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Inside China’s Push to Turn Muslim Minorities Into an Army of Workers

The Communist Party wants to remold Xinjiang’s minorities into loyal blue-collar workers to supply Chinese factories with cheap labor.

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Secret Video Offers Rare Look Inside Chinese Labor Program

China is relocating Uighurs and other Muslim minorities to urban areas as part of a contentious labor program. The Times obtained rare footage taken inside one.

In a far corner of northwestern China, a car drives along a wall lined with barbed wire, heading towards what looks like a standard apartment complex. Access here is restricted, and the cameraperson is filming secretly … … because this is no ordinary residence. It’s part of a contentious labor resettlement program run by the Chinese government to extend state control over Muslim minorities, mostly Uighurs, by moving them from one part of China to work in another. This covert, low-quality footage that we’ve adjusted to reveal some details, and obscure others, gives us some rare insights into how people in this program live and are indoctrinated. Over the last few years, the mass incarceration of more than a million Uighurs and Kazakhs by the Chinese government has led to international outrage. These labor programs are part of that larger story. Let’s take a closer look at the compound we showed you at the beginning. It’s in Xinjiang, in the northern city of Kuitun, where the population is mostly China’s Han ethnic majority. But the workers in the compound are Uighurs, and other minorities transferred there from their homes in Hotan and Kashgar, hundreds of miles away. At the Kuitun complex there are multiple dormitories. We see that right around the time the transfer started in 2017, a security checkpoint and another building, a cafeteria, were built at the site. The cameraperson is now shooting inside of the cafeteria. We can see the compound’s residents. They all work as street cleaners. A sign describing the program calls them Kashgar and Hotan surplus labor. It also lists instructions for how they should conduct themselves. And another poster offers guidelines on how to interact with the local population. This program and others like it have led to the relocation of hundreds of thousands of Uighurs away from their homes and families. But government propaganda openly promotes these as poverty alleviation initiatives. What’s at stake here is about more than just putting people into labor programs. The bigger goal is to turn Uighurs and other ethnic minorities away from their own heritage, to be more in line with the rest of Communist China. Back at the compound, the rules strictly limit when and where the workers can go. We hear about this as a cameraperson meets residents in the sleeping quarters. This man was pressured to come here a year earlier, leaving his family, a wife and young child, behind. His life here includes mandatory Mandarin classes in the evenings. And despite the government’s claim that they are lifting these workers out of poverty, he says he’s only making a third of what he did back home. Yarkand County is the home he left behind. For Uighurs in towns like these, the future is becoming increasingly uncertain because the decision, whether to stay or go, is often no longer in their hands.

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China is relocating Uighurs and other Muslim minorities to urban areas as part of a contentious labor program. The Times obtained rare footage taken inside one.

KASHGAR, China — The order from Chinese officials was blunt and urgent. Villagers from Muslim minorities should be pushed into jobs, willing or not. Quotas would be set and families penalized if they refused to go along.

“Make people who are hard to employ renounce their selfish ideas,” the labor bureau of Qapqal, a county in the western region of Xinjiang, said in the directive last year.

Such orders are part of an aggressive campaign to remold Xinjiang’s Muslim minorities — mostly Uighurs and Kazakhs — into an army of workers for factories and other big employers. Under pressure from the authorities, poor farmers, small traders and idle villagers of working age attend training and indoctrination courses for weeks or months, and are then assigned to stitch clothes, make shoes, sweep streets or fill other jobs.

These labor programs represent an expanding front in a major effort by China’s leader, Xi Jinping, to entrench control over this region, where these minorities make up about half the population. They are crucial to the government’s strategy of social re-engineering alongside the indoctrination camps, which have held one million or more Uighurs and Kazakhs.

The labor bureau of Qapqal ordered that villagers should undergo military-style training to convert them into obedient workers, loyal to employers and the ruling Communist Party. “Turn around their ingrained lazy, lax, slow, sloppy, freewheeling, individualistic ways so they obey company rules,” the directive said.

The government maintains that the Uighur and Kazakh villagers are “rural surplus labor” and are an underemployed population that threatens social stability. Putting them in steady, supervised government-approved work, officials say, will erase poverty and slow the spread of religious extremism and ethnic violence.

The government describes the laborers as volunteers, though critics say they are clearly coerced. Official documents, interviews with experts, and visits by The New York Times to Xinjiang indicate that local plans uproot villagers, restrict their movements and pressure them to stay at jobs.

Experts say those harsh methods can amount to forced labor, potentially tainting the global supply chain that uses Xinjiang workers, particularly for cotton goods. The Japanese retailers Muji and Uniqlo say they have used cotton from the region, while Walmart has bought goods from a company that until recently used workers from Xinjiang.

Given the tight control on Xinjiang, “we have to assume for the moment that there’s a very significant risk of coercion,” said Amy K. Lehr, director of the human rights initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the co-author of a study on Xinjiang’s labor programs.

Forced labor could arise “even if the coercion was implicit or the programs offered workers a decent income,” she added.

The labor programs operate in parallel with the indoctrination camps in Xinjiang, that have drawn condemnation from Western governments. Camp inmates also receive job training, and officials say that many will be sent to work in factories.

Taken collectively, the policies are designed to make the region’s Muslim minorities more secular and urbanized like China’s Han majority. Many Chinese people see that as laudable. Uighur critics see it as ethnic subjugation.

“What they are trying to do is assimilate the Uighur people,” said Mustafa Aksu, a program coordinator at the Uyghur Human Rights Project.

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Construction trucks in August at an industrial development zone under construction near internment camps in Hotan, in the western region of Xinjiang.Credit...Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times

The factory run by the Jinfujie Clothing Company on the sandy edge of Kashgar, a city in southern Xinjiang, has been a star in the government’s labor campaign.

Jinfujie, which calls itself Golden Future in English, trained and employed 2,300 workers from villages. It also opened a branch factory in an indoctrination camp, where it would put to work more than 500 inmates, a company executive told officials last year.

The executive, Sun Yijie, a former soldier, said the company ran a tight ship to turn villagers into workers. “Beginning with military drills before they start their jobs, we foster a sense of discipline,” he said.

Video footage posted online shows Jinfujie workers in gray-and-orange uniforms lined up for a pep rally. “A successful future,” they shouted in unison.

The company has said it won an order from Germany to make hundreds of thousands of ski pants. Jinfujie would not answer questions about the claimed order. During a recent visit, Times reporters were barred by guards from visiting the Jinfujie factory or the surrounding industrial zone.

Dozens of factory zones have emerged across Xinjiang, attesting to the government’s ambitions to remake the region. Mr. Xi, China’s leader, has vowed to end poverty nationwide by late 2020, and Xinjiang officials face intense pressure to create jobs.

“The offensive to eradicate poverty has reached the crucial stage in a decisive battle,” Chen Quanguo, the Communist Party secretary of Xinjiang, said early this month on a tour of southern Xinjiang. “Transmit the pressure down, level by level.”

The labor programs depend on luring companies from China’s wealthier eastern seaboard, where fewer young people want to work on production lines. Xinjiang has offered manufacturers inexpensive labor, as well as generous tax breaks and subsidies.

“They’re still not as fast as workers from other parts of China,” said He Tan, a businessman who owns a small factory on the outskirts of Hotan, a city in Xinjiang.

The government’s goals are sweeping. One plan issued in 2018 called for putting to work 100,000 people from the poorest parts of southern Xinjiang, a heavily Uighur area, by the end of 2020. The government recently said that target was met a year ahead of schedule. By late 2023, another plan says, Xinjiang wants one million working in its textile and garment industries, up from about 100,000 in 2017.

At Mr. He’s factory, dozens of Uighur women from nearby villages sat wordlessly in rows sewing school uniforms. Guzalnur Mamatjan, a 20-year-old Uighur, said she made about $200 a month.

“I’d like to work here for two or three years and then open my own clothes shop,” she said in a brief interview in the presence of officials.

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A scene from undated video footage showing Muslim trainees at a garment factory at the Hotan Vocational Education and Training Center.Credit...CCTV, via Associated Press

Jutting out against desert dunes, the new industrial zones in Xinjiang are often surrounded by high walls, barbed wire and security cameras. Some are built near indoctrination camps and employ former inmates.

Xinjiang’s drive to put minorities in jobs often feels less like a jobs fair and more like a military call-up.

Trainee laborers often first attend political courses similar to those used in the indoctrination camps. They practice military drills, learn patriotic Chinese songs, and listen to lectures warning against Islamic zeal and preaching gratitude to the Communist Party. New laborers are sometimes shown in Chinese media reports wearing military-type uniforms and standing to attention as they are escorted to their employers.

Many are separated from their families. A directive from the Qapqal government ordered children of working couples to be put in care — home villages for the young, boarding schools for older ones — so their parents could move for work.

Workers’ movements are highly controlled if they are far from home. In Yanqi County in the region’s north, workers sent from the south are not allowed to quit unless they get written permission from several officials, according to rules by the local government.

Labor recruits undergo “political vetting” to determine if they are a security risk. In Qapqal County, officials imposed rules to grade potential recruits from most to least trustworthy. The least trustworthy had to attend indoctrination classes in the evenings, while only the most trusted could leave the county for work.

“There is a great deal of pressure placed on individuals to sign work contracts,” said Darren Byler, an expert on Xinjiang at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Mr. Byler said many residents believed that resisting work transfers could prompt detention. “The threat of the camps hangs over everyone’s heads, so there is really no resistance to assigned factory work,” he said.

Chinese official media reports that workers make $400 and up a month, a decent income. The reality may differ, especially in smaller, struggling factories. In a township in southern Xinjiang, two thirds of 43 factory employees whose wages were included in online records earned $114 a month, according to Adrian Zenz, an expert on Xinjiang who has studied the labor programs.

Amanzhol Qisa, a 31-year-old Xinjiang resident, spent a year in an indoctrination camp and in April was sent to work at a clothing factory for three months. She was paid $115 a month, less than half the minimum wage, according to her husband, Muhamet Qyzyrbek.

Mr. Qyzyrbek, a Kazakh citizen, said by phone from Shymkent, a city in southern Kazakhstan, that his wife had no choice but to take the job. “After being released, you need to work according to their policies,” he said.

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The entrance to an apparel employment training center in Hotan last year. Companies that use the training center have been linked to accusations of employing forced labor.  Credit...Ng Han Guan/Associated Press

Starting in late summer, villagers in Xinjiang file onto buses taking them to cotton farms, sometimes hundreds of miles away. For a few intense weeks under the sun, they hunch over in fields, picking the crop that ends up in Chinese clothing factories.

Teams of Communist Party officials in villages hold “mobilization meetings,” pressing farmers to sign up. The pay is good, they say.

“Head out boldly and bring back the cash,” a village official in Dol Township in southern Xinjiang told dozens of farmers, according a local government report last year. The village officials urged team leaders to take special care of three villagers in their 60s who had signed up to pick cotton, the report said.

Xinjiang grows 85 percent of China’s cotton, by official estimates, and is pushing to make more textiles and garments. And nearly every link in the supply chain intersects with the government’s labor programs.

Large Chinese textile makers, such as Huafu Fashion Company, based in eastern China, have promoted their role in employing minorities from the countryside, while denying that any were forced to take the work.

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A cotton farm near Qapqal County, Xinjiang, in 2015.Credit...Adam Dean for The New York Times

Some global companies have advertised high-quality Xinjiang cotton as a selling point. The Japanese retailer Muji describes that its flannel uses “hand harvested” cotton from the region.

The international concern over human rights in Xinjiang is putting pressure on global retailers to vet their suppliers. The United States recently banned clothing from Hetian Taida, a company in Xinjiang suspected of using workers from an indoctrination camp.

The parent company of the Japanese retailer Uniqlo said the brand stopped working with production partners in Xinjiang. Muji of Japan did not respond to emails requesting comment. In August, its parent company, Ryohin Keikaku, said it was committed to banning forced labor, including among its business partners.

Until recently, Qapqal County had sent a total of over 440 workers to east China to work for a factory that makes inflatable paddle pools and beds for export to the United States and other countries. The factory is owned by the Bestway Leisure Products Company, which has sold such products to Walmart, Kmart and other retailers, according to export records.

Pat Fumagalli, a chief strategic officer for Bestway who is based in the United States, said the company ended the program to take workers from Xinjiang in October, after managers in the United States noted reports about the region’s labor programs.

Marilee McInnis, a spokeswoman for Walmart, said in email: “Responsible recruitment and voluntary labor are two very important issues for Walmart.”

Transform Holdco, the parent company of Kmart, declined to comment.

After The Times made inquiries, inspectors acting for Walmart visited the factory. The inspectors from the ICTI Ethical Toy Program examined records and spoke to managers. They found no disparity between the pay and conditions of workers from Xinjiang and other places, said Mark Robertson, a senior vice president for the inspection program.

“We did not have the opportunity to interview workers from Xinjiang as none were working at the factory when we conducted our visit,” he said.

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A recently built factory in an industrial development zone that includes camps, in Hotan in August.Credit...Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times

Chris Buckley is chief China correspondent and has lived in China for most of the past 30 years after growing up in Sydney, Australia. Before joining The Times in 2012, he was a correspondent in Beijing for Reuters. More about Chris Buckley

Austin Ramzy is a Hong Kong reporter, focusing on coverage of the city and also of regional and breaking news. He previously covered major events around Asia from Taipei and Beijing. More about Austin Ramzy

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: China’s Push to Turn Its Muslims Into Loyal Army of Cheap Labor. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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