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 Par