Uighur activists and human rights defenders often contend that major Western electronics and apparel manufacturers profit from the use of slave-like and coerced labor in China, including work done by Uighurs confined in camps in western Xinjiang Province. Mediazona Central Asia discussed the various forms of involuntary labor in Xinjiang with Rune Steenberg, an anthropologist and researcher at the University of Olomouc in the Czech Republic who has long studied the Uighur population in Xinjiang. He and his colleagues rely on an approach they call “remote ethnography” to form a picture of what is transpiring in Xinjiang. This method relies on anecdotal evidence from those who have direct experience in Xinjiang, as well as close analysis of written accounts and economic data, to compensate for the lack of access for foreign experts to the region.

MZ: How did you collect information about forced labor in Xinjiang?

Steenberg: I worked with German journalists on issues of forced labor, cotton picking, and clothing production in Xinjiang, and also interviewed people who were in a “re-education” camp and forced to work there. So, I have an insider idea of ​​how the system works. I also know a little about labor transfer programs in Xinjiang.

MZ: Please tell us more about the involuntary/coerced labor regime in Xinjiang.

Steenberg: There are three different types of forced or involuntary labor in Xinjiang, each having different degrees of coercion. The most forced and difficult labor occurs in prisons. In Xinjiang prisons, prisoners can be forced to work for decades. Often it is very hard work, physically difficult work in terrible conditions, and no pay, nothing.

Then we have a situation where people are forced to work in the camps, or are transferred from a camp to closed factories, which also operate according to the principles of the camps, where they sew clothes, produce food and various other things. They aren’t paid for this either, but the conditions are not as harsh as in prison.

There are also those who have been interned in a camp but are given an opportunity to move from the camp to a factory. This can be described as “liberation.” All this camp forced labor, as well as prison “slave” labor, takes place in Xinjiang itself, next to the camps and prisons. People who have had a chance to be released from the camp to work in factories are sometimes transferred to inland China. There, they are given a contract, they sign an agreement, and they are paid some kind of salary, albeit a very low one. Moreover, they work in conditions that are not as bad as those in camps or prisons. I don’t know exactly how many people have gone through all this.

A fourth category is the so-called labor transfer programs. This involves people who have not been arrested or detained. They are directly “recruited” to work in various factories, fields, etc. Some people are sort of forced into it because in their village – or wherever they are – they are told that they need to bring so many people to a certain place, for example, to pick cotton. 

This practice is not new. It is, in fact, a form of forced labor as well. If someone refuses, there are consequences. But many also sign up for these labor transfer programs voluntarily, to receive a salary, although not very high, and with certain conditions that they can also leave if they want. The reason why many of them sign up for these programs is because they have no alternative, otherwise they will not be able to find a job. Getting a job in Xinjiang is now very difficult, especially for Uighurs who lack education. Many Chinese companies simply do not hire Uighurs, considering that officials say they are terrorists, suspicious, problematic.

Also, as I found out, when many men are detained in “re-education” camps, their wives, sisters and daughters can be sent to factories in so-called new special economic zones in Kashgar and Ghulja. I’ve heard stories of people who were directly involved, who worked in these newly opened factories. For their work they received a modest salary, but the government, at its own expense, arranged for transport to and from villages. It wasn’t entirely voluntary either – if you didn’t show up or didn’t agree to participate, you could get in trouble.

MZ: An important part of the modern Uyghur discourse in the West is to talk about how the forced labor of Uighurs not only benefits Chinese companies, but also some Western firms. How do we know about this?

Steenberg: Of course, it [forced labor] is not used directly by these companies, but by someone in their supply chains. Because of the way the capitalist system is structured, supply chains, as you can imagine, are very long and opaque. So, it’s very difficult to understand where the raw products actually come from. Many of these companies hide behind the fact that they don’t know anything, they just get ready-made products. But the reason why they do this, the benefit they get from it, is that they simply, through forced labor, get very, I repeat, very cheap products. Many of these companies operate factories and supply chains where there is no certainty that they are “clean” and where there is a high probability that forced labor is used. Besides cotton there is also polysilicon for solar cells, which is used by many large companies.

China is not just a market economy, but a state-controlled market economy. Therefore, many of these [Western] companies may have been involved in these labor transfer programs. Some of them may even have directly benefited from forced labor in prisons or camps, or have connections to factories where people were brought either after being in a camp, or which has workers who are wives of prisoners. Until companies and factories open up to transparent inspections, we will be forced to suspect that similar forms of forced labor exist throughout the region.

MZ: You have conducted research on cotton from Xinjiang? Can you discuss your research methods?

Steenberg: It was about a year and a half ago. We interviewed people who worked in the Xinjiang cotton industry, and they told us about the use of forced labor during harvesting and early processing. That is, to extract the seeds from cotton, as well as to clean it, extracting the oil from it, before it can be turned into threads, from which they will then sew fabric, and from it – clothes. So, we researched companies that could source cotton from Xinjiang, bought clothes from them, and tested them in a laboratory. As a result, based on the isotopic analysis of the clothing, we were able to say with a very high degree of confidence that these clothes contained cotton from Xinjiang. Where exactly this cotton was harvested, what kind of cotton, in what field, and so on, of course, is difficult to determine in this way, but this is at least something that we can say for sure.

We also analyzed satellite images of cotton fields, which show the speed of harvest. The Chinese government says that most of the cotton is picked by machines, but if you pick it by machines, they pick it all at once. If you collect it manually, it takes longer. Therefore, satellite images show how quickly a photograph of a field turns from white to dark. This is an indicator of how much of the crop is harvested by machine and how much by hand. Moreover, harvesting is not the only place where forced labor is used. At cotton gins, raw cotton is treated with chemicals, and this is quite hard and in many ways dangerous work, the voluntariness of which we also cannot measure.

Our understanding of forced labor needs clarification. Our ideas about it do not quite correspond to the situation in Xinjiang. As I already said, many people there have contracts, they sign up for work, they are paid a salary, but they are under political pressure to go and do the work, and they have no alternative. Therefore, I believe that this could still qualify as forced labor, and maybe even coercion. So, we need to think more deeply about the terms we use and how we define them, as well as the legal framework that surrounds them. The Xinjiang case can help us take a closer look at this and, I hope, create better tools for analyzing these types of labor.

Source: EuroasiaNet