Xinjiang workers enjoy full freedom and benefits working in Guangdong, academics find through 9-month-long field study

Comprehensive investigation

At the end of 2019, the Xinjiang regional government announced that trainees who used to be influenced by extremism have all graduated from the vocational education and training centers. Then the anti-China forces in the West who had been slandering the vocational training and education centers as "concentration camps" tried increasingly hard to find new anti-China "explosive points," and "forced labor" became one of them.

In 2020, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) released a so-called research paper titled "Uyghurs for sale 'Re-education', forced labour and surveillance beyond Xinjiang," in which it claimed that "some factories across China are using forced Uyghur labor under a state-sponsored labor transfer scheme" and "in factories far away from home, they typically live in segregated dormitories, undergo organized Mandarin and ideological training outside working hours, are subject to constant surveillance, and are forbidden from participating in religious observances."

"I was shocked when I read this 'report' last April," Nilufer Gheyret told the Global Times.

She said that the ASPI report was so dubious. "It's full of secondary information which has no guarantee of authenticity, and the final allegations are ridiculous. Therefore, at that time, we decided to conduct a field research. With help from a professor of the Institute for Communication and Borderland Governance of Jinan University, we completed the survey and drafted the report," she said.

Different from the so-called "research reports" that anti-China forces, including Zenz, fabricated without any field investigations, the Global Times learned that to pen this report, researchers conducted field studies in five companies (including two mentioned in Zenz's report) and they used research methods including focus group interviews, in-depth interviews, and participatory observations. A total of 70 ethnic minority migrant workers from Xinjiang, including the Uygur, Kazak, Kirgiz, and Tajik were interviewed.

When Zenz learned that the Jinan University would release this report, he said on his Twitter account on Sunday that "Beijing's latest propaganda strategy on Xinjiang will consist of a multi-site fieldwork study conducted by Uyghur researchers on transferred Uyghur laborers in Guangdong. Designed to refute my findings, the new study will find only 'bright smiles' and 'no forced labor.'"

In response to Zenz's accusations, Nilufer Gheyret told the Global Times that "I don't know whether Zenz is afraid of being found out [about his lies], so he self-vaccinated to preempt his embarrassment? Our report is an objective presentation of the research facts. In contrast, I have never seen any first-hand information and on-site interviews in Zenz's so-called 'report.' If he still considers himself a 'scholar,' he should uphold the basic requirements of academic rationale and treat our research results in a correct way."

The Global Times learned that it took about nine months for Nilufer Gheyret and Chen to finish the report. All the materials used in the report are obtained through first-hand investigation. In the first part of the report, it mentioned that the research mainly aims to answer questions including "Why ethnic minority groups in Xinjiang chose to work in other regions?" "How are these workers' living and working conditions?" "What significance does working outside the region have to these workers?" "And what are their plans for the future?"