Muslim inmates from internment camps in far western China hunched over sewing machines, in row after row. They were among hundreds of thousands who had been detained and spent month after month renouncing their religious convictions. Now the government was showing them on television as models of repentance, earning good pay and political salvation as factory workers. Chinas ruling Communist Party has said in a surge of upbeat propaganda that a sprawling network of camps in the Xinjiang region is providing job training and putting detainees on production lines for their own good, offering an escape from poverty, backwardness and the temptations of radical Islam. But mounting evidence suggests a system of forced labor is emerging from the camps, a development likely to intensify international condemnation of Chinas drastic efforts to control and indoctrinatea Muslim ethnic minority population of more than 12 million in Xinjiang. Accounts from the region, satellite images and previously unreported official documents indicate that growing numbers of detainees are being sent to new factories, built inside or near the camps, where inmates have little choice but to accept jobs and follow orders.
These people who are detained provide free or low-cost forced labor for these factories, said Mehmet Volkan Kasikci, a researcher in Turkey who has collected accounts of inmates in the factories by interviewing relatives who have left China. Stories continue to come to me, he said. China has defied an international outcry against the vast internment program in Xinjiang, which holds Muslims and forces them to renounce religious piety and pledge loyalty to the party. The emerging labor program underlines the governments determination to continue operating the camps despite calls from United Nations human rights officials, the United States and other governments to close them.
The program aims to transform scattered Uighurs, Kazakhs and other ethnic minorities many of them farmers, shopkeepers and tradespeople into a disciplined, Chinese-speaking industrial work force, loyal to the Communist Party and factory bosses, according to official plans published online.