Mick Hartley

The latest in China's treatment of the Uighurs:

Thousands of Muslims from China's Uighur minority group are working under coercive conditions at factories that supply some of the world's biggest brands, a new report says.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute said this was the next phase in China's re-education of Uighurs.

China has already detained about a million Uighurs at internment camps, punishing and indoctrinating them….

Between 2017 and 2019, the ASPI think tank estimates that more than 80,000 Uighurs were transferred out of the far western Xinjiang autonomous region to work in factories across China. It said some were sent directly from detention camps.

ASPI said the Uighurs were moved through labour transfer schemes operating under a central government policy known as Xinjiang Aid.

According to the report, the factories claim to be part of the supply chain for 83 well-known global brands, including Nike, Apple and Dell.

The report said it was "extremely difficult" for Uighurs to refuse or escape the work assignments, with the threat of "arbitrary detention" hanging over them.

It added that there was evidence of local governments and private brokers being "paid a price per head" by the Xinjiang government to organise the assignments, which ASPI describes as "a new phase of the Chinese government's ongoing repression" of Uighurs.

"Our report makes it really clear that the dispossession of Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang also has a really strong character of economic exploitation," the report's co-author Nathan Ruser told the BBC.

"We have this unseen and previously hidden contamination of the global supply chain."

Here's the original report – Uyghurs for sale:

The Chinese government has facilitated the mass transfer of Uyghur and other ethnic minority citizens from the far west region of Xinjiang to factories across the country. Under conditions that strongly suggest forced labour, Uyghurs are working in factories that are in the supply chains of at least 83 well-known global brands in the technology, clothing and automotive sectors, including Apple, BMW, Gap, Huawei, Nike, Samsung, Sony and Volkswagen.

This report estimates that more than 80,000 Uyghurs 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 organised Mandarin and ideological training outside working hours, are subject to constant surveillance, and are forbidden from participating in religious observances. Numerous sources, including government documents, show that transferred workers are assigned minders and have limited freedom of movement…

Slave labour, in other words.