Experts, including one of the world’s top researchers on the Uyghur genocide and a senior official in the Department of Labor, told Congress this week that legitimate audits to inspect for slave conditions and other forced labor in China, especially in the occupied Uyghur region, are “impossible.”
The experts spoke before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), a bicameral entity that largely focuses on the Communist Party’s human rights abuses against its people and other malign practices, during a hearing on Tuesday. The hearing, titled “Factories and Fraud in the PRC,” addressed if it is possible for American companies, and those in the greater free world, to conduct reasonable due diligence to keep their supply chains devoid of human rights abuses if operating in China.
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The panelists concluded that social audits by third parties were highly unreliable, as the Communist Party has subverted all of society to make it impossible for workers to speak freely on the conditions in their factories and industrial parks. Furthermore, evidence is mounting that China is redirecting slavery-tainted products to third countries such as India and Vietnam to compromise supply chain tracking and ensure the products get sold in American and European markets.
The hearing focused largely on forced labor, the practice of making it impossible for a person to escape work environments. In many of these cases, individuals are forced into traditional slavery – with no legal rights as a person and no meaningful salary – though the panelists at the hearing stated that Chinese companies often offer meager wages to their workers, even when it is impossible for them to leave their jobs. The United Nations classifies forced labor as a form of “modern slavery.”
China has engaged in genocidal practices against the Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and other indigenous people of occupied East Turkistan since at least 2017, when dictator Xi Jinping is believed to have debuted a sprawling concentration camp system that at its peak was believed to have imprisoned 3 million people. Mass murderer Mao Zedong seized the territory of East Turkistan in 1946, turning it into what China now calls the “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region,” or “Xinjiang Province.”
Slavery was a key component of treatment in those concentration camps. Beijing referred to them as “Vocational and Educational Training Centers” where allegedly backwards ethnic “minorities” could gain skills useful in the modern Chinese economy. In reality, the concentration camps funneled their victims to factories nationwide, as multiple reports have revealed.
In his testimony on Tuesday, Adrian Zenz, a senior fellow with the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and one of the most prolific researchers on the ongoing Uyghur genocide, focused on the Communist Party practice he said succeeded the “vocational” centers: the “Poverty Alleviation Through Labor Transfer policy,” which he described as separate from the labor camps and harder for foreign corporations to track in their supply chain. The policy, he told Congress, “coercively trains and transfers non-detained rural surplus laborers from the primary (agricultural) sector into secondary or tertiary sector work.”
“In the so-called Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), Beijing currently operates the world’s largest system of state-imposed forced labor, with over two million targeted Uyghurs and other ethnic group members at risk,” Zenz asserted. “Unlike most forms of forced labor, state-imposed forced labor operates through a pervasively coercive social context marked by a lack of civic freedoms and a state that generates powerful coercive pressures through local mobilization via an extensive grassroots bureaucracy.”
China, he asserted, “creates an environment where its victims cannot speak freely, rendering assessment of individual cases difficult or impossible.”
“As a result, due diligence efforts based on social or labor audits are not feasible, both in Xinjiang and in other Chinese provinces that receive transferred ethnic workers from that region,” Zenz concluded. “The only ethical response is divestment.”
The “Poverty Alleviation Through Labor Transfer” program, he asserted, pervades many more industries than the “vocational training” slave program, including “cotton, tomatoes and tomato products, peppers and seasonal agricultural products, seafood products, polysilicon production for solar panels, lithium for electric vehicle batteries, and aluminum for batteries, car vehicle bodies, and wheels.”
Zenz asserted that the goal of the program is two-fold: to exploit the laborers in ways difficult to track from outside China, and to dilute the indigenous population of East Turkistan so that the Uyghur population ultimately becomes a minority in its own homeland.
“Experts and activists have long warned that credible audits in Xinjiang are impossible. A growing body of scholarly research shows that Xinjiang operates the largest system of state imposed forced labor in the world today,” Zenz said, “affecting more than 2 million Uyghurs and members of other ethnic groups.”
The transfer element of the program, however, means that Uyghur slaves a present far beyond “Xinjiang” – and thus out of the reach of American laws such as the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), which bans imports from East Turkistan unless the importer can demonstrate a supply chain free of slavery.
“A September 2023 state media article reported that Hubei province accepted 4,100 workers,” Zenz revealed, “while Anhui province, which is paired with the Uyghur majority population county of Pishan (Hotan Prefecture), received a transfer of over 5,000 workers (People’s Daily, September 17, 2023).”
“Xinjiang’s recent policy changes have rendered forced labor less visible and more challenging to conceptualize,” he noted.
Beyond other parts of China, Zenz told Congress that “products made in whole or in part in Xinjiang are entering global supply chains through intermediary countries, in particular Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, and other Asian countries.”
On the matter of foreign companies conducting audits of factories in China, Undersecretary of Labor for International Affairs and the Department of Labor Thea M. Lee asserted that doing so reliably was “impossible.”
“Audits are often announced in advance, giving managers time to prepare a facility. Managers can easily fake timesheets to skirt pay and overtime laws. And workers may be pressured to provide inaccurate information,” Lee noted. “It is clear effective worker voice is impossible when workers are trapped in state-sponsored forced labor, where there are no independent, democratic unions, and where workers continue to face threats and reprisals.”
Lee suggested “social audits in China should not be seen as an authoritative source for companies reflecting on-the-ground human rights conditions.”
“The business community needs to be aware that any audits, and frankly any business operations undertaken inside China, carry heightened labor and human rights risks,” she concluded.
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