Communist China has adopted the strategy of the Stalinist Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and is using its Uighur citizens for forced labor far from their Xinjiang province home.
Chinese officials happily lie to deny it, but this disgrace is hard to underestimate.
After all, we already know that more than 1 million Uighur civilians have been held in concentration camps designed to deconstruct their individual identities, purge their faith, and turn them into drones for Xi Jinping’s ironically named “Chinese dream” strategy. But now we know that many of these innocents are being moved from concentration camps into forced labor camps.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s findings in “Uighurs for sale” are built around compelling documentary, witness, and visual evidence. The evidence is damning, echoing the Third Reich’s deployment of conquered European peoples into forced service of its military machine.
This is damning worldwide, not simply for Xi’s regime.
The research notes that a number of western firms, including “Apple, BMW, Gap, Huawei, Nike, Samsung, Sony, and Volkswagen” use the factories where the Uighur laborers have been deployed.
Let’s hope they read the report and move their supply chains out of China. The need is urgent.
The report “estimates that more than 80,000 Uighurs were transferred out of Xinjiang to work in factories across China between 2017 and 2019, and some of them were sent directly from detention camps. The estimated figure is conservative, and the actual figure is likely to be far higher. In factories far away from home, they typically live in segregated dormitories, undergo organized Mandarin and ideological training outside working hours, are subject to constant surveillance, and are forbidden from participating in religious observances.”
The vast majority of these factories are in China’s eastern industrial heartlands, more than 1,500 miles from Xijiang’s borders. Still, these aren’t factories of normal form. These are concentration-labor camps in all but name. “A factory in eastern China that manufactures shoes for U.S. company Nike,” for example, “is equipped with watchtowers, barbed-wire fences and police guard boxes.”
It gets worse.
Not only are these innocent peoples being transferred from concentration camps to forced labor camps, they are being used to enrich Communist Party bosses. We learn that “local governments and private brokers are paid a price per head by the Xinjiang provincial government to organize the labor assignments. The job transfers are now an integral part of the ‘re-education’ process, which the Chinese government calls ‘vocational training’.”
Cash for bodies: slavery.
Further similarities to the Nazis beckon.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute report points out how a “local government work report from 2019 reads: ‘For every batch [of workers] that is trained, a batch of employment will be arranged and a batch will be transferred. Those employed need to receive thorough ideological education and remain in their jobs.”
“Batch.” That really says it all about how Xi and his minions view individual life: worthy only as a cog for the party machine. Or how about this gem: “workers are often transported across China in special segregated trains, and in most cases are returned home by the same method…”
Again, it’s straight out of the Nazi handbook.
China’s best excuse, then, is that while it might be using slave labor, it hasn’t quite got around to death camps.
