JUDY WOODRUFF: This week, the Trump administration took one of its most aggressive steps yet
against what it calls Chinese slave labor.
The U.S. accuses Beijing of forcing ethnic Uyghurs, a Muslim minority who live mostly
in Western China, into factory and farm jobs against their will.
Nick Schifrin reports on how Uyghurs end up as forced laborers and the larger campaign
that has ripped Uyghur lives and families apart.
NICK SCHIFRIN: Inside a massive network of detention, within a government campaign the
U.S. calls close to genocide, one man is chained to a bed. He can't talk because of a guard
outside his door, but his video speaks loudly about the conditions of his captivity and
the fate of Muslim Uyghurs.
Merdan Ghappar was a 31-year-old Uyghur model in Southern China. His flashy ads targeted
Han Chinese, the country's majority ethnic group. But, in January, Chinese authorities
detained him in a Xinjiang detention facility full of ethnic minority Uyghurs, whom the
Chinese government calls disloyal.
Pro-Beijing messages play from a loudspeaker. He secretly filmed and sent the video to his
uncle, Ablikim Ghappar, who now lives in Amsterdam.
ABLIKIM GHAPPAR, Uncle of Merdan Ghappar (through translator): When I saw the video clip, I
really felt sorrow for my nephew.
NICK SCHIFRIN: Merdan sent text messages describing the conditions of his initial detention in
a police station. He wrote: "The cop just shouted fiercely at me: 'If you lift that
hood again, I will beat you to death.'" Merdan adds: "I don't want to die."
ABLIKIM GHAPPAR (through translator): In the detention center, they were tortured. The
cell was very small and very crowded, more than 50 or 60 people. Every night, some people
slept, while some people needed to stand. A hood was on their heads. They were always
handcuffed, and their feet were chained.
NICK SCHIFRIN: Merdan's video, which was first reported by the BBC, is one of the first visual
testimonies from what the Trump administration calls the human rights stain of the century,
hundreds of detention facilities and camps that the U.S. says are filled with more than
a million Uyghurs.
National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien:
ROBERT O'BRIEN, U.S. National Security Adviser: If not a genocide, something close to it going
on in Xinjiang.
NICK SCHIFRIN: In Xinjiang and a neighboring province, residents say the government has
partially or completely destroyed at least a dozen mosques. A Communist Party program
forcibly inserts Han Chinese into Uyghur families. And China has banned Uyghur language and music.
The Chinese government calls some Uyghurs separatists and terrorists. It cites a 2009
riot and a 2013 Tiananmen Square attack claimed by Uyghurs who argue Xinjiang is an independent
country.
The Chinese government says it built camps to reeducate and deradicalize separatists.
Today, the government claims the camps have closed. And, in September, President Xi Jinping
shrugged off international criticism, as read by a Chinese state TV anchor.
WOMAN (through translator): The party's strategy of governing Xinjiang in the new era is completely
correct and must be adhered to for a long time.
NICK SCHIFRIN: But the Australian Strategic Policy Institute found that, since 2019, at
least 61 camps and detention facilities have expanded or are newly constructed. And now
international researchers say Uyghur detention has evolved into Uyghur forced labor.
AMY LEHR, Center for Strategic and International Studies: The patterns of mass detention in
Xinjiang are actually very closely linked to forced labor that we're seeing there.
NICK SCHIFRIN: Amy Lehr is with the Center for International and Strategic Studies.
AMY LEHR: There's an idea that you can reform people's minds and cut off their connection
to their culture and religion by putting them to work in factory jobs.
And so they're taking these detainees and either within the detention facilities or
moving them into guarded dormitories requiring them to work in factories in the region.
NICK SCHIFRIN: The Chinese government calls it poverty alleviation. Ethnic minorities
and prisoners get low-skilled factory and agricultural work to improve their lives.
Xi Jinping talked about it in September.
MAN: President Xi Jinping says unprecedented achievements have been made in Xinjiang's
economic and social development. Xi says the sense of happiness and security has increased
among people of all ethnic groups.
NICK SCHIFRIN: But what Beijing calls security, the U.S. calls forced labor as business and
governing model that profits Beijing $150 billion.
Beijing's central planners pay companies in Eastern China to open factories in Xinjiang
and train Uyghur workers. And the Xinjiang local government gets paid to build factories
near Uyghur detention camps.
AMY LEHR: I actually interviewed a number of former detainees who were put to work.
Their communications were monitored. They were paid in a year what they should have
been paid in a month.
The kind of treatment that these workers received when they are detained continues when they're
working. You see that pattern of trying to decrease their connection to their own culture
and increase their loyalty to the Communist Party within the system of work.
NICK SCHIFRIN: The Chinese government denies that.
ZHAO LIJIAN, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman (through translator): There is no so-called
forced labor problem. Some anti-China forces try to use this made-up topic to smear China's
image and seek their own political interests.
NICK SCHIFRIN: But it's a policy decades in the making.
In the 1950s, the Chinese government formed the XPCC, or Xinjiang Production and Construction
Corps. It guaranteed Xinjiang became more Han Chinese and less Uyghur. Today, the U.S.
says the XPCC runs the detention camps and Xinjiang's textiles industry. XPCC created
and owns many cotton fields, owns some gins where cotton is spun into yarn, and allegedly
owns many of the cotton cut-and-sew factories.
Xinjiang alone produces more than 20 percent of the world's cotton. And China is the world's
largest cotton exporter. That global supply chain makes it hard for companies to trace
whether their product were made with forced labor.
SHARON WAXMAN, Fair Labor Association: We're working with all of these companies to help
them really do that incredible detective work that they need to do to penetrate the deeper
layers of the supply chain.
NICK SCHIFRIN: Sharon Waxman is the president of the Fair Labor Association, a group of
organizations and companies dedicated to protecting workers' rights around the world.
She says, because Uyghur workers are too scared to tell the truth about their labor conditions,
Western companies can't figure out who exactly is creating their products.
SHARON WAXMAN: It could happen on the cotton field. It could happen when the cotton is
ginned, right? So, the risk of forced labor is cut across all the different rungs of the
ladder.
NICK SCHIFRIN: Several clothing companies have promised to cut ties with Xinjiang factories
and have taken steps to do so, but now the possibility of forced labor is harder to track.
In 2018, the Chinese government moved 62,000 ethnic minorities out of Xinjiang to work
across China. The Chinese government claims the workers move to follow higher salaries.
SHARON WAXMAN: If you're focusing only on Xinjiang, you have one region. And then, if
you're looking at all workers in factories all over China, it takes it to a whole other
level.
NICK SCHIFRIN: The Trump administration has recently punished China for Uyghur forced
labor. XPCC and Xinjiang party leaders have been sanctioned for -- quote -- "serious human
rights abuses."
The Department of Homeland Security banned all XPCC products it says are made with forced
labor, and Customs and Border Protection has seized Uyghur-made hair extensions and women's
gloves.
In Congress, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would block all Xinjiang
cotton, co-sponsored by Massachusetts Democrat Jim McGovern.
REP. JIM MCGOVERN (D-MA): The evidence of systematic and widespread forced labor in
Xinjiang is astounding and irrefutable.
NICK SCHIFRIN: But under Xi Jinping, external pressure may be incapable of changing Chinese
policy.
SHARON WAXMAN: The government is making the decisions about these really these horrendous
abuses against Uyghurs in Xinjiang. It's part of a concerted policy. And only the government
can change that.
NICK SCHIFRIN: And there's no evidence China has any intention of changing its policy,
as family members of the detained know all too well.
ABLIKIM GHAPPAR (through translator): China does not want to educate Uyghur people. They
want to destroy them. They will just put you in jail just because you are Uyghur.
NICK SCHIFRIN: After Merdan Ghappar filmed and sent this video to his uncle, he hasn't
been seen since.
For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Nick Schifrin.