Friday, January 30, 2026

Xinjiang: Slavery and Solar Panels

In Xinjiang, western China, the polysilicon that is used the in the inexpensive photovoltaic panels that have become so widespread is manufactured. The people who manufacture it are members of an Islamic ethnicity called Uyghurs,1 and they are enslaved by the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This is widely reported, but is most clearly laid out in Prof. Laura Murphy’s extensively-researched report, In Broad Daylight2 from the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice (HKC) at the United Kingdom’s Sheffield Hallam University.3

Xinjian and the XUAR

The Xinjiang Autonomous Region is one of five Chinese internal colonies of non-Han people. These are large regions, some with significant resources, which the People’s Republican of China (PRC) governs as colonies. It is a goal of the PRC to reduce the non-Han majorities within the Autonomous Regions to minorities, and to that end the PRC has been settling Han Chinese in the Autonomous Regions.

Xinjiang is governed as a colony by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC) or Bingtuan. Wikipedia politely describes the XPCC as a “state-owned enterprise and paramilitary organization.” The Helena Kennedy Centre’s Modern Slavery Project report on the XPCC, “Until nothing is left”4 is more forthright, describing it as an oppressive colonial government and calling for its abolition.

Slavery in Xinjiang

Slavery in modern times is always surrounded by euphemisms. The South had its “peculiar institution,” “property” (slaves), and “states rights.” China has “poverty alleviation” – enslavement, “minder” – overseer, “surplus laborer” – potential slave, “transfer laborers” – slaves, and “surplus labor transfer” – the purchase – lease? – of a gang of slaves.

While continuing to hold indigenous citizens of the region in internment camps without trial, regional and local governments shifted their focus to the creation of an enormous forced labour regime. This system had the explicit goal of employing practically every adult citizen and was accompanied by the justification that the programme would increase both the economic productivity and the “stability” of the region. To those ostensible ends, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has placed millions of indigenous Uyghur and Kazakh citizens from the XUAR into what the government calls “surplus labour” (富余劳动力) and “labour transfer” (劳动力转移) programmes.–In Broad Daylight, p. 9

Multiple incentives were provided to Xinjiang solar industries to participate in this system of slavery. Local governments and community organizations were paid to push citizens into “surplus labor transfers.” Companies that hired them were subsidized.

In the fall of 2016, the Xinjiang Party Committee and People’s Government began promoting the expansion of several industries (including silicon and polysilicon) in Xinjiang as part of the “Made in China 2025” strategy.“ […] Starting as early as 2010, governments exempted companies that moved into the “difficult regions of Xinjiang” from all corporate income tax from their first to second year and it was reduced to 50% from their third to fifth year.–In Broad Daylight, p. 17

Other subsidies were provided as well, as was cheap coal which is used both to power the refining process and as a reactant.5 There is violence, though the Kennedy Centre report does not foreground it – it is mentioned in cited sources. People who refuse slavery are punished. Enslaved people fight their guards and bosses and the guards and bosses are themselves violent people. There are rapes.

Aside from the goal of erasure of the Uyghur identity, I wonder if slave labor is used because the industrial processes involved are life-threatening and Uyghur lives are cheap. Environmental degradation is not discussed in the Kennedy Centre report, but it is present. Where is the coal ash going? What about all those toxic inputs and byproducts of the refining process?

Response

The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) published a damning assessment in 2022 but, as of August 2025:

The international community and the UN has yet to act on these findings. The Chinese government also continues to intimidate and silence victims’ families, and maintain repressive laws and policies in the region.–Amnesty International

China, as usual with human rights abuses, denies everything: "the Helena Kennedy Centre at the Sheffield Hallam University has released multiple fake reports on Xinjiang that are seriously flawed”.6 Anyone who knows how the Soviet Union claimed to be a bastion of hope and freedom while committing mass murder will recognize the pattern.

Prof. Murphy published a followup report, Over-Exposed, that discusses the response as of late 2023. A second followup was planned, but China got Sheffield Hallam University to shut that work down and it may never be completed.

The United States has long objected to Chinese monopolistic practices in photovolatic marketing, but took until 2021 to pass the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA.). In 2024, the European Union passed the Forced Labor Regulation (FLR) forbidding the sale of products made with forced labor, but it does not even come into effect until nearly 2028. It’s also argued that the FLR is not adequate. The rest of the world seems to have shrugged and moved on. One Bluesky commentator remarked that Muslim governments determinedly ignore Uyghur slavery, despite Islam’s prohibition on enslaving Muslims and strong regulations on the treatment of slaves.

The United States passed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) with strong bipartisan support in 2021. HKC’s late 2023 report explains that China responded by bifurcating its supply chain, supposedly leaving the slave-produced products out of some portions of the supply chain, but solar manufacturers also responded by concealing more information about their business. The result is that, while some manufacturers claim not to be using slave-labor produced polysilicon, none of these claims have been verified. As of that report, the rest of the world was still buying panels made with slave labor. While proprtionately less polysilicon is being manufactured in Xinjiang, Uyghur slavery has also widened in its penetration of Chinese industry, so it’s not clear that Uyghur slavery has decreased.

For the United States, this is also a matter of monopolistic trade practices on the part of China, and late in 2022, the US Commerce Department found that China was evading US trade laws. However, the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), which counts as members major firms using slave labor, protested. Early in 2023 and in the interest of developing solar energy in the United States, President Biden allowed panels made with slave labor to be routed through Southeast Asia and sold in the United States without penalty. The Trump administration has now placed large tariffs on Chinese solar panels, but that administration also opposes the development of a domestic solar panel industry. The result is the worst of both worlds: the United States transition to a sustainable energy system has gone into reverse, and China continues to market solar panels made with slave labor in the rest of the world.

Expansion of the Chinese Slave System

In a 2022 Foreign Policy article, Cullen Hendryx observes, “It was believed that the forced labor problems were concentrated in a few key industries: cotton, polysilicon that underpins solar arrays, and tomatoes. […] But a recent report by U.K.-based researchers finds that the problems extend deep into the supply chains of virtually every major automobile manufacturer.” A 2025 article comments, “More than 100 global brands are linked to a scheme that ships Xinjiang ethnic minorities to work in factories thousands of miles away.” So it isn’t only solar panels, and it’s not limited to Xinjiang any more.

Commentary

Apparently, as it did in the antebellum US South, slavery in China is expanding. I do not know ideologically how China addresses slavery and racism. In US history, many slaveholding founders believed that slavery was a failing institution and would wither away but “the past does not know its future.” Slavery is contradictory to Communist ideology and Chinese ideologues may, like many US founders, believe it is temporary, but instead the institution is expanding. It has gone from polysilicon manufacture to textile fibers (yes, Uyghur slaves are picking cotton)7 and the refining of raw materials and manufacture of parts for the global automobile industry, including China’s own electric automobile industry.8

In Gordon Wood’s Radicalism of the American Revolution, Wood explains how Enlightenment idealism undercut the aristocratic order of Europe. The current situation of China is an inversion of that; the introduction of slavery into an already oppressive society completes the oppresive order of Chinese society. Slavery, existing as it does at the lowest rank of labor in China, drags down all labor in China, which is none too free to begin with. And slavery is spreading. The wealthy elites of Europe and the USA offshored manufacturing in order to evade workplace safety and labor regulations. China has implemented the ultimate form of labor abuse; not even wage slavery but slavery outright. This having been done, labor practices developed in China are seeping back into Europe and the USA.

Are we to build a sustainable future on slavery, environmental destruction, and coal?

  1. The name has a complicated history. It was originally the name of a 8th-9th cy (CE) Turkic-speaking tribal empire (“khanate”) and was much later applied to the Turkic-speaking people of the region by the Soviet Union after an invasion in 1934 CE. The region was then invaded by the People’s Republic of China in 1949 CE. This is further complicated by the PRC practice of lumping in members of other Islamic groups with the actual Uyghurs. ↩

  2. Murphy, Laura, and Nyrola Elimä. In Broad Daylight: Uyghur Forced Labour in Global Solar Supply Chains. Forced Labour Reports. Sheffield Hallam University, 2021. https://shura.shu.ac.uk/29640/. ↩

  3. There has been a followup report, Over-exposed: Uyghur region exposure assessment for solar industry sourcing. There may be another followup, but under pressure from the Chinese government Prof. Murphy was ordered to stop work on the project last February. She is attempting to restart her work; it is not clear if she will be successful in doing this. ↩

  4. Murphy, Laura T., Nyrola Elimä, and David Tobin. Until Nothing Is Left: China’s Settler Corporation and Its Human Rights Violations in the Uyghur Region. Forced Labour Reports. Sheffield Hallam University, 2022. https://www.shu.ac.uk/-/media/home/research/helena-kennedy-centre/projects/until-nothing-is-left-docs/murphy-elima-tobin—-until-nothing-is-left.pdf. ↩

  5. Wikipedia. “Polycrystalline Silicon.” In Wikipedia. December 30, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Polycrystalline_silicon&oldid=1330276710. ↩

  6. Damian Grammaticas. China Intimidated UK University to Ditch Human Rights Research, Documents Show. November 2, 2025. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq50j5vwny6o. ↩

  7. Laura T. Murphy. Laundering Cotton. Forced Labour Reports. Sheffield Hallam University, 2021. https://www.shu.ac.uk/-/media/home/research/helena-kennedy-centre/projects/laundering-cotton-annexes/laundering-cotton.pdf. ↩

  8. Murphy, Laura, Kendyl Salcito, Yalkun Uluyol, and Mia Rabkin. Driving Force: Automotive Supply Chains and Forced Labour in the Uyghur Region. Forced Labour Reports. Sheffield Hallam University, 2025. https://shura.shu.ac.uk/34918/. ↩

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