that while the INTERNATIONAL Criminal Court (ICC) has refused to hear genocide claims against China because it is not a member, China is a member of other international bodies and organizations that can take political and legal action.
The Communist Party’s foreign ministry denied the existence of forced labor at a regular news briefing, with spokesman Wang Wenbin saying all ethnic groups in Xinjiang were applying for jobs “according to their own will.”
He also cited the Xinjiang Ethnic Minority Employment Survey report, which said the average willingness of the four villagers surveyed to go out to work was as high as 86.5 percent, and reiterated Beijing’s poverty-alleviation record.
Wang also criticized the photos of the “re-education camp” and directly named zheng Guoen, the author of the investigation report, saying that some media revealed that he was “a member of the far-right organization established by the US government and the backbone of an anti-China research institution manipulated by the US intelligence agency, making a living by fabricating anti-China rumors and slandering China.”
China has come under intense international criticism for its policies in Xinjiang, where rights groups say as many as 1m Uighurs and other mainly Muslim minorities are imprisoned in “re-education camps”.
Beijing says the heavily guarded centers are education and vocational colleges, and all those who attended have returned home after graduation.
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