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China’s economy runs on Uyghur forced labour: More than 100 global brands are linked to a scheme that ships Xinjiang ethnic minorities to work in factories thousands of miles away from their home

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By trawling tens of thousands of videos posted on Douyin, TikTok’s Chinese sister app, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) has uncovered a largely hidden force that is helping to fuel China’s economic expansion. Geolocating the videos and reviewing Chinese state media reports allowed TBIJ, The New York Times and Der Spiegel to identify Xinjiang minority workers in 75 factories across 11 regions.

International responses to the oppression of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang have tended to focus on products grown or made within the province, particularly cotton. But this investigation demonstrates that the problem of forced labour goes well beyond the borders of Xinjiang.

The investigation establishes the most detailed picture to date of how China’s programme to move tens of thousands of people from Xinjiang to work in eastern factories has become an inescapable facet of its export economy. The Uyghur, Kazakh and Kyrgyz workers make everything from keyboards to cars, as well as components that end up in products shipped around the world, including to the UK.

The link to forced labour pervades entire swathes of the Chinese economy. More than a hundred consumer brands – from Apple to Volkswagen– can be tied to the tainted trade and, for the first time, evidence shows factories directly owned by big brands themselves, like those run by Midea and LG Electronics, have participated in the Chinese government programme. The products implicated include everything from shoes like Skechers to KFC chicken.

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The mass transfer of mostly Muslim minority workers constitutes state-imposed forced labour according to researchers, human rights watchdogs, North American and European governments and the United Nations. This type of forced labour involves authorities recruiting targeted populations who — living in a police state-like environment — are coerced to work in key industries.

“When a government official knocks on the door of a Uyghur person and says they should take a job far from home, the person knows this is not merely a request,” said Laura Murphy, a former senior policy adviser to the Biden administration on Xinjiang forced labour.

“They know there are directives that say refusal is punishable by detention. And they know how horrible detention is. Every Uyghur in Xinjiang has either been in detention themselves or has someone close to them who has been. This is not a choice. This is not consent.”

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Search for ‘Xinjiang’ on Douyin, and your feed will light up with mountainous vistas, horseback riding and sizzling kebabs uploaded by Chinese travel bloggers. The occasional talking-head influencer – Han Chinese settlers to the region – offers advice on navigating the government’s various relocation subsidies.

Dig deeper and you’ll find a different kind of video.

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On the outskirts of Wuhan, a security guard at a car parts manufacturer cried: “Plenty of Xinjiang workers here – more than 200!” The company didn’t hire them directly, he said. “It’s all government-organised labour.”

Local state media reports only offer a glimpse of the national programme; Beijing doesn’t publish statistics on such transfers. The written evidence gathered by TBIJ shows transfers of at least 11,000 people in the past decade to factories in nine provinces, all thousands of miles east of Xinjiang, and to the megacities of Tianjin and Chongqing.

This figure is a fraction of the total: Jiangsu province, for instance, hosted 39,000 Xinjiang “migrant workers” in 2023, according to official figures, and just one Xinjiang county transferred more than 10,000 people in the first quarter of the same year, according to local official reports. A state media article tallied more than 100,000 labour transfers out of Xinjiang as far back as 2006, the year the program started.

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In August 2023, President Xi Jinping visited Xinjiang. There he urged authorities to “encourage and guide” Uyghurs to find jobs throughout the country. A few months earlier, the local government had pledged to expand labour transfers out of the region by more than a third.

The measures are just the latest phase of the government’s decades-long crackdown on ethnic minorities. The state has moved millions of mainly rural ethnic minorities — what Beijing calls “surplus labourers” — both within and outside of Xinjiang for work, as part of a broader drive to forcibly re-engineer their identities under the guise of “poverty alleviation”. The repressive programme serves Xi’s vision of forging a more homogenous culture, society and ethnicity, and turbocharging China’s economy in a race to gain the upper hand over the US and EU.

Xi first declared war on “terrorism” and “violent extremism” in Xinjiang in 2014, when unrest was met with brutal crackdowns. Since then, Xinjiang has been wrapped in a web of surveillance and security architecture. More than a million ethnic minorities have been arbitrarily detained, many forced into factory work at internment camps and detention facilities.

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The repression has gone wider still. Beijing has demolished thousands of mosques, collectivised land and herds and built vast new estates to house displaced ethnic minorities and sprawling industrial parks to employ them. High unemployment linked to broad discrimination in the local job market has helped keep Uyghurs in lower-skilled work like farming.

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The region’s current five-year plan requires all able members of ethnic minority households to be employed – a shift from the single family member specified previously. It projects that 13.75 million people will be transferred, mostly within Xinjiang, between 2021 and 2025, and instructs local governments across China to strengthen coordination, including through digitising personnel files for all transfer workers.

This data is integrated into a “real-time’”employment monitoring system, which Beijing established after deploying hundreds of thousands of party officials to assess the income of 12 million rural Xinjiang households. It includes regular home visits by local teams of party officials, like the one seen by the BBC in 2021 reducing a 19-year old girl to tears as they broke down her resistance to labour transfer.

Authorities have identified almost 800,000 people for real-time monitoring, according to state media in 2022, and transfers are the government’s first recourse to stop household incomes dropping.

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When 30 or more workers are transferred together, government minders and security guards accompany them. These minders deliver them to the factory where they will live and work, and stay on to help communicate with management and address concerns. Hubei Hangte, which claims it supplies BMW and other carmakers, said in 2022 that it invited minders to discuss how to stop problem behaviours among workers from Xinjiang “such as drinking and swimming in groups”.

The minders also help with the primary aims of the labour programme: cultural assimilation and political indoctrination. Their own Douyin posts can be revealing.

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The scenes [shown in videos posted on Chinese social media that display members of the Uyghur group and other minorities celebrating and dancing, and enjoying their lives are staged propaganda and] are examples of the sinister destruction of Uyghur, Kazakh and Kyrgyz identities, much like the “patriotic” education sessions routinely described in state media, analysts told TBIJ.

Yalkun Uluyol, China researcher at Human Rights Watch (HRW), called the videos “extremely unsettling”. He added that HRW’s research showed swearing allegiance to the flag is “political indoctrination” and part of the suite of repressive policies that “constitute crimes against humanity”.

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Last year, the International Labour Organization decided to start measuring state-imposed forced labour by looking at what a given government is doing, rather than the conditions experienced at an individual level. Pointing to factors like a police state and policies targeting specific ethnicities, the organisation highlights how this kind of forced labour feeds on people’s vulnerabilities, such as a lack of job opportunities, but may not always exploit them economically because the political aims are more important.

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In Liaoning, a few hours drive from the North Korean border, a young Uyghur woman turns to show piles of raw chicken on the gleaming aluminum worktops of a poultry processing factory. She sets the 14-second clip to a stanza from a Uyghur poem, spoken in a hushed voice:

>My many sorrows overflow, uncontained.

>But to the world I am lighthearted, companioned with laughter.

>I am bait for my silence, quietly.

>Nobody is aware, and they shall never be.