The Forced Uyghur Labor Behind China's Fish Exports
On a cloudy morning in April 2023, more than eighty men and women, dressed in matching red windbreakers, stood in orderly lines in front of the train station in Xinjiang, a landlocked and subjugated region in China's far west. The people were Uyghurs, one of China’s largest ethnic minorities. They stood, with suitcases at their feet, watching a farewell ceremony held in their honor by the local government. A video of the event shows a woman wearing in traditional dress pirouetting on a stage. A banner reads, “Promote mass employment and build societal harmony.” At the end of the video, drone footage pans back to show trains waiting to take the Uyghurs away.
The event was part of a vast labor-transfer program run by the Chinese state, which forcibly sends Uyghurs to work in industries across the country. The goal of the program is partially to subjugate a historically restive people. Uyghur separatists revolted throughout the 1990s and bombed police stations in 2008 and 2014. China began the labor transfers in the early 2000s as part of a broad system of persecution that has also included mass arrests and the use of “re-education” camps, where Uyghurs have been subjected to torture, beatings, and forced sterilization. Researchers described China’s actions against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims as a form of genocide.
Many of the transferred workers are involved in processing seafood that is then exported to more than twenty countries, including the U.S., Canada, and several in the E.U., according to an investigation published as episode 8 of the Outlaw Ocean Podcast’s second season.
These disclosures of China’s use of state-sponsored forced labor in seafood production come as the trade war between the US and China has heightened tensions between the countries and directed new attention to the Uyghur Forced Labor Protection Act. This is an American law that prohibits the import of goods produced in Xinjiang and a cudgel that the Trump administration is likely to apply more aggressively as he ramps up pressure on Beijing.
On November 19, 2024, the European Union approved its Forced Labor Regulation, which prohibits “products made using forced labor” from entering member countries. This new regulation will likely intensify the urgency for companies and market players like the U.S. and Europe to know whether imports coming into those countries are tied to forced labor such as those identified by this investigation.
A review of internal company newsletters, local news reports, trade data, and satellite imagery revealed that ten large seafood companies in the eastern province of Shandong, China’s most important fishing and seafood processing hub, have received at least a thousand Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities from forced labor transfer programs out of Xinjiang since 2018.
Sometimes transfers were motivated by labor demands. In March 2020, for example, the Chishan Group, one of China’s largest seafood catching and processing companies, published an internal newsletter describing what it called the “huge production pressure” caused by the pandemic. That October, party officials from the local anti-terrorist detachment of China’s public security bureau and the country’s human resources and social security bureau, which handles work transfers, met twice with executives to discuss how to find the company additional labor, according to company newsletters.
Soon after, Chishan agreed to accelerate transfers to their plants. Wang Shanqiang, the deputy general manager at Chishan, said in a corporate newsletter, “The company looks forward to the migrant workers from Xinjiang arriving soon.” The Chishan Group did not respond to requests for comment.
The Chishan Group was not unique. Many seafood companies were tied to a wide variety of similar problems with forced labor. The pervasiveness of these problems is why the global seafood industry likely will have to assess how it monitors its supply chains, particularly when these supply chains route through China.
To detect forced labor, companies tend to rely on private firms that conduct “social audits,” in which inspectors visit factories to make sure they comply with international labor standards. But social audits are typically announced in advance, which allows managers to hide minority workers during inspections. Even when workers are interviewed, they are often reluctant to be candid, for fear of retribution.
In May, 2022, social auditors from SGS, one of the top auditing firms, toured the Haibo seafood processing factory, in Shandong, and found no evidence of forced labor. But a team of investigative reporters found that more than 170 people from Xinjiang worked at Haibo in 2021, and a half-dozen Uyghur workers posted regularly to social media from Haibo throughout 2022. On the same day the auditors toured, a young Uyghur worker posted pictures of herself near the plant’s dormitories and loading bays.
This was not an isolated incident. During the investigation, reporters found other examples of Uyghurs who had posted pictures of themselves at factories within days of those plants being cleared by social audits. They also found that half of the Chinese exporters they had identified as being tied to Uyghur labor had passed audits by leading global inspection firms.
Marcella Boehler is global publishing editor at The Outlaw Ocean Project, a non-profit journalism organization based in Washington D.C. that produces investigative stories about human rights, environment and labor concerns on the two thirds of the planet covered by water. Season Two of The Outlaw Ocean Project's podcast series may be found here.
The opinions expressed herein are the author's and not necessarily those of The Maritime Executive.
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