A new report on cotton industry slavery in China has been issued by the noted China anthropologist Adrian Zenz, who has been working mainly with Chinese government documents to reveal the staggering scale of the Chinese government’s ongoing mass atrocities launched in 2017 against the Uyghur and Kazakh peoples, in whose homelands most of China’s cotton is gathered. The report “dissects the evolution of China and Uzbekistan’s systems of state-sponsored forced labor and exposes an inside view of their brutal nature, scale, and motivations.”
Key findings include: Never before seen Chinese internal state documents show that despite some mechanization, Uyghurs continued to be sent to pick cotton through coercive labor transfers in 2021 and 2022, and such seasonal labor transfers continue to be part of Xinjiang’s Five-Year Plan for 2025 as premium-grade long staple cotton grown in southern Uyghur regions still cannot be harvested by machines.
Xinjiang now produces 90 percent of China’s cotton, up from 85 percent in 2020. This expansion was partly enabled through large-scale land transfer arrangements whereby Uyghur farmers are forced to surrender their land rights to large private or state-led entities, then subjected to state-arranged labor transfers. Hence, even when mechanically harvested, Xinjiang cotton is produced through exploiting the rights of ethnic groups.
Despite the abolishment of Beijing’s “re-education through labor” system in 2013, China’s prison farms in Xinjiang continue to operate cotton ginning plants.
By comparing Xinjiang with Uzbekistan, the report concludes that systemic state-sponsored forced labor in Xinjiang is not easily captured through static standard measures such as the ILO forced labor indicators—severely impairing the potential effectiveness of any policies based on those indicators. Coercive labor in Xinjiang is deeply embedded in Beijing’s whole-of-society efforts, which are framed as political and national security mandates, not just economic goals, making those policies more deeply entrenched and requiring a more robust international policy response.”
The above is partly cited from the press release issued May 9 from Zenz’ home institution, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
A related article has been published in the Journal of Communist and Post-Communist Studies (University of California Press). It is now Open Access for 30 days.
Further information about the various other aspects of Chinese slavery today (solar, automobile, floors, etc.), can also be found in two reports from Sheffield Hallam university’s Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice, accessible here and here.
I track these various reports and news and add them to my open access running bibliography of China’s genocide.
Certainly, the history of world slavery too is being rewritten now, as we speak, in China’s ongoing genocide.
Sincerely,
Magnus Fiskesjö, Cornell University <nf42@cornell.edu>