China Finds Way To Quietly Keep Its Forced Labor System Alive

China has been moving Uyghur Muslims to factories outside of the Xinjiang region in order to skirt U.S. restrictions on imports using their forced labor, a New York Times investigation revealed Thursday.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has moved Uyghurs as far as 2,600 miles from the Xinjiang region — considered ground zero for the genocide against the religious minority group — in order to provide forced labor at factories across the mainland, according to the NYT, which collaborated with Der Speigel and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism on the investigation. While the 2021 Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act prevents certain imports to the U.S. from Xinjiang, Chinese goods tainted with Uyghur forced labor may still be arriving on Western shores.

Through interviews, open source intelligence and visits to the province, the NYT-led team estimated that tens of thousands of Uyghur Muslims may now be producing goods around China against their will, according to the NYT. China has insisted that the moving program is voluntary and helps open economic opportunity, but other observers — including labor experts for the United Nations — have countered that the initiative appears to be forcing Uyghurs into the jobs, and that the workers may have no other option but to accept the labor given that Chinese authorities may target them if they decline.

The State Department officially declared the Chinese government’s repression of the Uyghurs to be a genocide in 2021. Other crimes against the Uyghurs the State Department noted in 2024 include corruption, repression of political dissidents, arbitrary or illegal killings and detention, torture of detainees and kidnapping; other reports have alleged