A recently released United Nations agency report compiles evidence that China has dramatically expanded its state-sponsored slavery program tormenting Tibetans and the indigenous Turkic communities of East Turkistan, forcing rural people off their land and making them pick cotton and work in factories to make solar panels.
The revelations are part of a global report published by the International Labor Organization (ILO), a United Nations entity, on Monday. The ILO extensively cites research by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) indicating that the Chinese Communist Party has evolved its slavery program away from the concentration camps popular in East Turkistan for much of 2017 through 2020 and into what it calls the “liberation” of “surplus” rural workers into manufacturing and processing.
Slavery is a major component of the Chinese government’s genocide of Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and other ethnic groups that form the majority of the population of East Turkistan. China is believed to have begun building concentration camps for Uyghurs around 2017, which it later branded “vocational and educational training” centers (VETCs). Survivors of the camps reported enduring communist indoctrination, routine torture and humiliation, systematic rape, and slavery. Some evidence suggests the government trafficked the organs of prisoners in prime medical condition to be harvested. At their peak, the VETCs were estimated to imprison as many as 3 million people.
Outside of the camps, China launched a massive forced sterilization campaign – despite enduring a steep birth rate decline – to keep the local population down and forced local families to take in ethnic Han communist agents to splinter communities.
While smaller, evidence suggests Beijing imposed a similar program in Tibet, forcing tens of thousands into slavery and stealing children from homes to indoctrinate them out of their culture in communist boarding schools.
The ILO report published this week begins by celebrating the Chinese government, claiming that China has made “progress … towards the effective application” of international labor laws. It cites China outlawing “re-education through labor” – which it practiced in the Uyghur camps – in 2013 as an example of progress, as well as laws to prevent, in theory, the sex trafficking of women and children.
The report then continued to “note the observations” by the ITUC in a report submitted to the U.N. agency in September.
“The ITUC alleges widespread and state-sponsored forced labour practices in both the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (Xinjiang) and the Tibet Autonomous Region (Tibet),” the report noted, listing two ways that China enslaves people in East Turkistan:
Firstly, a system of arbitrary detention for Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities suspected of endangering social stability and national security (the “Vocational Skills Training and Education Centers” or VSTEC system) which since 2020 has been replaced with institutionalized long-term detention in regular prisons following a formal legal process, notably of prominent intellectuals and continued forced placement of “released” detainees in labour-intensive industries such as textiles and electronics.
Secondly, a system of transferring “surplus” rural workers from low-income traditional livelihoods pursuits [sic] into industries such as the processing of raw materials for the production of solar panels, batteries and other vehicle parts; seasonal agricultural work; and seafood processing.
The second system, the ILO report indicated, essentially involves the government stealing land from traditional farmers and then forcing those individuals into industrial slavery conditions. Beijing describes this as the “liberation” of rural people from the “poverty” of their traditional lifestyles.
Also in Tibet, the ILO said it had received evidence of similar policies, including “military-style vocational training methods” and forcing “Tibetan nomads and farmers swap their traditional livelihoods for jobs providing measurable cash income in industries such as road construction, mining or food-processing, thereby diluting ‘the negative influence of religion.'”
“Local authorities had ‘actively guided’ ethnic smallholder farmers to transfer their agricultural plots to large state-led cooperatives, thus ‘liberating’ ‘surplus’ rural workers for transfer into manufacturing or the service sector,” the report adds. It also noted, citing experts in Chinese slavery, that the ILO report has significantly modified its assessment of slavery in China since its last updater the service sector,” the report adds.
The report concluded by “requesting” that the Communist Party explain itself.
Voice of America (VOA) noted in its report on the ILO allegations that the original ITUC report cited estimated that as many as 630,000 people in Tibet were enslaved in such a way in 2024. It also noted, citing experts in Chinese slavery, that the ILO report has significantly modified its assessment of slavery in China since its last update, moving away from the use of the VETCs towards the theft of rural land and abduction of traditional farmers.
VOA reached out to the Chinese embassy in Washington, which categorically rejected the allegations.
“Some forces keep spreading lies that there are ‘forced labor’ in Xinjiang [East Turkistan] and Xizang [Tibet],” spokesperson Liu Pengyu replied. “The aim is only to smear China’s image, denigrate the Chinese government’s policies governing Xinjiang and Xizang, interfere in China’s internal affairs, and attempt to deceive the international community and disrupt the stable development of Xinjiang and Xizang.”
The Communist Party regularly uses the incorrect Mandarin-language names of territories it has colonized or wishes to colonize in an attempt to “Sinicize” them. In addition to Tibet and East Turkistan, the Chinese government has attempted, with little success, to rename much of India and the South China Sea.
In addition to directly condemning the report, Chinese state media published a report on Thursday claiming that the “mounting pressure” on China to abandon its racist slavery policies had failed, citing a growth in exports out of the affected regions.
“Despite mounting pressure from Western countries over issues like so-called ‘forced labor’ and import restrictions and sanctions, northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region has achieved a historic high in foreign trade in 2024,” the Xinhua state news agency claimed.
“Last year, the region’s import and export value surged to 435.11 billion yuan (about 60.68 billion U.S. dollars), marking a 21.8 percent year-on-year increase and underscoring its remarkable resilience and vitality,” Xinhua reported. “To date, more than 3,000 state-owned and private enterprises are actively engaged in foreign trade in the region.”
