Last month, Chinese diplomats sent letters – really threats – to discourage attendance at an event on the sidelines of the UN general assembly spotlighting Beijing’s persecution of Uyghur and other Turkic Muslims in China’s Xinjiang region. The childish tactic backfired, heightening media interest, but it highlighted the lengths to which Beijing will go to cover up its repression. A recent exposé on the persecution of Uyghurs should reinforce our determination to address these crimes against humanity.
A four-year investigation by the Outlaw Ocean Project pulls back the curtain on the massive use of forced labor in the Chinese government-backed fishing industry. Much of the study focused on people coercively kept on China’s distant-water fishing fleet, which holds workers at sea for months at a time in appalling conditions, often with lethal neglect. But the study also showed that seafood-processing facilities inside China are deploying Uyghur forced labor on a large scale.
Beijing’s persecution of Uyghurs has evolved in recent years, in part due to global scrutiny. At first, Chinese authorities established an extraordinarily intrusive surveillance state to identify “suspicious” activity such as excessive praying, wearing Muslim garb, or having contacts abroad. The reams of data collected were used to detain an estimated one million people to force them to abandon their religion, culture and language.
After initially denying their existence, Beijing laughably tried to pass these forced indoctrination camps off as “vocational training centers”. Some ingenious bureaucrat rubbed them off the Chinese equivalent of Google Maps, making their location easy to spot. But as people saw through these ploys, Beijing partially changed tactics. Some Uyghurs were convicted on trumped-up criminal charges and handed lengthy sentences in ordinary prisons. Others were released to the surveillance state, under threat of renewed detention should they act, well, too Uyghur. And some were moved into forced labor.
Most attention to that forced labor so far has focused on three big Xinjiang industries – cotton (20% of the world’s supply is grown there), tomatoes and polysilicon (used in solar panels). There is also evidence of the use of forced labor in the automobile and aluminum industries. Some Uyghurs were assigned to forced labor projects outside of Xinjiang – the better to deracinate them from their culture – but few details are known. The Outlaw Ocean Project shows us that the seafood processing industry is a major destination. Much of that seafood finds its way into Britain.
The US government has taken some steps to block such imports. The Uyghur Forced Labor Protection Act, adopted with overwhelming bipartisan support in December 2021, creates a rebuttable presumption against the import into the United States of any goods made in whole or in part in Xinjiang unless the products can be shown to be free of forced labor. Given the opacity of Chinese supply chains, a clean product is difficult to demonstrate.
Enforcement could be stronger – members of Congress fear that many goods made in Xinjiang are slipping by, especially as companies try to launder products through firms outside of China – but this presumptive bar is a powerful policy. The act also creates an “Entity List” for companies believed tainted by Uyghur forced labor. Clearly a good part of China’s seafood processing industry belongs on that list. Targeted sanctions should also be imposed on the officials and companies involved, as the separate Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act requires.
Neither the British government nor the European Union has followed Washington’s lead in restricting Uyghur forced labor by creating a presumption against imports from Xinjiang. The British government imposed targeted sanctions on four individuals and one company, but hid behind the impenetrability of the system to avoid doing more. A parliamentary bill proposing a presumptive ban is going nowhere.
The EU is planning to ban all products of forced labor – a good generic policy – but, again, without a presumptive bar for Xinjiang. In the meantime, while exports from Xinjiang to the US plummeted, exports to the European Union increased by a third in 2022.
In August 2022, Michelle Bachelet, then the UN high commissioner for human rights, issued a damning report that found that Beijing’s treatment of Uyghurs “may amount to crimes against humanity”. In October 2022, 50 governments including Britain signed a joint statement condemning these atrocities.
An effort to place her report on the agenda of the UN human rights council failed by a mere two votes, with disappointing abstentions by Ukraine, India, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil and Malaysia. The vote mattered so much to Beijing that Xi Jinping is reported to have personally telephoned four (unidentified) heads of state to urge a pro-China vote. It was only the second resolution ever voted down in the 16-year history of the human rights council.
Since then, global pressure over Beijing’s treatment of Uyghurs seems to have waned. No delegation in Geneva has tried again to persuade the UN human rights council to take up the issue. The new UN rights chief, Volker Türk, refuses even to repeat in his own words the findings of his predecessor, let alone to condemn these atrocities. He seems focused instead on raising funds for his office and pursuing the naïve if convenient belief that his quiet diplomacy suffices. The UN secretary general, António Guterres, is utterly awol, as he is for all forms of Chinese repression.
Now is no time to get complacent. Yes, Beijing is powerful, and the Chinese market is enticing, but no one should have to endure the persecution imposed on the Uyghur people. The new revelations about China’s fishing industry should compel all governments to redouble their efforts to press for these atrocities to end – and certainly not to be underwriting this persecution by purchasing its product.
Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch, is a visiting professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs
