VOC Research on Uyghur Forced Labor Featured in Politico Exclusive

As Stuart Lau writes in POLITICO:  A new research paper previewed by POLITICO, Adrian Zenz, a leading scholar on Beijing’s repressive policies, casts doubt on the applicability of these rules by the ILO, a U.N. agency, arguing they were mainly drawn up to tackle commercially — not politically — driven exploitation.

In other words, Beijing is not looking for cheap labor when its local officials in Xinjiang arrange for Uyghurs to go to work. Instead, it is a top-down political campaign to make these Uyghurs, collectively presumed by the state to be potential secessionists and terrorists, submit to Communist Party rule.

That, according to Zenz, a scholar at the U.S.-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, makes the ILO definition insufficient in tackling the issue. His research shows that the use of ILO indicators “largely fails” in evaluating the coercive elements in China’s system against the Uyghurs.

Read the full article here.