Forced labor on China’s cotton farms will enslave Uyghurs until the EU and UN act, a report says

Ethnic minority Uyghurs could remain enslaved in China producing cotton for world markets unless the United Nations closes legal loopholes that allow Beijing to exploit the workers of its northwestern territory, a June report by a United States–based nonprofit foundation warns.

A new report, “Coercive Labor in the Cotton Harvest in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and Uzbekistan: A Comparative Analysis of State-Sponsored Forced Labor,” outlines how Uyghurs are trapped in forced labor programs that have not yet become the focus of democratic lawmakers around the world. It was researched and written by Adrian Zenz, a senior fellow in China studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington, D.C.

Based on work Zenz began in 2018 into human rights abuses in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region — an area the size of Alaska that’s home to about 14 million Uyghurs, most of whom are Muslims — the report urges UN legislators to tighten up International Labor Organization rules.

Zenz told The China Project that efforts in Europe and America to combat forced labor in China are not enough.

He also said that unless the UN definition of forced labor is expanded to include the particular types of coercion employed in Xinjiang — such as the threat of incarceration if a Uyghur refuses a state job — the unthinkable could happen.

Forced labor is but one of many human rights abuses facing China’s Uyghurs, many of whom have been interned en masse and subjected to forced sterilization to reduce their population.

In July 2022, Washington banned the American import of goods wholly or in part made in Xinjiang though the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.

According to U.S. Department of Agriculture data, 90% of China’s cotton is produced in Xinjiang, and only 20% of the cotton used by Chinese textile manufacturers is imported.

“That means most Chinese cotton products contain cotton that was produced in Xinjiang and are thus subject to the ban,” a USDA report said.

After Zenz’s report went to press, lawmakers from both major U.S. political parties introduced a bill designed to give sharp teeth to the ban on Chinese cotton by forcing American businesses to disclose their links to forced labor.

The Uyghur Genocide Accountability Act introduced on May 31 by U.S. senators Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR) adds to the earlier legislation a raft of provisions to help Uyghurs who have fled China to gain the power to penalize companies profiteering from the forced labor of their relatives back home.

Advocates for Uyghur rights lauded the bipartisan bill, whose proposed measures they would like to see enforced internationally.

“This act is a cry for justice, piercing the darkness with the light of hope, as we fight tooth and nail to restore the shattered lives and stolen dreams of the Uyghur people,” Rushan Abbas, the executive director of the Washington-based nonprofit Campaign For Uyghurs, said in a statement on June 1.

Governments that trade with China have been reluctant to issue a blanket ban on Chinese cotton but are warming to the idea.

In September 2022, the European Union received draft legislation against forced labor, and last week, on June 1, France’s Green Party proposed a resolution that would assume Chinese cotton products entering the EU are tainted by forced labor unless European importers can prove otherwise.

Though EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, in her 2021 state of the union address, said that while doing business around the world was “good,” it “can never, ever be done at the expense of people’s dignity and freedom,” there still are no EU laws prohibiting the sale in the EU of products made by forced labor.

The newly proposed EU law would institute such a ban if all member states agree, though its implementation and enforcement would not necessarily follow.

The United Kingdom lags behind the EU on proposing legislation to stop forced labor, leaving the burden of proof of forced labor with importers and anti-forced-labor activists. Uyghur advocates are pressing British lawmakers to tighten post-Brexit rules that allow slave-made cotton and cotton products to be sold in the U.K.

International anti-slavery groups and Uyghur activists agree with Zenz’s conclusions and continue to press for laws that will force the Chinese Communist Party to stop oppressing the people of the Uyghur region.

Historically, International Labor Organization (ILO) indicators of forced labor have set the global standard for acceptable working conditions.

In 2022, Beijing ratified two of the ILO Forced Labor Conventions, but their wording addressed commercial rather than political exploitation and therefore did not address China’s enslavement of Uyghurs, a fact Zenz suspects Beijing understood when it signed on.

“In doing so [China] is able to exploit the fact that the set of 11 ILO indicators were not designed to effectively identify state-imposed forced labor,” Zenz said. “It is paramount that the EU’s proposed ban on goods made with forced labor has to be implemented in a way that effectively targets goods made with Uyghur forced labor.”

International pressure campaigns helped end forced labor in Uzbekistan in 2021, whereas in neighboring Xinjiang, the campaigns failed to make a dent in the use of Uyghur forced labor. Zenz’s report says that Uyghur forced labor exists for political reasons and is therefore harder to combat. “It will require an international coalition and a concerted multilateral effort,” he said.

Picking cotton for the state in Uzbekistan and Xinjiang looks the same on the surface, Zenz found. Both involve corralling people into the grueling work of harvesting cotton by hand, but there the similarities end. In Uzbekistan, the driving force was largely economic: employ a rapidly growing rural population and keep costs down by using manual labor over expensive modern farm machinery.

In China, in 1996, Xinjiang Party Secretary Wáng Lèquán 王乐泉 said that the region was to become the “largest cotton-producing area in the country,” and began to mobilize prison labor and thousands of children to make up a labor shortfall.

Cotton picking by hand in Xinjiang is politically motivated and backed by Chinese Communist Party (CCP) policy that goes back decades to a period post-9/11, when Beijing began to characterize China’s Turkic-speaking Muslim minorities such as Uyghurs as “terrorists,” a reframing that Zenz said justified their rehabilitation through labor.

In 2016, a new Party secretary named Chén Quánguó 陈全国, who led the CCP’s quelling of dissent among ethnic minorities in neighboring Tibet, acted to root out “separatist” leanings among Uyghurs and see them “Sinicized,” Zenz said.

Chen steered Uyghurs and other indigenous peoples in the region into state-approved work, an approach that accelerated as the number of so-called reeducation camps grew. As many as 1 million Uyghurs are believed to have been detained by Chinese authorities in Xinjiang. Once indoctrinated in Communist Party dogma and “fluent” in Mandarin, their reeducation of one to three years “successfully” behind them, many Uyghurs were “promoted” to factories around China to work under bonded conditions. This camp-to-labor practice slowed to a halt in 2019, Zenz told The China Project.

Ongoing, however, is a “poverty eradication” scheme, promoted by CCP General Secretary Xí Jìnpíng 习近平, that sends Uyghurs designated as “surplus laborers” into factories in Xinjiang and elsewhere in China to allay Xi’s concern that large numbers of unemployed Uyghur “troublemakers” are upending social stability and falling prey to “religious extremist thinking.”

CCP policy to hedge against this perceived extremism included dispatching Uyghurs to factories run by Han Chinese to make goods for export. There they would work for wages below market rate, be surveilled around the clock, have no freedom to come and go, and be subjected to continuous CCP indoctrination and compulsory Mandarin classes.

Uyghurs who refused work placements were labeled “religious extremists” and sent to vocational skills education and training centers, or state reeducation camps, where “lazy persons, drunkards, and other persons with insufficient inner motivation” were subjected to repeated “thought education,” leaked documents show. Detainees of 60 years or older were forced to pick cotton and vegetables, Zenz said. One 77-year-old was labeled “lazy.”

Highlighting cracks in the ILO’s Forced Labor Conventions that fail to address the multilayered political rationale behind Uyghur forced labor, Zenz said that stopping the practice will be difficult without a radical revamp of international labor laws.

“It is paramount that the EU’s proposed ban on goods made with forced labor has to be implemented in a way that effectively targets goods made with Uyghur forced labor,” Zenz said.

Peter Irwin of the Uyghur Human Rights Project criticized indifference toward Uyghur forced labor.

“The ILO hasn’t even acknowledged that what’s happening in the Uyghur region is, in fact, forced labor, despite mountains of evidence demonstrating this,” Irwin told The China Project.

Global clothes manufacturers and the lobby groups that represent giant brands accused of sourcing and profiting from cotton harvested by slave labor are under mounting pressure from social responsibility campaigns.

Antonio Gambini, the European Lobby and Advocacy coordinator for the Clean Clothes Campaign, told The China Project he wants “increased transparency and traceability in the value chain.”

Dominique Muller, the policy director of Labor Behind the Label, said that the ILO alone was impotent in halting forced labor.

“Major fashion brands continue to source from Chinese factories — including those with links to forced labor despite the absolute denial of the right to independent unions in China. We must now move to ensure that promises are put into practice,” Muller told The China Project.

Some researchers say the only solution lies in a total boycott of business in Xinjiang.

“All businesses should end all operations and sourcing from the Uyghur region immediately,” Laura Murphy, a professor of human rights and contemporary slavery at the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice at Sheffield Hallam University, told The China Project.

“They should also end relationships with any suppliers that will not provide information relevant to their own sourcing or are unable or unwilling to provide free and unfettered access to workers,” Murphy said.

Murphy’s research into forced labor among detainees and prisoners in northwestern China looks at international supply chains. China’s cotton is implicated, but so are its finished clothes, solar panels, chemicals, plastics, car parts, and industrial minerals.

Since 2021, Murphy’s team has pressed the ILO to expand its list of 11 indicators of forced labor to address the unique circumstances Uyghurs face when forced to work by the state.

“Threat of incarceration for refusal to work; state recruiters charged with conscription of workers; government surveillance and security forces; required ideological programming; retribution for airing grievances; work as a requirement of release from incarceration or internment; and contracts signed between state and company rather than workers” — these all should be added to the ILO list, Murphy told The China Project.

“These additional indicators would help to capture state-imposed forms of forced labor that are now less adequately captured by the ILO indicators,” Murphy said.

What is needed is a “clear and unambiguous message to the CCP,” said Sabrina Sohail, the director of advocacy and communications of the Campaign For Uyghurs.

“When it comes to matters of genocide, human rights abuses, and forced labor, diplomacy only serves to embolden the oppressor. Until the CCP and companies can unequivocally prove that they are not complicit in Uyghur forced labor, governments should refuse any association,” Sohail said.