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Xinjiang grows about 90% of China’s cotton, and at least one-fifth of the world’s, and Aksu prefecture is Xinjiang’s cotton-growing heartland.
As a result, many of China's most important textile companies, such as the Esquel Group, have set up farms and factories across Aksu.
But an enormous trove of evidence, compiled from eyewitnesses and survivors, government documents, state media reports, and social media footage, shows that a system of severe repression and forced labour underpins the region’s cotton industry.
Some, including Seanad Éireann, have described the system as a form of genocide. A landmark report by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, published in 2022, concluded that China’s widespread human rights violations in Xinjiang could constitute crimes against humanity.
Uyghurs who have fled China recall discrimination as being ever-present throughout their lives, but, under President Xi Jinping, the system of repression has escalated enormously.
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A system of state-backed forced labour, meanwhile, has seen millions of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities transferred to work both inside and outside of Xinjiang, with many thousands forced to work in the cotton industry.
State-imposed forced labour is intrinsic to the Chinese government's broader repression of the Uyghur people, and it facilitates forcible migration, familial separations, mass surveillance, land expropriation, cultural erasure, and resource exploitation.
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