Unspecified sellers in China are increasingly using online venues to advertise Uyghurs for sale in “batches of 50 to 100 workers,” Sky News revealed on Friday.
“On Chinese websites, there are dozens of postings advertising Uighur [sic] labour, in batches of 50 to 100 workers,” Sky News reported on April 16. “Baidu, the company hosting the job postings, did not respond to a request for comment.”
Baidu is a Chinese multinational technology company providing Internet-related services, including China’s top search engine.
The Baidu advertisements suggested Uyghur laborers were under “tight political and social controls,” according to Sky News, which noted that one posting stated the “security of workers will be guaranteed by the government.” Sky did not mention the ads suggesting the workers would be compensated in any way.
Roughly 10 million Turkic-speaking Uyghurs live in Xinjiang, China’s westernmost territory bordering Central Asia. Provincial Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials in Xinjiang have detained 1-3 million Uyghurs and other mainly Muslim minorities in state-run concentration camps since at least 2017, according to estimates by human rights groups and foreign governments. The Chinese government officially denies the camps are meant to exterminate Uyghur identity, though it admits to trapping Uyghurs in the camps.
The CCP says it operates “vocational training” and Marxist “political education” centers for Uyghurs in Xinjiang designed to steer the Sunni Muslim group away from alleged “extremist” behavior and ideology and into the Chinese labor force. Former detainees and ex-employees of Xinjiang’s Uyghur camps say they suffered or witnessed slave labor conditions at the facilities.
The CCP allegedly transferred roughly 80,000 Uyghur “graduates” of Xinjiang’s “re-education” camps out of the territory and into slavery at various factories and plants across China between 2017 and 2019, according to a March 2020 report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).
“For every batch [of workers] that is trained, a batch of employment will be arranged and a batch will be transferred. Those employed need to receive thorough ideological education and remain in their jobs,” the CCP said in a Chinese government work report from 2019 cited by the ASPI as evidence of the Uyghur labor transfers.
Breitbart News noted other evidence cited by the ASPI in its report…
