Introduction

“Surplus labor transfers” are part of the PRC government’s program of government assistance for impoverished people nation-wide. Reflecting both socialist concepts effective methods for reducing underemployment and international development discourse, the PRC incentivizes people in the poorest parts of China to move into factory work, fulfilling the goal of national modernization and industrialization.

In Xinjiang – where threat of internment looms like a spectre in the daily lives of all Uyghur, Kazakh, and other minoritized people of the region, and where “refusing to receive government subsidies or assistance” on “the grounds of religion” was named as one of “75 religious extremist activities” – the government’s surplus labor transfer program is transformed from one of government assistance to one of government coercion. Islam was blamed for influencing people of the region to “refuse to improve their vocational skills, economic condition, and the ability to better their own lives,” thus reducing those who do not welcome the government’s assignment to work to the category of radical or extremist. Assigning people to work is described by the top party leadership, including Xi Jinping, as a way of “stabilizing” the region and undermining the purported terrorist influences that Beijing saw as infecting the region.

As the documents in this collection show, since as early as 2014, local and regional governments across Xinjiang, under the direction of the central government, have implemented a program of labor recruitment that begins with surveillance of all family households and the quantification of individuals in regard to their perceived threat to security. Labor agency representatives, cadres, work teams, and even prosecutors and prison bureau agents are sent door-to-door to assess each individual person in a village and to assign them a value that will determine where they will work. As many state media, corporate publicity campaigns, and academic reports attested, many Uyghur people were unwilling to move to factories for work. But people were not allowed to refuse. Agents were instructed to “educate” people to “want to work” and to “unburden” them from their children, elders, and farmland to ensure their compliance. Media accounts reveal people who are eventually coerced to move into factory work by the relentless insistence of the work teams.

Unlike in other parts of the country, the possibility of being sent to an internment camp if one refused made this a coercive state-sponsored forced labor program.

Between 2018 and 2021, local agencies were directed to have at least one person in every household assigned to work. By December of 2021, that quota was succeeded by another that indicated that every single person able to work should be in a job of some kind.

The programs are inherently grounded in racist generalizations about the behavior of Uyghurs and other Muslims and sought to change their cultures, minds, practices, and desires for freedom. The programs were meant to “change their long-cultivated lazy, idle, slow, and inconstant behaviors of personal freedom, to abide by corporate rules and regulation and work discipline, and to devote themselves to daily production.” (See the 2018 Qapqal County directive below) Labor transfers are designed to destroy the Uyghur culture and religious practice, and to create a docile workforce unable to resist the government.

The sources included in this collection paint a clear picture of repression and show that General Secretary Xi Jinping and top Chinese officials were responsible for the inception of the state-sponsored labor program in the Uyghur Region and that the central government continues to engage directly in the implementation of the program. The central government designed policies to enact their project of forced labor, from attracting businesses with tax incentives to creating policies that would coerce Uyghur, Kazakh, and other indigenous Turkic people in the region into the factories. The documents also lay out the justifications for the policies and a variety of local implementation plans, quotas, and practices.