Terrorism

New evidence further links a company in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) whose products were banned from entry to the U.S. earlier this month to forced labor supplied by detainees from a local internment camp, RFA has learned. On Sept. 14, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency issued Withhold Release Orders (WROs)—measures intended to prevent goods suspected to have been made with forced labor from entering the United States—that targeted three entities from Xinjiang and one from Anhui province in eastern China. Among the products was apparel produced by Yili Zhuowan Garment Manufacturing Co., Ltd. and Baoding LYSZD Trade and Business Co., Ltd., located in Ghulja (in Chinese, Yining) county, in the XUAR’s Ili Kazakh (Yili Hasake) Autonomous Prefecture. “Information reasonably indicates that these entities use prison and forced labor in apparel production,” CBP said at the time. “CBP identified forced labor indicators including the restriction of movement, isolation, intimidation and threats, withholding of wages, and abusive working and living conditions.” The WROs follow a year of heightened U.S. scrutiny of Beijing’s sprawling network of camps in the XUAR, where authorities are believed to have held up to 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities since April 2017. And on Tuesday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act that would block imports from the XUAR, amid growing evidence that internment camps in the region have increasingly transitioned from political indoctrination to forced labor, with detainees being sent to work in cotton and textile factories. Investigations by RFA have found that former detainees placed in forced and coerced labor schemes following their detention are regularly required to surrender part of their pay to camp administrators. In some cases, they are housed in dormitories on their workplace campuses and only permitted to visit their families at home as little as once a month. In January last year, RFA learned that nine Kazakh women from Ghulja county were sent back to an internment camp after they refused to sign a labor contract with a monthly salary of 600 yuan (U.S. $90), around 40 percent of a typical wage for a manual worker, of which they would have received only around 300 yuan (U.S. $45). The women had been sent to work in the Jiafang Garments Industrial Park after being released from an internment camp, and expected to work 12-hour shifts sewing gloves and undergo an hour’s “political education” every day for the money. A map shows Ghulja county in the XUAR's Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture. RFA Name-brand exports RFA recently spoke with a Europe-based Uyghur who claimed, on condition of anonymity fearing reprisal, that over the past two years their own younger sister has worked under forced labor conditions in a Zhuowan factory. The source, who provided RFA with a number of photos of different factories and workshops, said that several small- and medium-sized factories have been built in Ghulja at the invitation of the local government. “They produce name-brand gloves, bags, clothing, and other goods, and then export them to Russia as well as Europe and the United States,” the source said. “These factories and workshops are tax-exempt, and the local government has assumed responsibility for electricity, water, and rent. These factories use the people from camps basically for free. They work 10-plus hours a day. Those who cannot meet the demands placed on them face all sorts of punishment.” Photos provided by the source show that the Zhuowan factory is located within the Jiafang Garments Industrial Park and reveal rows upon rows of workshops and other buildings inside a large complex. The source also provided the business card of Zhuowan’s general manager, Wang Xinghua. Repeated calls to Wang by RFA reporters went unanswered at the time of publishing. The source said they felt compelled to share information about factories in the region after learning that products made by their sister and other forced laborers were making their way to countries like the U.S. According to information available online, Zhuowan was founded with a private investment of some 460 million yuan (U.S. $67.5 million). It is registered as a limited liability company, and was registered in November of 2017, well after the start of the internment campaign in Xinjiang. The goods it produces include both leather and wool gloves. According to the website of the Ili prefectural government, the total land area of buildings in the Jiafang Garments Industrial Park in the Ili Yidong Industrial District measures around 160 mu (26 acres). When founded in September 2016, the park contained 15 workshops and agreements were signed to locate 15 garment factories there. By August 2017, seven factories in the park were producing apparel and “close to 2,000 [people] were put to work.” Reporting by RFA and a number of other news outlets over the past several years has shown that a staggering number of factories have been built in Xinjiang contemporaneous to the campaign of mass incarceration—many of which are located on the site of or nearby known internment camp locations. Gulzira Auelkhan (R) and a fellow worker at the Zhuowan factory in Ghulja county, in late 2018. Gulzira Auelkhan ‘Just like a camp’ Gulzira Auelkhan, a Kazakh woman RFA reported on last year who worked at Zhuowan, recognized details in the photos supplied by the source in Europe of the factory and Jiafang Industrial Park and confirmed that she had been sent there after spending 15 months prohibited from leaving an internment camp between July 2017 and October 2018. “This is Jiafang—I worked in a glove factory there for three months,” she said. “The Zhuowan glove factory and the camp were both on the grounds there. [The factory] was just like being in a camp. Even now, just thinking of it makes my heart cry. I can’t stand it.” Auelkhan, who relocated to Kazakhstan in 2019 after finishing the work detail, described the factory as a two-story building on the edge of the industrial park structure, where armed police stood “everywhere.” “It was a 20-minute bus ride between the workshop and the camp—at 6:30 a.m. Beijing time, when it was still pitch-black outside, the police would put us onto the bus and take us to the workshop,” she said. There, she claimed, she worked on a floor with more than 200 other Uyghurs and Kazakhs who had been released from a camp. “Between the two floors there were at least 500 Uyghur and Kazakh women, as well as a small number of Hui [Muslim] women [working],” she said. “Excluding the 40 minutes in which we were allowed to eat meals, we spent all the rest of our time under the heavy weight of work, without even the permission to get a drink of water. We got off work at 6:00 or 7:00 p.m. We would go back to the camp and take part in brainwashing sessions.” Each day at work, Auelkhan and others were expected to sew 20 pairs of gloves, each of which could take 30-50 minutes to complete. She said that because she was forced to study Chinese at night, her eyesight had become poor and she was “never once able to complete the work assignment.” “We tried to help one another to complete our work assignments, because there were all sorts of punishments for us if we didn’t finish,” she said. “They even scared us by saying we might go back into the camp.” While Auelkhan was promised 600 yuan for her three-month stint at Zhuowan, at the end of the contract she received nothing and was forced to sign a document saying she had received “free job training” from the company. She was beaten by police when she told them should wouldn’t sign until she received the money she was owed. Visiting officials are briefed outside of the Zhuowan factory, in an undated photo. RFA listener Global market Auelkhan told RFA she is devastated to know that the gloves she and her fellow workmates made are being sold on the global market. “The leather gloves we sewed are sold in China for 250 yuan (U.S. $37)—the cheapest sell for 180 yuan (U.S. $26),” she said. “They told us that the gloves are also sold in the U.S. and Germany, that they would go to foreign countries.” When asked what brand of gloves they were making, Zhuowan managers told workers that the labels would be added once they were sent to different workshops in other parts of China. Additional details of the link between Zhuowan and the internment system, as well as the conditions at the glove factory, were confirmed by Darren Byler, a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Asian Studies, at the University of Colorado, Boulder in an September 2019 interview he conducted with a Kazakh man named Erzhan Qurban published in the journal SupChina. Qurban had spent nine months in a camp in Ghulja before being released in November 2018, at which point he was promptly forced to work at the glove factory. Reported by Gulchehra Hoja for RFA’s Uyghur Service. Translated by Elise Anderson. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.

Anne Destiny 1 is one of the few Israelis actively campaigning against the persecution of ethnic Uyghurs in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) on Twitter. The social media activist, who asked to be identified only by her Twitter handle, said that the Israeli government should speak out against repression in the region, where authorities are believed to have held up to 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in a vast network of internment camps since April 2017. As more evidence about Beijing’s policies in the region raise the question of whether Chinese authorities may be committing a form of genocide as defined by the United Nations, Anne Destiny 1 said that Jews in Israel are increasingly concerned by the Uyghur situation, although they are wary of drawing comparisons to the atrocities of the holocaust in Nazi Germany. Anne Destiny 1 recently spoke with RFA’s Uyghur Service about the work she is doing to draw attention to rights abuses in the XUAR and how she believes the Israeli people can help pressure China to end its crackdown in the region. RFA: When did you first learn about the plight of Uyghur people? Anne: I had heard of the Uyghurs already maybe 20 years ago. I think it was in 2017 that I became aware of the atrocities that they endure. It was only in the last three years that I’ve actually known about their sufferings. RFA: What was your reaction after you heard of what was happening to the Uyghur people? Anne: I must say I was shocked because I actually heard it from a Uyghur friend that we got to know in Europe. So, it immediately became very personal. It was a shock. We got the message that his parents had gone missing. RFA: As an Israeli, what made you speak out on the Uyghur issue? Anne: I think it's just kind of a conviction that this is something that has to be spoken of. We can't just sit quietly and watch this happen. So, I thought about what I can do as an individual is to get on Twitter and try to inform other Israelis, but also anybody who's interested. So, I started posting Uyghur related news since 2018, because I felt the need for information. RFA: What sort of activism has taken place in Israel so far? Anne: In Israel, they are taking part in Friday protests outside the Chinese Embassy in Tel Aviv … And also, in the last couple of years there have been university lecturers speaking not only about Uyghur culture but also about what is happening to the Uyghurs and the persecution that they are currently facing inside XUAR. RFA: China is one of Israel's largest trading partners and sources of foreign investment, alongside the United States and Europe. Under these circumstances, what is Israel’s position towards the current ongoing Uyghur crisis? Anne: So far Israel hasn’t made any official statements about the Uyghur crisis. It has not shown any support, but neither has it condemned it. But I do believe this can also change because I think on a personal and grassroots level, we can effect change. RFA: Why is the Israeli government’s response towards the ongoing humanitarian crisis so important? Anne: I do think that one of the aspects is that Israel being a nation that was established after the Holocaust, it has affected this nation. We are very sensitive to others when we … see genocide happening elsewhere in the world, and do not want to stay silent. And Jewish people vowed that the Holocaust should never happen again. I'm actually really pleased to see that people are really waking up to what is happening to the Uyghurs. Drawing comparisons RFA: Most of us, especially in the Jewish community, won’t compare any current atrocities to the Holocaust due to the idea that comparisons like these make light of the annihilation of the Jewish people. But there are voices emerging now that when it comes to the Uyghur crisis, there is no alternative but to compare the two because there are many echoes of the past. In your opinion is there any similarities between what had happened to the Jews and what is currently happening to the Uyghurs? Anne: Well, there are definitely many similarities and the scale of the dehumanization is the most obvious thing. Putting people in camps with poor conditions. I actually had a talk with follow activists from the Jewish advocacy for Uyghurs about how they view this. The Holocaust is such a sensitive thing in the Jewish state, and this is actually quite shocking for them to see something similar that resembles the Holocaust is happening again. The Jews are kind of divided about the use of the word Holocaust … But then again, comparing the two, [Uyghurs and Jews] I think we definitely need to compare, because this is almost like a genocide in the making. So, I think the Jewish people are starting to compare what is happening to the Uyghurs with the Holocaust. They may not use the actual name Holocaust, because for them it is a kind of reference to what happened to their families in the 40s. But … the Jewish people definitely do not want to see the same happen to the Uyghurs. So, they want to prevent it from happening. RFA: Why are world leaders so reluctant to call the Uyghur crisis a genocide? Anne: I think is that this is already meeting some the U.N. characteristics for genocide. So, I think if we acknowledge it as genocide it will actually force world leaders to act. RFA: There was an article written by young Jewish student in America, in which he urged the Jewish community, especially young Jews, to speak out against the Uyghur crisis. What can young Jews and Israelis do to force China to stop its abuses against the Uyghurs? Anne: I think young people can be very active in just influencing their own community, colleges, and universities. And I notice many young people acting on social media … I can see that the third generation of Jews whose grandparents are Holocaust survivors, they have this inbuilt ability to empathize with people when they hear what they're going through. What is happening to the Uyghurs is already on such a level that even young people feel that the comparison to the Holocaust can be made and they feel they need to shout louder than ever that we should never let this happen again. Reported and translated by Shahrezad Ghayrat for RFA’s Uyghur Service.