China ‘Doubling Down’ on Uyghur Forced Labor Transfers Outside Xinjiang

The findings bolster evidence gleaned from documents such as the Nankai report-leaked by Zenz in 2021-that indicate a broader campaign of cultural and religious genocide behind these euphemistically termed initiatives, though Beijing, for its part, has repeatedly and vehemently rejected the allegations as “slanderous attacks” from the West.

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“And, of course, China just solves a basic problem of increasingly costly labor with rising wages and rising fringe benefits and costs in eastern China [with the] abundance of cheap Uyghur labor,” he said, noting that Uyghurs earn far less than their majority Han Chinese counterparts-and that’s before they have to pony up for costs such as food, housing and transportation. The exploitation, in other words, is a doubleheader, with motivations that are as much economic as they are political.

Zenz said that the implications for Western industries, including fashion, are now much greater because “this affects secondary industries that are processing stuff that may or may not be from Xinjiang. They may not otherwise have a supply relationship to the region.”

Of note in the report is Xinjiang’s increasing deployment of an “unemployment monitoring and early warning” mechanism, which Zenz first documented in 2022. The program involves the real-time tracking of incomes and employment statuses of millions of rural households. The program is increasingly becoming the “No. 1 reason” why China’s actions can be described as forced labor, he said. Previously, the leading reason was coercive recruitment and “all the mechanisms that happened at the grassroots level,” including land grabbing that leaves Uyghurs without homes to return to. Those still exist and in many cases accelerated, but there is now a “greater emphasis on retention, institutionalization and the sort of normalization of what has been achieved.”

“Uyghurs’ lives have been changed,” Zenz said. “And now you want to retain them through surveillance and monitoring.”

So what does this mean for brands and retailers? For one thing, they have to be more preemptive in their measures.

“You have to realize that firstly, this problem isn’t going away,” Zenz said. “Uyghur forced labor is not going anywhere. Second, it’s actually intensifying. It’s expanding in scale, transfers to other provinces are increasing, [and] so the risks arising [in Xinjiang] are present in other parts of China.”

Not to mention the fact that 90 percent of Chinese cotton hails from Xinjiang, a cause of much consternation for fashion firms seeking to comply with the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which blocks products with any nexus to the province from entering the United States. More Uyghur-related legislation could be coming down the pike, too: On Wednesday, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would prohibit the State Department and Agency for International Development from funding the purchase of goods made in Xinjiang.

Despite its “strategic shift” from reeducation and internment of ethnic groups, Xinjiang still has what Zenz characterizes as a “greatly enlarged” detention and prison system, with waves of arbitrary detention continuing to take place. At the same time, labor transfers are a “less visible” form of repression and control while remaining a “very strong” form of assimilation. They also evade many existing conceptual frameworks of forced labor, including those used by the International Labour Organization. In short, companies’ exposure to exploitation in China will only climb.

“It’s a very significant exposure that may or may not mean that some brands have to even divest from China,” Zenz said. “Certainly, they have to invest a lot more in due diligence and take more precautionary steps not just to be presumably one step removed from Uyghur forced labor but try to be two or three steps removed.”