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