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The parallel purpose of mass employment and mass internment is made clear by the appearance of many factories within the walls of the camps, or in close proximity to them. Since 2018, a huge industrial expansion has been under way involving the building of hundreds of factories. While China calls them “schools for de-radicalisation”, its own records suggest that the reality is a draconian system of internment which aims to replace old identities of faith and culture with an enforced loyalty to the Communist Party.īut the construction work didn’t stop with the camps.
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Its response, from 2016 onwards, has been the building of “ re-education” camps for anyone displaying any behaviour viewed as a potential sign of untrustworthiness, such as installing an encrypted messaging app on a phone, viewing religious content or having a relative living overseas. In recent years, those efforts have gone into overdrive.Īrguably President Xi Jinping’s most important domestic political priority, the goal is to eliminate absolute poverty in time for the Communist Party’s centenary next year.īut in Xinjiang there is evidence of a far more political purpose and much higher levels of control, as well as massive targets and quotas which officials are under pressure to meet.Ī marked shift in China’s approach to the region can be traced back to two brutal attacks on pedestrians and commuters in Beijing in 2013 and the city of Kunming in 2014, blamed by China on Uighur Islamists and separatists. “Anyone who cares about ethical sourcing has to look at Xinjiang, which is 85% of China’s cotton and 20% of the world’s cotton, and say, ‘We can’t do this anymore.’”Ĭhina has long used the mass relocation of its rural poor - with the stated aim of improving their employment prospects - as part of a national anti-poverty campaign. “For the first time we not only have evidence of Uighur forced labour in manufacturing, in garment making, it’s directly about the picking of cotton, and I think that is such a game-changer. “In my view the implications are truly on a historical scale,” Dr Adrian Zenz, a senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington who uncovered the documents, told the BBC. The Chinese government denies the claims, insisting that the camps are “vocational training schools” and the factories are part of a massive, and voluntary, “poverty alleviation” scheme.īut the new evidence suggests that upwards of half a million minority workers a year are also being marshalled into seasonal cotton picking under conditions that again appear to raise a high risk of coercion. Alongside a large network of detention camps, in which more than a million are thought to have been detained, allegations that minority groups are being coerced into working in textile factories have already been well documented.