We’ve discovered the inspiration for part of China’s economic development program: the old U.S. slave trade.

As the BBC reported on Monday, Chinese officials are forcing hundreds of thousands of Uighur Muslims into cotton harvesting. It’s just another element of China’s ethnocidal campaign against the population of its far northwestern Xinjiang province. Despising Uighur Muslims for their values outside of the Communist Party orthodoxy, Xi Jinping’s minions have spent the past decade throwing millions of their fellow citizens into reeducation camps, sterilizing tens of thousands more, and then using these innocent people as semi-slave labor.