After recruiting large numbers of police forces, installing massive surveillance systems, and interning vast numbers of predominantly Turkic minority population members, many have been wondering about Beijing's next step in its so-called "war on Terror" in Xinjiang. In this report it is argued based on government documents that the state's long-term stability maintenance strategy in Xinjiang is predicated upon a perverse and extremely intrusive combination of forced or at least involuntary training and labor, intergenerational separation and social control over family units. Much of this is being implemented under the heading and guise of "poverty alleviation". The findings presented below call for nothing less than a global investigation of supply chains involving Chinese products or product components, and for a greatly increased scrutiny of trade flows along China's Belt and Road.

Since spring 2017, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China has witnessed the emergence of an unprecedented reeducation campaign. According to media and informant reports, untold thousands of Uyghurs and other Muslims have been and are being detained in clandestine political re-education facilities, with major implications for society, local economies and ethnic relations. Considering that the Chinese state is currently denying the very existence of these facilities, this paper investigates publicly available evidence from official sources, including government websites, media reports and other Chinese internet sources. First, it briefly charts the history and present context of political re-education. Second, it looks at the recent evolution of re-education in Xinjiang in the context of ‘de-extremification’ work. Finally, it evaluates detailed empirical evidence pertaining to the present re-education drive. With Xinjiang as the ‘core hub’ of the Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing appears determined to pursue a definitive solution to the Uyghur question.

This study traces the evolution of systemic state-sponsored coercive labor in the cotton harvest in China’s northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). The recent situation in the XUAR is compared to Uzbekistan, which implemented forced labor in cotton picking until 2021. Both regions create structurally coercive labor environments through a centralized authoritarian state apparatus that deploys human resource–intensive local grassroots mobilization efforts. The article finds that while both regional entities’ coercive labor dynamics are in many ways comparable, the resulting labor settings are not easily captured through static standard measures such as the ILO forced labor indicators. Instead, state-sponsored forced labor is characterized by pervasive state-induced and systemic dynamics of coercion that are deeply embedded within sociocultural contexts. Whereas Uzbekistan’s coercive labor practices were primarily driven by economic considerations, Xinjiang’s labor transfer program pursues some economic aims but is predominantly designed to achieve Beijing’s wider ethnopolitical goals in the region.