Rights group: China imprisons more than 449,000 Uyghurs in Xinjiang

April 26, 2024 | United Press International | By Karishma Bhuiyan and Andrew Fang, Medill News Service

According to the Uyghur Human Rights Project, a Washington-based research and advocacy group, 1 in 26 Uyghurs and non-Han people in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in northwest China were incarcerated in 2022.

Henryk Szadziewski, the director of research at the Uyghur Human Rights Project, told Medill News Service that “the Uyghur issue has become core to U.S. human rights dialogue with China.”

Szadziewski said he expected Blinken to raise human rights in a “performative” way, but he did not expect much discussion of human rights during the visit. “There are issues the China side will bring and there are issues that the U.S. side will bring — then, there’s the business.”

He said the prison system benefits the Chinese economy. Some companies constructed factories near prisons to take advantage of prison labor.

“Prisoners work in those factories, and of course, the labor costs are next to none,” he said.

Szadziewski said that some imprisoned Uyghurs were coerced into programs in which they are locally sourced to various factories because government incentives exist for businesses to relocate to Xinjiang.

He said as the number of imprisoned minorities had grown, so had China’s forced labor pool.

“What we are seeing now is increased imprisonment, China’s promotion of a narrative of stability in Xinjiang and we’re seeing this continued use of coercive labor,” he said.

Read the full article: https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2024/04/26/uyghurs-imprisoned-report/5901714168977/