Forced labour in China: 'Growing evidence" that Beijing forcibly transfers workers from Xinjiang to other regions within the country seeking to avoid Western sanctions

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More must be done to identify companies participating in labor transfer schemes, in particular outside of the Uyghur Region, the Coalition to End Forced Labour in the Uyghur Region, says.

The Coalition is joint force of civil society organisations and trade unions united to end state-sponsored forced labour and other egregious human rights abuses against people from the Uyghur Region in China, known to local people as East Turkistan.

While the coalition welcomes regulations by the U.S. administration aimed to end the state-sponsored forced labor of Uyghur and other Turkic and Muslim-majority peoples in supply chains such as the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), it says that “more must be done to identify companies participating in labor transfer schemes, in particular outside of the Uyghur Region”, writes Charlotte Tate, Advocacy Lead for the Coalition to End Forced Labour in the Uyghur Region.

• There is growing evidence that Chinese government-led programs to transport Uyghurs to other parts of China, where the working conditions strongly indicate forced labor, are increasing.
• Recent research has documented the government’s increased efforts to forcibly transfer Uyghurs outside of the Region, finding that in 2023, “Xinjiang significantly expanded the scale of the Pairing Assistance program, which facilitates cross-provincial labor transfers, aiming to increase transfers to other Chinese regions by 38 percent—levels exceeding those of any year since the mid-2010s.”
• In the context of government control and coercion that Uyghurs and other Turkic and Muslim-majority peoples are experiencing in China, all state-sponsored labor transfers from the Uyghur Region should be considered coerced labor by companies. Individuals who refuse the government’s requirements risk being arbitrarily detained, along with their families.
• An investigation published by the Outlaw Ocean Project into the seafood industry, which was recently added as a high-priority sector for enforcement, found that over 1,000 Uyghurs were placed in at least 10 seafood processing facilities after being forcibly transferred thousands of miles from the Uyghur Region.
• This investigation found those same companies imported over 47,000 tons of seafood into the U.S. between 2018 and 2023. However, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) can only apply the UFLPA to future shipments if those seafood processors are included on the UFLPA Entity List, which may come as a surprise to some.
• “Increasing UFLPA enforcement efforts on labor transfers outside of the Uyghur Region would send a strong signal to importers that they must focus attention beyond direct sourcing from the area,” Tate says.