A recent investigation has detected products made using forced labour by minorities from Xinjiang province across almost all China-based supply chains.
Investigators from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), the New York Times and Der Spiegel scoured Chinese social media platform Douyin to find posts by ethnic minority workers transferred outside Xinjiang, before identifying and verifying the factories they worked at. Their report found over 100 global brands linked to Uyghur, Kazakh and Kyrgyz forced labour from a transfer programme started in 2006 and accelerated since 2021.
Daniel Murphy, a freelance journalist with TBIJ, told New Internationalist that while the poor working conditions inside the factories themselves are broadly the same for workers from China's dominant Han ethnicity, non-Han workers minorities are forcibly recruited into the programmes and ‘face restrictions on freedom of movement, constant surveillance and compulsory non-work related activities such as cultural education sessions’.
Executive Director of US-funded NGO China Labor Watch, Li Qiang, meanwhile says that ‘many Uyghur workers are now in second- or third-tier suppliers or in companies serving primarily the domestic Chinese market.’ Transferred Uyghur workers do not tend to be hired by factories linked to international supply chains, instead entering into precarious subcontracts.
The TBIJ investigation points to tens of thousands of victims of forced labour.
