In Episode 4, James speaks with Chloe Cranston, Business and Human Rights Manager at Anti-Slavery International. James asks Chloe about what companies are doing in response to allegations of Xinjiang forced labour, and we he ar about a new initiative in Brussels to prevent goods made with forced labour entering the European market. Transcript James Cockayne 0:00 Welcome to Xinjiang Sanctions, a podcast looking at the global response to forced labour in Xinjiang, China. I'm James Cockayne, a Professor of Global Politics and Anti-Slavery at the University of Nottingham. I've been working on modern slavery and forced labour issues for the last decade and researching Xinjiang forced labour for the last year. You can see the results of that research at www.xinjiangsanctions.info. In this short podcast series, I speak with global experts to understand why forced labour emerged in Xinjiang and what governments and business are doing to try to address it. I'm pleased to be joined on this episode by Chloe Cranston, Business and Human Rights Manager at Anti-Slavery International. Welcome, Chloe. Chloe Cranston 0:44 Hi, James. Thanks for having me. James Cockayne 0:46 Tell us about Anti-Slavery International Chloe. Chloe Cranston 0:48 So Anti-Slavery International is considered the world's oldest human rights organisation. It was set up over 180 years ago as part of the original abolitionist movement. And it's worked all through that time in one form or another. And we now work to end contemporary forms of slavery. And we have four strategic themes which are: responsible business (which I manage), climate change in modern slavery, migration & trafficking and child slavery. James Cockayne 1:17 So almost two centuries of expertise then in fighting slavery and forced labour. Recently, Anti-Slavery International has helped mobilise an effort responding to Xinjiang forced labour. Can you tell us about that? Chloe Cranston 1:29 Yes. So we co-founded something called the Coalition to End Forced Labour in the Uyghur Region. And that coalition came about towards the end of 2019, the beginning of 2020. And essentially what happened there is various groups, labour rights groups, investors, anti-slavery groups, human rights groups, which have focused heavily for decades, on how the fashion industry is tainted with human rights abuses, complicit in human rights abuses. They we increasingly saw all the evidence that the fashion industry was directly tied to the forced labour of Uyghurs. And at the same time, obviously, and evidently, the Uyghur community was watching in horror as the fashion industry was failing to take action. So what we had was essentially, a group of us came together with this common objective, to unite to end the state's imposed forced labour and other human rights abuses against Uyghurs. And it's not only Uyghurs, it’s other Turkic and Muslim majority peoples in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. So we united and brought brought these groups together with this common cause. And I would say, you know, arguably, it is one of the biggest formalised human rights movements now in recent times. So the coalition is now supported by over 400 organisations, and that's faith based organisations, investors, as I said, many human rights and human rights organisations such as Human Rights Watch, in over 40 countries. So really a worldwide movement, and we have various focus areas. One is we're calling for companies to exit the Uyghur region. For governments and institutions such as the UN and the ILO to put pressure on the Chinese government, ultimately, to end the forced labour in the Uyghur region. James Cockayne 3:16 So as you mentioned, one of the key things the coalition has done is issue a call to action to companies to exit the Uyghur region. Are they listening? Chloe Cranston 3:25 So I would definitely say yes, so we publicly launched the coalition in July 2020. And when we launched that call to action companies, and we were initially focused on the fashion industry, our focus has obviously expanded looking at solar looking at agriculture, at PVC, all the other industries. But initially, we were focused on fashion. And when we first launched it, we were doing extensive private engagement with many, many leading companies in the fashion industry. And honestly, many companies really did not understand the scale to which they were exposed to Uyghur forced labour across their supply chains. So how I would explain that is many were looking at it solely in terms of their direct business relationships in the region. So did they have a tier one supplier in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and at that time, some companies still did, I think that has very much significantly changed in the past two and a half years. So many of it, we're looking at really just these direct business relationships, but the exposure was much more complex. And this is what we laid out in our call to action. It's about direct business relationships, it’s about wherever companies are in financial relationships with a facility say elsewhere in China or even elsewhere in the world, the parent company of which is involved in supporting the Uyghur forced labour systems and that’s still being in a financial relationship with a complicit company. Then in early 2020, we had the expose about the forced transfers of Uyghurs from the region to elsewhere in China. So that was also part of how it was tainting supply chains. And then obviously the sourcing of goods. So cotton and yarn and if we are talking about other sectors, you know, polysilicon, PVC, and so on. So we really set out in these kind of the way I have said it, it's kind of four different ways that companies were very, very exposed in their supply chain. I'm not even speaking about the value chain side, which is obviously be about exporting goods and services to the region. And so by setting out those four areas that you know, what we did is we definitely set the bar. We know that companies took the steps we demanded, we know that companies were taking these, really understanding these different layers of how they could be exposed. And even if companies weren't being public about it, a year on many of the leading companies that we were engaging with, we know were taking these steps. And crucially now, and I know you probably want to talk about this, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act in the US essentially makes our call to action binding law. And what that shows is companies can't be completely complicit in Uyghur forced labour, not even if it's just a small part of their supply chain. James Cockayne 6:09 You mentioned the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. Was the Coalition involved in its, its development? Chloe Cranston 6:15 Yes, of course, so many, there's many, many US based organisations in the coalition. And those organisations did a huge amount of work to advocate for the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, and also to push it forward when it was stalling. James Cockayne 6:29 So as you've explained that that law, in a way makes mandatory some of the things that you are calling on business to do. Which of the steps that business now have to undertake as a result of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, do you see as having the most impact? Chloe Cranston 6:45 So you know ultimately what the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act does is it makes it that companies cannot source anything from the Uyghur region, essentially, because there's this rebuttable presumption and only if the company can prove it wasn't made with forced labour would they be able to import it into the United States. However, the crux of it is, and this was really the basis of our call to action, is due to the levels of repression and surveillance and control in the region, no company can go there and actually meaningfully identify whether there is forced labour happening. And if they actually did, there's nothing they can do to prevent it, there's nothing they can do to mitigate it, and there's nothing they can do to remediate it, i.e. they cannot act in accordance with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. And that's, you know, was really seen as well, in September 2020, if I get my timelines, right, that many auditing companies, six auditing companies announced they would no longer audit in the region due to you know, the threats on auditors and so on. So with that, if we have this rebuttable presumption, the only way a company can import its goods into the United States now is if it can prove that none of the inputs in that good were made in the Uyghur region, because they are not reasonably going to be able to prove it was not made with forced labour. And that is, you know, what we need to see happening and that needs to, you know, put the pressure on the Chinese government to allow access to the region to allow for an enabling environment for human rights. James Cockayne 8:17 So you mentioned there Chloe that the situation in Xinjiang makes effective due diligence very difficult and you also mentioned that it makes remediation very difficult. So what can be expected in terms of remediation of the problems in the supply chain and also remedy to people who have been affected by these abuses? Chloe Cranston 8:41 So it's a really interesting question, remedy for victims of state imposed forced labour, which is what this is, is a really unexplored area. So this is not the only example of state imposed forced labour in supply chains we've had. There was decades of state imposed forced labour in Uzbekistan. That situation has now reformed we need to see more change happening in Uzbekistan still with labour rights, but that situation is reformed and we still have ongoing state imposed forced labour in cotton in Turkmenistan as well. However, in all these situations, whether we're talking about the previous situation in Uzbekistan or what we're looki
In Episode 3, we hear from Anasuya Syam, Human Rights and Trade Policy Adviser at the Human Trafficking Legal Centre. James asks Anasuya about US import bans on goods made with Xinjiang forced labour, and the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. Transcript James Cockayne 0:00 Welcome to Xinjiang Sanctions, a podcast looking at the global response to forced labour in Xinjiang, China. I'm James Cockayne, a Professor of Global Politics and Anti-Slavery at the University of Nottingham. I've been working on modern slavery and forced labour issues for the last decade and researching Xinjiang forced labour for the last year. You can see the results of that research at www.xinjiangsanctions.info. In this short podcast series, I speak with global experts to understand why forced labour emerged in Xinjiang and what governments and business are doing to try to address it. My guest today is Anasuya Syam, Human Rights and Trade Policy Advisor at the Human Trafficking Legal Center. Welcome Anasuya. Anasuya Syam 0:43 Thanks, James. It's a pleasure to be here. James Cockayne 0:44 Tell us a bit about the Human Trafficking Legal Center, Anasuya. Anasuya Syam 0:48 Thanks, James. The Human Trafficking Legal Center is a nonprofit based in Washington DC. We serve as a pro bono clearing house that connects trafficking survivors with highly skilled legal representation to hold traffickers accountable. One of our primary areas of focus is labour trafficking in global supply chains. And we do this by conducting cutting edge research to identify gaps in services and system failures. And we also seek to transform systems to prevent forced labour in global supply chains. So a lot of our trade work fits into that. The, the idea that we want to have systems change to address forced labour. James Cockayne 1:28 So you mentioned supply chains there and your title is Human Rights and Trade Policy Advisor. What does trade policy have to do with human trafficking and especially in a place like Xinjiang? Anasuya Syam 1:41 So trade policy for years now has had some links to addressing forced labour in global supply chains, the US has had an import prohibition against products made using forced labour, prison labour and forced child labour since 1930. So that's been 90 years in the books. But it's only really been since 2016, that the law was enforced by US Customs and Border Protection to the extent that we're seeing today. And what we're seeing right now is the start of a global trend. And this goes back to one of our core areas of work that I mentioned when I introduced the Centre, which is about transforming systems to prevent forced labour in global supply chains. And we're seeing trade policy rise up to that level to transform systems and the way business is done to make sure that this prevents the occurrence of forced labour in the future. So import bands are really coming up right now. And we can see these debates happening in the EU, in Australia, in Canada, and in many other countries. It's a very topical issue. James Cockayne 2:52 So as you said, there's been an import ban in place on the books in the United States for almost a century now. What is that? How does that work? Tell us a bit about the relevant law and how that's enforced. Anasuya Syam 3:06 So the import ban is enshrined in Section 307 of the US Tariff Act of 1930. It has its roots in protectionism. When we are talking about when the law came about in 1930, it was to protect domestic US manufacturing. But since then, and as I mentioned earlier, when the law was improved in 2015, by an amendment under the Obama Biden administration, there was a loophole in the law that had kind of swallowed enforcement efforts. Because the import ban had an exception - goods that were not made in the United States to meet American demand, even if they were made using forced labour or prison labour overseas, they could still be imported into the country to meet that demand. So once that loophole, the consumptive demand loophole was removed. we saw US Customs now having access to this tool and NGOs being able to leverage this tool and incorporate it into their campaigns to address forced labour. So we saw petitions coming in from NGOs, like Global Labor Justice, International Labor Rights Forum, those were some of the first petitions that we saw in 2016 on cotton from Turkmenistan, because it’s systemic state sponsored forced labour in Turkmenistan. We saw a petition on cotton from Uzbekistan, and then we realised, okay, this is something that CSOs can really get behind. Because this law relies quite a bit on external sources to share information about forced labour happening around the world. CBP relies on external sources, they do have the power to self initiate actions, based on their own investigations into forced labour. But by and large, we see a reliance on NGO partners, on unions, on worker representatives around the world to share this information. James Cockayne 4:59 So US Customs and Border Protection is looking to these civil society organisations to understand which shipments coming into the United States might potentially be made with forced labour. Is that right? Anasuya Syam 5:12 Well, more so for the evidence on forced labour that's happening on the ground in so many different regions around the world, but also to a certain extent to identify shipments that are coming to the United States. But of course, access to trade databases is not something that's available to a lot of different organisations. Because, you know, it's prohibitively expensive to some, but where possible, where that information is available on the ground at that factory level or the unit level. it's known that that entity exports to the United States, that's definitely information that is fed into US Customs investigations. James Cockayne 5:53 And is this tool that you're referring to, is this, is this what we sometimes hear referred to as Withhold Release Orders? What does that mean? Anasuya Syam 6:00 Yes, so Withhold Release Order is the technical term for a detention order that US Customs can issue once it is convinced reasonably, that there is forced labour in the product that it is investigating. So once the investigation is complete, the Commissioner of US Customs and Border Protection issues instructions to directors at all US ports of entry, detailing the Withhold Release Order that is in effect, the product, the region, if the specific factory or facility information about that, and instructing the directors at port and port officials to stop these goods at the border. James Cockayne 6:42 And what happens to the goods once they stop? Anasuya Syam 6:45 So the goods are detained for a certain period of time. And the law gives importers the right to either contest the detention and say, hey, our products are not produced using forced labour and here's the evidence, or in the alternative, they are allowed to re-export the goods to other countries. James Cockayne 7:04 So they can send those goods that the US Customs and Border Protection has concluded, are more likely than not made with forced labour, they can send them to some other market to be sold there? Anasuya Syam 7:15 Exactly any market that does not have an import ban. So it lacks import restrictions on forced labour. And we, we’re seeing trends in this re-exportation because this is an option that most importers would like to use, rather than contesting the detention order, which requires you to have extensive supply chain documentation in place. James Cockayne 7:40 Would it be fair then adopting a devil's advocate position to say that this tool works more to cut the link between these goods and US consumers than it does to actually prevent the use of forced labour in the first place? Or is that too simplistic an analysis of what's going on here? Anasuya Syam 8:01 What we are seeing in the first instance is that companies are trying to proactively remedy the situation once they've been targeted, as opposed to simply cutting and running or leading to massive closures of their operations. So we are optimistic that it's more likely that the companies want access to US markets. And as more countries are thinking about import bans and as more borders close, that they will have no choice but to remedy the situation or just risk the financial, reputational and legal consequences. James Cockayne 8:38 So as those risks of losing access to the US and potentially other markets are increasing the costs they incur from the changes in business practice to remove forced labour from their supply chain start to become a more worthwhile proposition. Is that, is that the conclusion? Anasuya Syam 8:56 It is because right now, what import bans are doing is bringing risk into the equation in a way that many other measures to date have not. And it has become a serious compliance issue for companies and it's taken four/five years of import ban enforcement for it to rise to this level. I mean, the enforcement doesn't just stop at a showing a Withhold Resource Order. That's just the first step, real enforcement is when goods are stopped at the border. And when CBP engages the companies to remedy forced labour. Now, we've seen companies really want to get the ban revoked or modified and for that, they really have to provide proof that forced labour no longer exists in their supply chain. James Cockayne 9:47 Have we seen any cases where that's led to a company remedying past harms? Or is this always just about changing business practices in a way that prevent future harms to workers? Anasuya Syam 10:00 We've seen a bit of both and Malaysia is evolving as a case study and there's been a lot of reporting from Malaysia on the reimbursement of recruitment fee payments that migrant workers have made. And these have gone into millions of dollars. If you see US Customs and Border protections trade and trave
In Episode 2 of Xinjiang Sanctions, James speaks with Dr Adrian Zenz, Senior Fellow and Director of China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. Dr Zenz explains how many people are affected by Xinjiang forced labour, and James asks him about his sources, methods and the challenges of working on this issue. Transcript James Cockayne 0:01 Welcome to Xinjiang Sanctions, a podcast looking at the global response to forced labour in Xinjiang, China. I'm James Cockayne, a Professor of Global Politics and Anti-Slavery at the University of Nottingham. I've been working on modern slavery and forced labour issues for the last decade and researching Xinjiang forced labour for the last year. You can see the results of that research at www.xinjiangsanctions.info. In this short podcast series, I speak with global experts to understand why forced labour emerged in Xinjiang and what governments and business are doing to try to address it. My guest on this episode is Dr. Adrian Zenz Senior Fellow and Director of China studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. Dr. Zenz, welcome to the podcast. Adrian Zenz 0:47 Thank you. James Cockayne 0:47 Dr. Zenz I thought we'd start with a question about the scale of this issue. How many people in and from Xinjiang have been subjected to forced labour? Adrian Zenz 0:56 Xinjiang is operating a very comprehensive system of forced labour – precisely, it is two different systems. One is through the Vocational Skills Education and Training Centres, which is the official sort of euphemism for the reeducation camps, the vocational camps, we can estimate at least several hundred thousand to be subjected to forced labour through that system. That's a conservative estimate. In addition, Xinjiang like the rest of China operates a programme called Poverty Alleviation through Labour Transfer. Labour transfers are a common feature of developing societies whereby agriculturalists, rural surplus labourers really, are being transferred to secondary and tertiary sector jobs industry, typically manufacturing. And of course, you find that throughout the world, throughout China, but in Xinjiang, and to some extent in Tibet, the programme is coercive, because it fulfils a political and other goals other than economic and there's a real distinct aspect of coercion to it. This system has been intensified and expanded recently, subjecting around or over 3 million people to labour transfers, we can estimate that possibly close to 2 million of these are at risk of coercion, and therefor of coercive labour. So the total scope I estimate to be between two and two and a half million. James Cockayne 2:19 Those are very large numbers. How do you arrive at these numbers Dr. Zenz? Can you tell us a bit about your methods? Adrian Zenz 2:25 Yes, so of course, I'm also someone who has been estimating the scale of the extra legal internment campaign into reeducation camps, which initially was estimated to be at least several hundred thousand. More recent and especially most recent evidence, also from leaked internal documents, such as the Xinjiang Police Files, points to a scope of one to 2 million. Within these vocational training camps are one component. One document from one prefecture alone spoke of placing 100,000 of these vocational camp detainees into labour placements in 2018 and it’s a conservative estimate to estimate that at least several hundred thousand are at risk or subjected to forced labour through that system. With labour transfer it is a bit more complicated because labour transfers are not inherently coercive. People can earn more money by working in a factory than previously being farming land. And the main reason why they might resist that is not just economic it is also because it tears apart community - it displaces people. The method is to estimate firstly, how many ethnic minorities are part of that system because you also have rural Han Chinese farmers, for example. And secondly, some groups are at higher risk of coercion. We have for example, academic studies, Chinese academic studies from previous years that estimated you know that quite a significant share of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities from Xinjiang were not willing to participate in labour transfers, oftentimes because they have for example, caretaking obligations. Women are taking care of children, families are taking care of elderly. The state is therefore instituting centralised childcare, centralised boarding schools, centralised elderly care. My estimate was that about 60 per cent of them are at risk of coercion and some of these would be at a higher risk of coercion, especially those who are characterised in academic studies and state discourses as ‘idle’. James Cockayne 4:27 We often hear this phrase surplus rural labour in this context, is that one of the relevant concepts here that we should be thinking about when looking for indicators of coercion or where does that fit into this mental framework? Adrian Zenz 4:43 That is exactly right. So the Poverty Alleviation through Labour Transfer, which is the larger of the two systems, state sponsored labour placement systems that are coercive, or at least partially coercive, that system explicitly transfers so-called “rural surplus labourers”, which is an international concept not just found in China. You have rural surplus labourers anywhere - in our western societies we had simply too many people with population increase the arable land typically does not increase or not enough. So you have more and more people trying to make a livelihood out of the land. These people often transfer themselves they want to go into factory jobs, they want to go into industry or other jobs for various reasons. However, others do not want this. And it really depends on the context. And so in Xinjiang, we have a particularly problematic context of coercion, because the state is using labour transfers to tear apart ethnic communities to achieve political goals and to indoctrinate people and assimilate them culturally and spiritually. So rural surplus labourers are clearly the target of this campaign. And this is one of the keywords that researchers like myself and others have used to identify risk of coercion and implicate specific companies. James Cockayne 6:03 So it sounds like very meticulous and demanding work that you've been undertaking Dr. Zenz because you have to, as you say, look, both at these structural patterns and policies, but then also at quite specific cases and see what's going on at the level of intent and voluntarity, at the specific level. What kinds of documents or other evidence are you able to use in understanding what's going on at those two different levels? Adrian Zenz 6:31 Yes, it is a very complex, very complicated type of research that first and foremost requires us to clearly understand the conceptual dimension, the terminology, the policy, the policy framework, at higher, at different administrative levels, higher levels, and then local levels. It is very complex indeed. And it's crucially important – especially for implicating companies, for governments to draft sanctions for Western companies to divest from supply chains that are problematic – it's crucially important to understand the conceptual dimension, to understand the terminology and the systems that are in place. The research has involved documentary research at every imaginable conceptual level. Of course, there's important witness accounts - the witness accounts come almost entirely from the vocational camp network. We don't really have witness accounts from labour transfers, although some Western media has been able to conduct some investigations on that matter. At the highest level, some of the interesting documents that we have on the nature and the goals of labour, Poverty Alleviation through Labour Transfers, come from top secret speeches by Xi Jinping himself and several other government officials that were leaked first to the New York Times in 2019, and then to the Uyghur Tribunal in 2021. And in these documents, I found references, very important references, to the political goals that were already stated in 2014 of labour transfers, of employment placement programmes that we previously didn't know about, and these statements in 2014 really framed what was to come. The research is also chronological, so we carefully examined labour transfer started in the early 2000s, in these regions, state sponsored ones. And then after 2014, they became significantly more coercive, we now know why, because in top secret internal speeches, Xi Jinping and other government officials spoke of the danger of idleness, of unemployment, of rural populations being susceptible to extremism, and also how enterprise work is conducive to learning and acquiring Chinese culture and language meaning to assimilation. James Cockayne 8:43 So in the field of anti-forced labour, studies in work and anti slavery work, we often hear the rationale for these practices being framed in terms of greed - business, greed, corporate greed - but it seems that what you're suggesting here is that there's some governmental policies that are involved in producing the context of coercion as well, is that correct? Adrian Zenz 9:08 That is very true. Xi Jinping himself in a top secret speech said that economic growth by itself cannot guarantee political stability and he affirmed the primacy of political stability over economic development, and that economic growth has to be subservient to the goal of political control. At the same time, he did say the economic is still an important foundation, it’s still the foundation for political stability, you need it as well as a component. And so what we see is that labour transfers and internment camp labour is being used to put people into work and to grow the economy. One internal state document that I uncovered in 2019 even openly admits that
In Episode 1, James is joined by Zumretay Arkin, Programme and Advocacy Manager for the World Uyghur Congress, and Jewher Ilham, rForced Labour Project Co-ordinator at the Worker Rights Consortium, to discuss allegations of forced labour in Xinjiang. He asks Zumretay and Jewher about their personal connections to policies generating forced labour in Xinjiang, and what is being done to address them. Transcript In Episode 1, James is joined by Zumretay Arkin, Programme and Advocacy Manager for the World Uyghur Congress, and Jewher Ilham, Forced Labour Project Co-ordinator at the Worker Rights Consortium, to discuss allegations of forced labour in Xinjiang. He asks Zumretay and Jewher about their personal connections to policies generating forced labour in Xinjiang, and what is being done to address them. Transcript James Cockayne 00:01 Welcome to Xinjiang Sanctions, a podcast looking at the global response to forced labour in Xinjiang, China. I'm James Cockayne, a Professor of Global Politics and Anti-Slavery at the University of Nottingham. I've been working on modern slavery and forced labour issues for the last decade and researching Xinjiang forced labour for the last year. You can see the results of that research at www.xinjiangsanctions.info. In this short podcast series, I speak with global experts to understand why forced labour emerged in Xinjiang, and what governments and business are doing to try to address it. I'm very pleased to be joined on this episode by Zumretay Arkin, Programme and Advocacy Manager for the World Uyghur Congress, and Jewher Ilham, Forced Labour Project Co-ordinator at the Worker Rights Consortium. Welcome. Zumretay Arkin 00:51 Thank you for having us. Jewher Ilham 00:52 Thank you for having us. James Cockayne 00:54 Jewher I might start with you. What do people mean when they refer to forced labour in Xinjiang? Jewher Ilham 01:00 Oftentimes, when people think of forced labour, they think of people are forced to work in a factory and get paid very low wages, or work in horrible conditions, which applies to what many Uyghurs are going through in the Uyghur region. But what's so different about the forced labour in the Uyghur region is that it's state imposed, state sponsored forms of forced labour, which is widespread and the Chinese government has been using the excuse of for the name of poverty alleviation, and forcing Uyghurs who might have already had perfect jobs or a career that they have been working in for years, and forcing them to work in low income jobs. And there are also different kinds of forced labour that is happening, but within the region. First of all, there's the coerced labour of rural poor in the so called Poverty Alleviation programme. And the Chinese government has a standard of how many numbers each year they would like to subject people to be participating in such programmes and where people are sent to the so called centralised training centres -- even though it's called as training centres, but when you look at it from the outside, there's no difference from a prison because it has high fences, watchtowers, guarded with police or armed polices and barbed wires. And there are also other kinds of forced labour, which is the forced labour of detainees, it could be ex detainees, or current detainees. So detainees include people who are locked up in internment camps, re education camps, and also there's prison labour as well. So they're all different kinds of forced labour but they're all fall into the categories of forced labour practices. For the prison labour are people who have already received sentences for example, like several members of my family have been locked up, and then received from 10 years to life sentence. And oftentimes prison labour -- not only in the Uyghur region, but in China as a whole -- prison labour has always been known to be a very common practices to be used by the Chinese government. And oftentimes, it's in the Uyghur region, oftentimes the XPCC which is the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, they have their own prison systems and factories where they subject prisoners to work in XPCC-owned factories, it could produce from textile to food and all kinds of yarning, harvesting cotton, and all sorts of manufacturing the habits of those factories. James Cockayne 03:44 So it's an incredibly complex and organised pattern of forced work that's going on here – or really several different organised patterns of forced work. Jewher Ilham 03:56 Besides the forced labour practices in the Uyghur region, forced labour is also happening outside of the Uyghur region as well not only in prison labour, but also there are forced labour transfer programmes, which is also administrated by the Chinese government, by the XPCC as well, where Uyghur people are sent shipped out of their homes are sent out of their homelands and sent to mainland cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and some provinces like Shandong to work in factories. And oftentimes those people cannot go home and they have to work in factories for long hours with very low payments. And those companies that are participating in forced labour transfers accept government subsidies, and it's oftentimes shown on their annual reports and that's how the researchers have been and human rights advocates have been able to identify which of the companies have been participating in the Labour Transfer programmes and according to the recent reports that at least 80,000 Uyghurs and not only Uyghurs, but also other kinds of ethnic groups have been forcibly transferred from our homeland Uyghur region to factories in central China and eastern China. James Cockayne 05:11 So this aspect of working in factories in private business is a new development in a way beyond the tradition of coerced work as part of the rehabilitation process in the criminal justice and the political re-education system. Is that right? Is that one of the things that’s new and different about what we’re seeing in these policies in Xinjiang? Jewher Ilham 05:36 Yes, it’s oftentimes people think forced labour is only related to economic gain, like profit gain. But oftentimes, what is happening in the Uyghur region is that forced labour has been used as a tool by the Chinese government to brainwash the people to re educate the people, and to assimilate the people to -- just like rest of China -- to make them becoming more and more Han Chinese to eliminate Uyghur culture, to wipe out the identity, Uyghur identity. And you know, from banning the Uyghur language to be spoken in those facilities, in those camps in those factories, to having forcing them to sing Chinese propaganda songs. I was taught several of those songs growing up, actually, you know, 没有共产党就没有新中国 (Méiyǒu Gòngchǎndǎng jiù méiyǒu xīn Zhōngguó) , it’s like, “If there’s no Communist Party, then there's no new China”, you know, it has always been a thing for a very long time. And now it's just being forced on the Uyghurs. And you can't even be granted a meal without singing a song to praise Xi Jinping, without singing a song to praise the Communist Party and those forced labour practices, those strict and crucial policies have been used in the name of poverty alleviation, also countering terrorism and combating religious extremism. But it's really that the Chinese government wants to seize control of the region, and subdue the Uyghur population and just strengthen their control over the entire community. Zumretay Arkin 07:06 Just to reiterate, maybe some of the points that Jewher has mentioned, I think forced labour itself, like the forced labour schemes and programmes, they're not new, you know, in itself, I think there's a long history of forced labour in China, if you go back to, you know, Cultural Revolution period, a lot of Chinese people were also undergoing forced labour programmes. And even in our region. I know, for example, my grandparents, my own father went through these forced labour programmes, because at the time this was imposed, and again, it's always imposed by the state by the central government. And then of course, it's kind of separated to lower levels. And then directives comes from different kind of levels. But forced labour has always been a thing. There was also the hashar programme a couple years ago, as well in the region, where, you know, especially cotton picking, this was imposed. I think, what's new is that how Jewher has also said it is it has this like new political dimension where it is also political and economic dimensions, because forced labour, obviously, you know, making things easier for the governments but also for companies. So it's profitable, because of the industrialization, our globalised world, and you know, how the global supply chains are heavily dependent on Chinese market and Chinese labour. This has become a big economic, I suppose, centre for the government, but the government is also using it as a political tool of oppression. And I think the industrialization has played a key part and kind of the ongoing state sponsored forced labour regime, which also comes actually at the same time as the securitisation of the region. So this goes back to of course, 2014, when Xi Jinping actually visited East Turkestan for the first time, I'm referring to East Turkestan, as you know, as the Uyghur region. And actually, you know, in 2014, when he visited the region, this was really like the beginning of escalation of the discriminatory policies that were going to be implemented in the years to come. And that led to the mass arbitrary detentions and camps targeting of Uyghurs and, you know, other target groups on the basis of their religion and ethnic identity in the name of countering terrorism. So later, with the appointment of Chen Quanguo, as the Party Secretary to the region, who really implemented all of the mass sophisticated surveillance system that really discriminates against targeted Uyghurs, we saw this open air