What the West can do about China’s Uyghur labour camps

Coca-Cola’s most controversial bottling plant is a huge factory located in an industrial zone just outside the city of Urumqi in western China. Logistically, the factory is well situated: the international airport is a short drive away, as is the high-speed train station close to the fashionable Wyndham hotel. But the problem for Coca-Cola — and other western companies such as Volkswagen and BASF, which operate plants in the same region — is the existence of hundreds of facilities not mentioned on any official map. The Cofco Coca-Cola plant, a joint venture with a Chinese state company, is surrounded by prisons and re-education camps in which China suppresses local ethnic minorities, according to human rights experts. Many of those minorities are forced to work for factories or farms making products also sold in the UK.

Xinjiang, a huge area of remote deserts and rich mineral resources, is the centre of what world religious leaders, including five Church of England bishops, have named as ‘one of the most egregious human tragedies since the Holocaust’. In the past three years, China has put an estimated one million Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities — more than one-tenth of the adult population — in re-education camps. In the camps, they are forced to renounce their religious belief and praise the Communist party, and are subjected to brainwashing. Inmates often try to kill themselves.

Evidence shows that China is now shifting from mass internment to forced labour to control the local population. According to a study by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a think tank established by the Australian government, more than 80,000 Uyghurs were transferred out of Xinjiang to work in factories in other parts of China between 2017 and 2019 ‘under conditions that strongly suggest forced labour’. Some had been sent directly from detention camps to production lines.