Experts, including one of the world’s top researchers on the Uyghur genocide and a senior Labor Department official, told Congress this week that there should be no legal audit to examine slavery and other forced labor in China, particularly in the occupied Uyghur region. stated that it had not been carried out. “impossible.”
The experts spoke at a hearing Tuesday to the Congressional Executive Committee on China (CECC), a bicameral body that focuses primarily on human rights abuses and other egregious acts by the Communist Party against its people.of hearingThe paper, titled “China Factories and Fraud,” argues that U.S. companies and those in the larger free world doing business in China should conduct reasonable due diligence to ensure their supply chains are free of human rights abuses. We are discussing whether it is possible to implement it.
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The panelists concluded that third-party social audits are highly unreliable because the Communist Party has subverted entire societies so that workers cannot speak freely about conditions in factories and industrial parks. Ta. Furthermore, China has compromised supply chain tracking and directed slavery-tainted products to third countries such as India and Vietnam to ensure that products are sold in American and European markets. There is increasing evidence that there is.
The hearing focused primarily on forced labor, the practice of making it impossible to escape working conditions. In many of these cases, individuals are forced into traditional forms of slavery without personal legal rights or meaningful pay, but panelists at the hearing said Chinese companies do not provide their employees with the means to do so. He said that even in such cases, workers are often offered lower wages. quitting one’s job.united nations Classify Forced labor as a form of “modern slavery”.
China has committed genocide against Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyzstans, and other indigenous peoples in occupied East Turkestan since at least 2017. At the time, dictator Xi Jinping is believed to have introduced a concentration camp system at its peak. 3 million people.Mass murderer Mao Zedong confiscated In 1946, China ceded the territory of East Turkestan to what China now calls the “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region” or “Xinjiang Province.”
Slavery was an important element of treatment in those concentration camps. The Chinese government calls these facilities “vocational education and training centers,” where backward “minorities” can learn skills useful in China’s modern economy. In reality, as multiple reports have revealed, concentration camps concentrated victims in factories across the country.
in him testimony Adrian Zenz, a senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and one of the most prolific researchers on the ongoing genocide against Uyghurs, said Tuesday that he is the successor to the “vocational” center of the Communist Party. The focus was on practice, “poverty alleviation through work.” He explained that “relocation policies” are separate from labor camps, making it difficult for foreign companies to trace them within the supply chain. He told Congress that the policy would “forcibly train unrestrained rural surplus workers from the primary (agricultural) sector and move them into secondary or tertiary sector jobs.” said.
“In the so-called Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR), the Chinese government currently operates the world’s largest state-enforced forced labor system, putting more than 2 million targeted Uyghurs and other ethnic groups at risk. ” Zentz argued. “Unlike most forms of forced labor, state-imposed forced labor is characterized by widespread coercion, characterized by a lack of civil liberties and the state generating strong coercive pressure through local mobilization through extensive grassroots bureaucracies. It takes place through social situations.
He argued that China has “created an environment in which victims cannot speak freely, making it difficult or impossible to evaluate individual cases.”
“As a result, due diligence efforts based on social and labor audits are not viable in Xinjiang or in other Chinese provinces that host ethnic workers transferred from the region,” Zenz said. I concluded. “The only ethical response is divestment.”
He said that “poverty alleviation through labor transfer” programs have penetrated far more industries than “vocational training” slave programs, including “cotton, tomatoes and tomato products, peppers and seasonal produce; Seafood, polysilicon production for solar panels, lithium for electric car batteries and aluminum for batteries, car bodies and wheels.”
Zenz argued that the plan’s purpose was twofold. One is to exploit workers in ways that are difficult to trace from outside China, and the other is to dilute East Turkestan’s indigenous population, ultimately making Uyghurs a minority in their homeland. .
“Experts and activists have long warned that reliable audits are impossible in Xinjiang.A growing body of academic research shows that Xinjiang operates the world’s largest state-run forced labor system today, with “2 million Zenz said the results showed that “more Uyghurs and other ethnic groups have been affected.”
However, the transfer element of this program means that Uyghurs are now enslaved far beyond “Xinjiang,” and therefore outside the scope of U.S. laws such as the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA). It is in. Importers can demonstrate a slavery-free supply chain.
“A state media article in September 2023 reported that Hubei took in 4,100 workers,” Zenz revealed. “Meanwhile, Anhui Province, along with Pishan County (Hotan County), where the Uighur population is the majority, accepted the transfer of more than 5,000 workers (People’s Daily, September 17, 2023).
“Recent policy changes in Xinjiang have made forced labor less visible and more difficult to conceptualize,” he noted.
Zentz told Congress that beyond the rest of China, “products manufactured in whole or in part in Xinjiang enter global supply chains through intermediary countries, particularly Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand and other Asian countries. It’s in,” he said.
Thea M. Lee, Under Secretary of Labor for International Affairs and Department of Labor, spoke about the issue of foreign companies conducting factory audits in China. claimed It is “impossible” to do so reliably.
“Audits are often announced in advance, giving managers time to prepare their facilities. Managers can easily falsify timesheets to circumvent payroll and overtime laws. And workers may be pressured to provide inaccurate information,” Lee said. “It is impossible for workers to have an effective voice when they are trapped in state-sponsored forced labor, lack independent democratic trade unions, and continue to be exposed to intimidation and retaliation. It is clear that
Li suggested that “China’s social audits should not be seen as an authoritative source for companies to reflect the human rights situation on the ground.”
“The business community needs to recognize that any audit, and frankly any business operation conducted within China, carries heightened labor and human rights risks,” she concluded.
