According to Radio Free Asia, a Han Chinese woman, who goes by the screen name “Guan Nu,” posted on the social media platform Clubhouse, said she was born on a Corps farm in the 1960s in Shihezi, Xinjiang‘s 8th Agricultural Division, and had been a middle school teacher on a Corps farm before moving to the U.S. She has been working as a volunteer since she was a child. She pointed out that the Xinjiang Construction Corps did mobilize people to pick cotton on farms in southern Xinjiang “through labor transfer. “For example, if a company commander or an instructor of a farm wants workers to pick cotton, can you say no? You do not leave, do not listen, do not give the leadership face, do not respond positively to the higher mobilization, how to live in the future?”
“Official slave” said, in Xinjiang blatantly “forced labor” is now relatively rare. The cotton picking in the Corps’ farms can earn 1.5-2 yuan per kilogram, and transportation and local Food and housing are guaranteed. Her Parents and herself had seen the misery of the dishonest “reactionaries” and had to do heavier manual labor, just hoping that she would not be treated as an alien and subjected to “forced labor”. She also taught her children that they must learn to be patient and not to suffer in front of their eyes.
The “official slave” pointed out that the work of picking cotton, but also often affect the employment of students! School starts in September every year in Xinjiang, but the cotton picking work is mainly mobilized in the middle and high schools are not open, the Corps to encourage everyone to help the autumn harvest, the community has an invisible pressure, “you better go help. Follow the Corps ‘labor transfer’ picking cotton, not enough housing to build their own tents, with local people to help cook.” She also said that the Corps use local people, compared to the hundreds of thousands of cotton pickers called from the mainland, plus long-distance trains in and out, trivial people management, etc., to be much more cost-effective. She was previously in the Corps of Agriculture Division 8, organizational mobilization capacity, labor export and evacuation are paramilitary management. The first Time I saw the film, I was able to see it.
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She said that since elementary school, voluntary labor has been growing up with the winter to collect manure for the spring fertilizer, each student has a target; spring to plant trees and grass; summer to hoe wheat fields to kill insects; autumn harvest season, students have to organize to go to the fields to pick cotton, collect wheat ears. Also learn from Lei Feng to go to the regimental organs cleaning, beautifying the courtyard, cleaning for the five poor households. The nine years of compulsory Education in school, to evaluate the three good students, as class cadres, the Corps of farm children labor can not be active, to give all the enthusiasm.
The difference between “compulsory labor” and “forced labor” was a new experience for her only after she arrived in the United States. In her opinion, picking cotton in Xinjiang can only be described as a kind of soft violence. She said she grew up with the “moral training” of “learning from Lei Feng to do good deeds without leaving a name” and “loving labor to be a successor”. Xinjiang’s well-trained army of farm workers has actually been held hostage by history for a long time.
Xinjiang cotton mainly relies on a large number of manual harvesting, and long labor hours. According to the Center for Global Policy, a U.S. think tank, more than 570,000 Uyghurs were forced to pick cotton in the fields in 2018, for example, and were even closely monitored. In this regard, it is estimated that up to 2 million people are forced to join the militarized cotton picking industry or the local textile industry.
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