Research has revealed that the global production of solar panels is using forced labour from China's Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang province. Xinjiang produces about 45% of the world's supply of the key component, polysilicon, the research by the UK's Sheffield Hallam University says. The report produced by Sheffield Hallam University states that the material is obtained under a massive system of coercion, a claim denied by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) ruling authorities.
The report urges top panel makers to source the component elsewhere. Solar panels are in huge demand because of climate change. Polysilicon is extracted from mined quartz, and the research says the world's four biggest manufacturers use materials tainted by a massive system of coercion.
"The [Chinese] government claims that these programmes are in accordance with PRC [the People's Republic of China] law and that workers are engaged voluntarily, in a concerted government-supported effort to alleviate poverty," the report says. "However, significant evidence - largely drawn from government and corporate sources - reveals that labour transfers are deployed in the Uyghur Region within an environment of unprecedented coercion, undergirded by the constant threat of re-education and internment."
The PRC has placed millions of indigenous Uyghur and Kazakh citizens from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR or Uyghur Region) into what the government calls “surplus labour” and “labour transfer” programmes. An official PRC government report published in November 2020 documents the “placement” of 2.6 million minoritised citizens in jobs in farms and factories within the Uyghur Region and across the country through these state-sponsored “surplus labour” and “labour transfer” initiatives.
The PRC claims that these programmes are in accordance with PRC law and that workers are engaged voluntarily, in a concerted government-supported effort to alleviate poverty. However, significant evidence – largely drawn from government and corporate sources – reveals that labour transfers are deployed in the Uyghur Region within an environment of unprecedented coercion, undergirded by the constant threat of re-education and internment. Many indigenous workers are unable to refuse or walk away from these jobs, and thus the programmes are tantamount to forcible transfer of populations and enslavement.
The PRC is facing mounting criticism from around the world over its treatment of the mostly Muslim Uyghur population in the north-western Xinjiang autonomous region. Human rights groups believe the PRC has detained more than a million Uyghurs over the past few years in what the state defines as "re-education camps". There is evidence of Uyghurs being used as forced labour and of women being forcibly sterilised.
We are living in a very connected world, in the 1930’s most people could state or at least claim that they did not know what went on in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, despite the courageous activities of journalists and political activists at the time to reveal the truth. In our 21st century connected world no one has the excuse of ignorance any more. The People’s Republic of China is a brutal, repressive, totalitarian dictatorship that represses all the peoples living within its borders - largely regardless of ethnicity.
The PRC has a long a dark record of brutality that goes back to the days of Mao, save for getting more technologically sophisticated, and delivering g prosperity at price to an expanding Middle Class, little appears to have changed. The Communist Party still controls the state, one of the last literal Empire’s and it thoroughly enjoys its privileges at the expense of the human rights people’s of China.
The PRC has a long well documented history of oppression - targeting minorities including the Tibetans, the Uygyr, and others. The PRC has also targeted ethnic Chinese citizens who resist oppression, seek freedom of thought, freedom of religion, or who have expressed concerns about environmental issues, land ownership and the cost of economic development that is being paid by the ordinary people.
The current UK Conservative Westminster PM, is keen, if not over-keen, perhaps with an eye to easing a post BREXIT trade deal with the USA, to send UK warships to confront the PRC in the South China Sea. This projection of UK military power east of Suez (the second time since 2003) may sit easily with the PM’s vision of ‘Global Britain’ but rather than sitting comfortably with military and strategic reality, it may owe more to the politics of fantasy island.
Not that Human rights violations and repression have ever stood in the way of economic or business dealings and commercial interests, previous Conservative and Labour PM’s have been much more accommodating to the financial and commercial (and political) interests and trading opportunities with the PRC and other repressive states in our recent past. George Osbourne, then Chancellor, desperately sought access to finance from China and encouraged the PRC’s involvement the in developing nuclear energy projects within the UK.
What we had over the years of visionless New Labour, Conservative-Lib DeM and Conservative years is governments at Westminster, which remained hand in glove with despotic oil and gas-producing regimes in the Middle East ( aside from the vassal like relationship between the UK and Saudi Arabia ) who have had has little real interest in developing renewable energy to achieve energy independence or supporting democracy and social justice in the Middle East.
Teresa May’s weak wobbly and unstable Westminster government, along with its predecessor and successor worked actively to pull the rug out from under the renewables sector by cutting the feed in tariff something that cost highly skilled jobs here in Wales. As long as the UK state and the Westminster elite remains content to quietly look the other way when public attention is drawn to the PRC’s and Saudi Arabia’s gross human rights violations, then things are going to continue much as they have.
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