Uighur Muslims in the Chinese province of Xinjiang are being forced to make masks and other personal protective equipment that are being sold domestically and overseas, The New York Times reports.
The newspaper reports forced labor from the Uighur concentration camps is being used by at least 17 Chinese companies that produce medical masks and other PPE.
Before the coronavirus pandemic, only four companies produced medical-grade equipment in Xinjiang. But since the outbreak, there are 51 companies making masks. Of those, 17 are part of a program that gives them cheap, forced labor from Uighurs held in concentration camps.
The Chinese Communist Party declared the Muslim minority group a security threat years ago and has incarcerated them in concentrations camps they call "vocational training schools."
The Chinese government maintains that the Uighurs are attending voluntary programs to improve their job opportunities, but human rights organizations say they are prisoners who are forced to work in Chinese factories.
The newspaper's report found that some of the Uighur made masks are exported and sold overseas.
"We traced a shipment of face masks to a medical supply company in the U.S. state of Georgia from a factory in China's Hubei Province, where more than 100 Uighur workers had been sent. The workers are required to learn Mandarin and pledge their loyalty to China at weekly flag-raising ceremonies," the newspaper indicated in its report.
According to the newspaper, Uighurs are not voluntarily agreeing to learn new skills and work for Chinese companies. The report stated "quotas on the number of workers put in the labor program and the penalties faced by those who refuse to cooperate" make the program compulsory.
"There are these coercive quotas that cause people to be put into factory work when they don't want to be," Amy K. Lehr, the director of the Human Rights Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies told the newspaper. "And that could be considered forced labor under international law."
In March, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) published a study that named 83 companies, both Chinese and foreign, that were directly or indirectly benefiting from Uighur labor programs.
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