Genuine assessments of slavery and other forced labour in China, especially in the occupied Uyghur place, are “impossible,” according to authorities, including one of the major researchers in the world on the Uyghur murder and a senior established in the Department of Labor.
The Congressional- Executive Commission on China ( CECC), a legislative body that primarily examines the Communist Party’s human rights violations against its citizens and other hateful techniques, heard the professionals speak during a reading on Tuesday. If it is possible for British companies and those in the greater free world to carry out fair due diligence to preserve their supply chains free of human rights violations if they operate in China, the hearing, titled” Companies and Fraud in the PRC,” addressed this.
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The panelists came to the conclusion that third-party social reviews were very unsatisfactory because the Communist Party has subverted everything community to make it difficult for workers to openly talk about the conditions in their factories and business parks. Further, evidence is mounting that China is moving slave-traded goods to countries like India and Vietnam to stifle supply ring integrity and ensure that goods are sold in American and European areas.
The hearing primarily focused on forced labour, which is the practice of making it difficult for someone to leave work. Although the panelists at the reading claimed that Taiwanese companies frequently offer small wages to their employees, even when it is difficult for them to leave their jobs, they are forced into conventional slavery in many of these cases. Foresightful labour is viewed by the UN as a form of “modern slavery.”
Since at least 2017, when Xi Jinping is alleged to have introduced a spacious concentration camp system that at its peak was said to have imprisoned 3 million people, China has engaged in murderous practices against the Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and other indigenous peoples of dominated East Turkistan. In 1946, mass murderer Mao Zedong seized East Turkistan and transformed it into what China now refers to as the” Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region” or” Xinjiang Province.”
Slavery was a crucial component of those concentration camps ‘ treatment. According to Beijing, they are” Vocational and Educational Training Centers” where allegedly underdeveloped ethnic “minorities” could reportedly acquire skills necessary for the modern Chinese economy. In reality, the concentration camps funneled their victims to factories nationwide, as multiple reports have revealed.
Adrian Zenz, a senior fellow with the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and one of the most accomplished researchers studying the ongoing Uyghur genocide, focused on the Communist Party’s” Poverty Alleviation Through Labor Transfer policy, which he described as difficult for foreign corporations to track in their supply chain in his testimony on Tuesday. The policy, he told Congress,” coercively trains and transfers non- detained rural surplus laborers from the primary ( agricultural ) sector into secondary or tertiary sector work”.
More than two million targeted Uyghurs and other ethnic group members are currently at risk, according to Zenz in the so-called Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR ). State-imposed forced labor operates in a pervasively coercive social context, which is marked by a state that uses extensive grassroots bureaucracy to mobilize local residents and creates powerful coercive pressures.
China, he asserted,” creates an environment where its victims cannot speak freely, rendering assessment of individual cases difficult or impossible”.
Due diligence efforts based on social or labor audits are ineffective, according to Zenz, both in Xinjiang and in other Chinese provinces that receive transferred ethnic workers from that region. ” The only ethical response is divestment”.
The” Poverty Alleviation Through Labor Transfer” program, he asserted, pervades many more industries than the “vocational training” slave program, including” cotton, tomatoes and tomato products, peppers and seasonal agricultural products, seafood products, polysilicon production for solar panels, lithium for electric vehicle batteries, and aluminum for batteries, car vehicle bodies, and wheels”.
Zenz argued that the program’s two objectives are to exploit the laborers in ways that are difficult to trace outside China and to reduce East Turkistan’s indigenous population so that the Uyghur population eventually becomes a minority in its own homeland.
” Confidenceful audits in Xinjiang are unavoidable, according to experts and activists.” More than 2 million Uyghurs and members of other ethnic groups are affected by the largest system of state-imposed forced labor in the world today, according to Zenz, according to a growing body of scholarly research.
However, the program’s transfer component means that Uyghur slaves are already present far beyond” Xinjiang” and are therefore out of the scope of American laws like the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act ( UFLPA ), which forbids imports from East Turkistan unless the importer can demonstrate a supply chain free of slavery.
” A September 2023 state media article reported that Hubei province accepted 4, 100 workers”, Zenz revealed, “while Anhui province, which is paired with the Uyghur majority population county of Pishan ( Hotan Prefecture ), received a transfer of over 5, 000 workers ( People’s Daily, September 17, 2023 )”.
” Xinjiang’s recent policy changes have rendered forced labor less visible and more challenging to conceptualize”, he noted.
Beyond other parts of China, Zenz told Congress that “products made in whole or in part in Xinjiang are entering global supply chains through intermediary countries, in particular Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, and other Asian countries”.
Thea M. Lee, Undersecretary of Labor for International Affairs and the Department of Labor,  , claimed that it was “impossible” to conduct factory audits in China on the grounds that it was “impossible.”
” Audits are often announced in advance, giving managers time to prepare a facility. Managers have a tendency to fictitiously time their reports to evade pay and overtime regulations. And workers may be pressured to provide inaccurate information”, Lee noted. When workers are ensnared in state-sponsored forced labor, where there are no independent, democratic unions, and where threats and reprisals are persistent, it is clear effective worker voice is impossible.
Lee argued that” social audits in China should not be seen as a trusted resource for businesses looking into human rights issues on a global scale.”
The business community needs to be aware that any audits, and to be honest, any business operations conducted inside China, raise more serious labor and human rights issues, she said.
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