Coercive Labor in Xinjiang:Labor Transfer and the Mobilization of Ethnic Minorities to Pick Cotton
December 01, 2020Coercive labor practices affect the vast majority of Xinjiang’s cotton production.
When adding up . . . numbers of cotton pickers for both local and external work assignments, we can estimate that Aksu, Hotan, and Kashgar alone mobilized an estimated 570,000 cotton pickers through the coercive labor transfer mechanism . . . Overall, it is safe to state that Xinjiang’s cotton production depends on a coercive labor transfer mechanism that involves well over half a million ethnic minorities.
In July 2016 . . . Xinjiang issued an action plan that explicitly specified details of . . . an “order-oriented” approach to labor transfer, where companies put in orders for employees with certain skills and the state then takes batches of ethnic minorities, trains them accordingly, and delivers them to companies.
