China's Economy Runs on Uyghur Forced Labor

More than 100 global brands are linked to a scheme that ships Xinjiang ethnic minorities to work in factories thousands of miles away.

A traditional song in the Uyghur language plays over the video of a man feeding bits of car chassis into a machine. “Who is going to the city to be a stranger? Who can no longer stand it?” a nasal voice croons. The workshop belongs to a company that supplies parts to Tesla.

Another young man snaps a picture of his overalls and hardhat and titles the picture: “Everyone’s slave is his own master.” The plastics factory where he works has supplied Midea, the white goods brand that sponsors Manchester City football club.

In a third video, posted in May last year, a man at an electronics factory wears a red jacket emblazoned with the name of a local government division — the very department that has sent men and women from Xinjiang, China’s most western region, 2,500 miles away to work at the factory supplying parts for Samsung laptops. “In life there are no worthless people, only those unlucky before fate,” comes the voiceover.

The videos capture scenes from the new reality of China’s economy. More than a hundred global brands are linked to factories using Uyghur and other ethnic minority workers recruited through a system international authorities call forced labour, an extensive investigation has revealed. Many of those brands risk breaching a US law meant to sanction businesses that contribute to the repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

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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.

Apple and Samsung said its suppliers are regularly independently audited and that recent audits found no instances of forced labour. However, Apple said it is investigating the alleged link to forced labour. Volkswagen also said it was investigating but couldn’t comment until this was completed and “against the background of the contractually agreed confidentiality obligations.” Skechers and KFC didn’t respond to TBIJ’s questions.

However, 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.”

TBIJ’s investigation suggests that previous reporting on China’s exploitation of vulnerable ethnic minorities failed to capture how extensive the practice has become. It also shows that measures taken by major brands and governments are failing to prevent imports of products tainted by forced labour. Using trade data and other sources, like information from company websites, TBIJ tracked products to 86 markets around the world, from the US and UK to Colombia and Egypt. It seems increasingly difficult to buy Chinese goods without running the risk of tapping into a regime of exploitation.

2,000 miles from home

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.

In September 2022, dozens of men and women gathered at the entrance of the Artush vocational school in southern Xinjiang. The Douyin clip capturing the scene lingers momentarily on a billboard behind the group, advertising the “moral and technical training” the school provides.

Setting down their suitcases, each person waited as school officials fixed dinner-plate sized red fabric carnations to their chests. The flowers are a common symbol in China, used to celebrate a “labour transfer scheme” lauded inside the country but rarely advertised abroad. Arranged in precise rows, the group listened to speeches before being whisked onto coaches to start a more than 2,000-mile journey to Yangzhou city in Jiangsu, a coastal province north of Shanghai and global leader in high-tech manufacturing.

A caption on the video, posted from a government account, confirmed that the group was heading to Elec & Eltek, a circuit board manufacturer.

Over 18 months, a reporter for TBIJ analysed thousands of user accounts for clues as to the extent of the Xinjiang labour transfer scheme. The video of the Artush group was a propaganda piece from a government channel. Most of the clips TBIJ reviewed were uploaded by the transferred workers themselves and required detailed analysis to identify the factories involved from a glimpse of a uniform logo or a building in the background.

Posts evidence transfers to scores of factories from as early as 2019. But almost 300 accounts have posted scenes from their everyday lives inside factories and dormitories since January 2023. In many cases, they show the actual labour transfers themselves: by coach, train and plane.

To pinpoint the plants’ locations, TBIJ used geolocation techniques, meticulously comparing the visible features in the videos with images captured via satellite, Baidu Maps street view or those available on the internet. TBIJ corroborated the labour transfers with more than 300 articles in state media, local government reports, WeChat posts from government accounts and company press releases and financial filings.

Early this year, reporters from The New York Times and Der Spiegel visited approximately two dozen of the sites, speaking to factory staff and Uyghur workers. Many were wary of journalists, but those who were happy to speak described dozens or sometimes hundreds of workers from Xinjiang at each facility, usually brought as a group by a government agency and living together in dormitories. Some workers said that minders kept an eye on their movements, especially while they settled in. The shifts were long, but the pay was higher than what they might expect in Xinjiang, some said.

In reality, Chinese authorities had left them little other choice.

Outside a chicken processing plant above a river in Hubei province, a young man smoking a cigarette said that he came to work at the factory because his mother and grandmother were ill and needed to go to hospital. Another man said that while he worked 12- to 14-hour days, in violation of Chinese law, the pay was decent. Originally from Kashgar in Xinjiang, he’d been at the factory for a little over a year. Initially, he would have to tell his group’s minder every time he left the factory, but with time he had earnt more trust.

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.

In the transfers tracked by TBIJ, more than a third of the 75 factories involved are in China’s top industrial powerhouses — Guangdong, Jiangsu and Shandong. Another 45 are in Hubei, Fujian, Liaoning, Tianjin, Jiangxi, Anhui, Hunan and Chongqing, all key centres of Chinese manufacturing.

The factories feed products and parts — from washing machines to precision lenses — into supply chains delivering to customers around the world.

TBIJ trawled commercially available trade data for shipments from the factories and identified more than 145,000 consignments that had been exported since evidence indicated each of the plants had started taking transfer workers. However, that’s only a fraction of the total, because most countries don’t publish company-specific data.

Often, the transferred workers are making parts of other goods, with several steps still to come before products reach store shelves. Some of Elec & Eltek’s circuit boards, for instance, are sold to LG and Cal-Comp, a San Diego business that supplies the US car, aerospace and defence industries.

Other times, the workers from Xinjiang are there when the final goods are assembled. Alim* filmed himself walking past banks of glowing LCDs on the dimly lit floor of a cavernous £372m factory belonging to Chinese electronics giant TCL. The high tech production line churns out an air conditioner every eight seconds. Later, Alim’s Douyin reel shows him working with a gleaming orange robotic arm to pack units onto cardboard.

Alim had filmed his journey to the plant, disembarking in March 2022 at Wuchang Railway Station in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province. Two dozen recruits milled around the platform in blue facemasks and government-issued red windbreakers, blinking in the bright midday sun. The lines of a Uyghur song on the clip express trepidation and courage: “If you encounter danger on the road, extend your hand to me, I would even give my life for you.”

Assimilation, coercion and indoctrination

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.

The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, governments and other experts have reported that, from at least 2018, Uyghur, Kazakh and Kyrgyz people have been subjected to religious restrictions, political indoctrination, compulsory sterilisations, rape, torture and forced labour. Although Beijing claims so-called “vocational education and training centres” have been shut down, more recent international media reports contradict that narrative, suggesting some had been turned into high-security prisons.

“The vast majority of people have now been formally incarcerated without due process,” said Rayhan Asat, a Uyghur lawyer and adviser with the Washington DC-based Atlantic Council think tank. A 2024 report from the Uyghur Human Rights Project, a US-based advocacy outfit, demonstrated that, despite making up less than 1% of China’s population, Uyghurs account for 34% of all incarcerations. In many cases, Asat claimed, people were sentenced without trial, legal representation or even access to a lawyer.

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.

Xinjiang has been under the direction of a new party secretary since 2021, and policy has shifted, according to Adrian Zenz, a leading scholar on the region. Instead of mass internments, he said, the government has focused on institutionalising and stabilising the labour transfer system.

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.

Xinjiang government officials overseeing transfers have previously complained that recruits run away because they are “backward in their thinking” and “unwilling to leave their homes.” To “eliminate” such worries, the state said in 2020, it put the elderly dependents of transfer workers in care homes, placed their children in institutionalised care and “centralised” the management of workers’ farms and livestock.

“We can learn skills in school and find jobs at job fairs. It’s so convenient,” a state media article quoted one jobseeker, Maynur Taji, saying, at a recruitment fair for “farmers and herdsmen” at the Artush school in February 2024.

A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in the US said “allegations of ‘forced labour’ in Xinjiang are nothing but vicious lies concocted by anti-China forces.” Members of all ethnic groups there “enjoy happy and fulfilling lives,” they said, adding that “Xinjiang-related issues are not human rights issues at all, but in essence about countering violent terrorism and separatism.”

Chinese researchers studying the transfer program have noted that labour export quotas have led to people being “forced” to go as party officials seek to “make up the numbers.” In one 2016 study, 85% of people surveyed in a village near Kashgar said they didn’t support the state’s efforts to drive out-of-town employment. “Farmers are not willing to work outside the village at all,” the authors noted.

The International Labour Organization, rights groups and the US government describe the labour transfers as “coercive.”

“You have a strong political mandate from the central government that idle Uyghurs are a threat to national security,” said Zenz, adding that, in Xinjiang’s police state-like environment, the labour transfers would be coercive even without the threat of detention for those who refuse.

The minders

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.

A clip posted by a man supervising Uyghur workers at a chicken factory in Dalian, a coastal city in northern China, shows workers enjoying barbecues and dances in the compound. On other days, he takes the workers on day trips in the area — “all ethnicities are members of one family” reads a company-branded banner at one excursion. Dachan Food, the factory’s owner, is an approved chicken supplier to KFC and Subway in China, according to industry analysis published in recent years, and Dachan itself.

He titled one video, showing Uyghurs playing sports, “This is how the Makit [county, in Xinjiang] employees of Dachan Food (Dalian) spent the May Day holiday! Do you want to come?♥💞.” He added an infantilising hashtag: “They are always happy on the playground.”

Another of the man’s posts — almost all of which were deleted a few months after TBIJ archived them — shows around 40 men and women lining up in loose rows in the Dachan factory common room for China’s National Day that year. The Uyghur workers faced a large Chinese flag, pledged allegiance, saluted and then sang. The minder, a corpulent man with a buzzcut, wearing a white t-shirt and black slacks, conducted the singers with his hands.

Another suspected minder posted similar videos, including from the TCL air conditioning factory where Alim works. There he filmed himself sitting with Chinese management at an event for the Xinjiang workers. By early 2024 he’d been reassigned and uploaded a clip of himself leading dozens of workers in a pledge of allegiance beneath the Chinese flag outside the main office of a poultry factory — a supplier to McDonald’s and KFC.

The scenes 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.”

Sanctions and seizures

International responses to the oppression of ethnic minorities, particularly Uyghurs, in China have tended to focus on events inside Xinjiang. Many of the earlier revelations detailed the scale of forced labour in Xinjiang’s plantations, which supply about a fifth of the world’s cotton. In response, the US introduced a targeted Xinjiang cotton ban in 2020, extended it to include all cotton and tomatoes grown in the region in 2021, and then passed the wider Uyghur Forced Labour Prevention Act (UFLPA) in 2022. The UFLPA targets goods produced in Xinjiang, such as cotton, as well as their use in industries outside of the region, including textiles.

But the law also prohibits US importers trading with factories in eastern China that participate in the Xinjiang labour transfer program. US authorities have detained more than $3.6bn worth of goods under the law, so far. The Chinese embassy spokesperson said the UFLPA “seriously violates international law and basic norms governing international relations and grossly interferes in China’s internal affairs.”

One of the sponsors of the law in the US Senate was Marco Rubio, now the secretary of state, prompting the New York law firm Ropes & Gray to predict Donald Trump’s administration will enforce it robustly.

With Trump levying yet more tariffs on Chinese exports in the first 50 days of his administration, the stage is set for the US to deepen a trade war with China. But TBIJ’s findings highlight how goods made through forced labour are circumventing US trade laws via shipments to third countries like Mexico and Vietnam — calling into question the efficacy of direct levies on Chinese imports.

And US authorities are facing an ever-growing list of Chinese export sectors connected to forced labour risks. Pharmaceuticals, aluminium and seafood have all been highlighted by reporting in recent years, while TBIJ’s own reporting has thrown up serious issues with Chinese poultry farming and animal feed.

It remains to be seen how the new administration will address the human rights situation in China. The US failed an early test in this regard, said veteran human rights advocate Phil Robertson, when it offered a “laughably weak response” to Thailand’s deportation of 40 Uyghur men to China in February.

That same month, the State Department updated the language on its China Relations webpage to add that the country “engages in unfair trade practices, including using forced labour and massive state subsidies, putting American businesses at a disadvantage and making them complicit in China’s human rights abuses.”

Tesla, KFC, Subway, TCL, Midea, LG, Cal-Comp, Dachan Foods, Elec & Eltek and Hubei Hangte didn’t respond to several requests for comment. McDonald’s declined to comment on the record.

BMW said none of the factories TBIJ asked about were “directly” supplying the brand, and that it was “working on increasing transparency over its extended supplier network.”

Poetic resistance

The thousands of Douyin clips analysed by TBIJ build a picture of systemic coercion and repression. But the app is also a site of quiet rebellion. It has become the contemporary platform for an age-old Uyghur tradition of expression of resistance through poetry, song and dance.

In Dalian, a couple of weeks after the suspected minder at Dachan Foods posted on China National Day, Abdul*, a 21-year-old man working at the factory, uploaded a video quoting Uyghur literature. “If not for life’s harsh necessities, no one would willingly choose to be a musapir in foreign cities,” he said.

‘Musapir’, a Uyghur word that crops up frequently in posts, is a nuanced and important term, said Rune Steenberg, an anthropologist specialising in Xinjiang. It refers to “someone living outside their community, an outcast, a stranger — someone to have pity on”, said Steenberg, who worked with TBIJ, The New York Times and Der Spiegel to review the videos.

A year earlier, in 2022, Patime*, a Uyghur woman also working at the plant, uploaded a video showing workers in pink overalls making deft cuts of chicken carcasses hanging from conveyor belts. A voiceover clip — an exchange between two Uyghur men — said:

"You always look depressed. What happened to you?”

“Oh, I’m so exhausted. If it weren’t for my family, what would I do?”

“These days too shall pass,” a friend back in Xinjiang replies under the video. Six months earlier, Patime had posted a video of rain falling on tarmac at the factory’s entrance with a single line from a song: “Why does the sky cry in the form of rain? My tears flow like a river.”

“You have to understand the context to understand the meaning,” said Rebecca Clothey, a professor studying language and identity at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Clothey has researched how, in the face of heavy censorship, Uyghurs use veiled language and metaphor online to express their cultural identity and resistance.

“When they want people to know what’s happening, they will find a way to show it,” she said.

Clothey, Steenberg and other cultural experts who reviewed some of the Douyin videos concluded that the workers were communicating unhappiness and distress at their situations.

“There’s a sense of defeat tied to the work that they’re doing,” said Steenberg. “And a feeling they’ve little other choice.” Whether that’s because of economic circumstances, discrimination, dispossession or coercion is hard to disentangle, he added.

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.

"The coercion is systemic, built into the system,” said Zenz. “The very notion of choice becomes highly questionable.”

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.

Caption for story's thumbnail photo: A production line with ceramic tile. Image by Roman Dombrowski/Shutterstock. 2017.