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NEW China has built nearly 2 million square metres of factories in camps in Xinjiang, focused in the Uyghur and Kazakh heartlands of southern and western Xinjiang. By me and @meghara https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alison_killing/xinjiang-camps-china-factories-forced-labor
Factories across Xinjiang – both inside and outside the camps – typically look the same. They are large, rectangular, steel framed buildings, often with blue, sometimes red, roofs. Here’s one under construction in Shule county, Kashgar in 2017/18.
Using our database of camps, satellite imagery analysis, media reports and detainee interviews we found all the camps with factories, then began to analyse them and their growth patterns.
Factory construction exploded in 2018, with 1.3 million sq metres built that year. Detainee labour now also looks very different to that in older Xinjiang prisons. Pre-2016, detainees might have been making cement, or mining coal, or uranium. Now they make clothes.
The programme is also heavily focused on the south of Xinjiang – over 30% of the factories built in camps since the start of 2017 are in Hotan, a prefecture with a high proportion of Uyghurs. Nearly 20% were in the Uyghur heartland of Kashgar.
Together with Washington think tank @C4ADS, we compared the factories’ locations with a registry that compiles address info from the Chinese govt business registry. C4ADS found 1500 companies located at, or right next to the factories.
We also spoke to a number of former detainees, including Dina Nurdybai, a successful businesswoman who was made to sew clothes in a camp in Nilka. Her detention destroyed her business and damaged her health. Now she’s rebuilding her life.
Read the full story here.
Thanks to @eyebeamnyc @pulitzercenter and @OpenTechFund for supporting this work. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alison_killing/xinjiang-camps-china-factories-forced-labor
Thanks to @eyebeamnyc @pulitzercenter and @OpenTechFund for supporting this work. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alison_killing/xinjiang-camps-china-factories-forced-labor
