Dhaka, Feb 3 (IANS) For years, Beijing’s mouthpieces dismissed testimonies from minority groups across China, including Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Tibetan survivors as fabrications, cast satellite images as misinterpretations, and labelled leaked documents as forgeries, while mocking the evidence as “Western propaganda”.

That argument has collapsed, with the United Nations — an institution they once invoked as the ultimate neutral party — confirmed the central reality: “China’s labour transfer system operates through coercion on a massive scale”, a report said on Tuesday.

According to a report in online magazine ‘Bitter Winter’, the statement by UN experts describes “a persistent pattern of alleged State-imposed forced labour involving ethnic minorities across multiple provinces in China,” warning that “in many cases, the coercive elements are so severe that they may amount to forcible transfer and/or enslavement as a crime against humanity.”

The experts’ findings, it said, indict the world’s second-largest economy through the most authoritative human rights mechanisms.

The report said, “Forced labour in China’s minority regions is not a rumour, not a geopolitical talking point, not an American invention. It is a documented reality. And those who once dismissed it now must face the fact that the institution they trusted to determine the truth has confirmed what survivors, researchers, and journalists have been saying all along.”

Last month, UN experts expressed deep concern regarding persistent allegations of forced labour affecting Uyghur, Kazakh and Kyrgyz minority groups as well as Tibetans within the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and across other parts of China.

“There is a persistent pattern of alleged State-imposed forced labour involving ethnic minorities across multiple provinces in China. In many cases, the coercive elements are so severe that they may amount to forcible transfer and/or enslavement as a crime against humanity,” the experts said.

According to the experts, forced labour in China is enabled through the State-mandated “poverty alleviation through labour transfer” programme, which coerces Uyghurs and members of other minority groups into jobs in Xinjiang and other regions.

They are reportedly subjected to systematic monitoring, surveillance and exploitation, with no choice to refuse or change the work due to a pervasive fear of punishment and arbitrary detention.

The experts highlighted that Xinjiang’s five-year plan (2021 to 2025) projects 13.75 million instances of labour transfers, while the actual numbers have reached new heights.

“The labour transfers are part of a government policy to forcibly re-engineer Uyghur, other minorities and Tibetans’ cultural identities under the guise of poverty alleviation,” they warned.

–IANS

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