I. The Rise of Heavy Industry and Abuses Against Uyghur People in the XUAR

The automotive sector is massive in the global economy, with 22 car companies on the Fortune 500 list.Footnote ¹ The main materials comprising cars include steel, aluminium, glass and plastics. China is the world’s largest producer and exporter of all of these, as well as the world’s largest producer of synthetic rubber, used for car tyres.Footnote ² Electric vehicles (EV) are also heavily reliant on copper, nickel, cobalt and lithium which, although not largely mined in China, are shipped to China for processing and EV battery parts manufacturing. As of 2020, China hosts 76 per cent of the world’s EV battery cell manufacturing, and Chinese companies own and operate many of the manufacturing facilities outside its borders.Footnote ³ In short, China currently dominates every aspect of car parts production, including in the EV sector, and exports 10 per cent of the world’s car parts to global markets.Footnote ⁴

In recent years, China has pushed heavy industry westward, into the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), where culturally distinct peoples are under existential threat. ‘Xinjiang’, which simply means ‘the new territory’ in Mandarin, is a 643,000 square mile (1.66‑million square kilometre) region claimed by China under post-World War II settlements. While China has been colonizing the region for decades, it began a more vicious social crackdown in 2017, which has been characterized by the mass incarceration of Uyghurs and other ethnic Turkic peoples, as well as mass sterilizations, family separations, ubiquitous surveillance, and cultural indoctrination.Footnote ⁵ The United Nations (UN) has identified these conditions as potentially rising to the level of ‘crimes against humanity’.Footnote ⁶

The industrial shift serves to consolidate the colonization of the XUAR, relying on conscription of working-age Uyghurs into forced labour in conditions of surveillance and social isolation. Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples who resist job placements or indoctrination are subjected to incarceration in a vast network of prisons and re-education camps spread across the region, where an estimated one million ethnic Uyghurs and other native inhabitants are being detained.Footnote ⁷ Often, ‘satellite factories’ are built adjacent to these camps, with detainees forced to work for industry as a form of social rehabilitation. The industrial expansion and large-scale abuse and exploitation occurring in the XUAR aim at the eradication of cultures that do not resemble the majority, Han, culture in China. This threat is globally important because China’s decision to shift global industry into the region links global companies and consumers to the abuses.

II. Abuses to Uyghurs Embedded in the Global Automotive Sector

Because of the place the XUAR now occupies in the global automotive supply chain, human rights abuses against Uyghur people are now embedded and pervasive in the automotive sector. Every major car maker is linked to abuses in the XUAR today, through parts or materials sourcing (or both). Recent research undertaken by scholars at Sheffield Hallam University and NomoGaia has confirmed many of the atrocities committed against Uyghurs described above, and has linked them to the automotive supply chains of global brands.Footnote ⁸ This section gives examples of some of these findings.

III. Methodologies for Linking Global Supply Chains to Uyghur Human Rights Abuses

Because car companies do not make their supply chains public, researchers began their investigation of supply chain risks from the geographies of risk, tracing the links from suppliers to brands, rather than from brands to successive tiers of suppliers.

The process began with commodity selection. As cars are 60 per cent steel and 10 per cent aluminium by weight, these were natural commodities for focus. To narrow the scope, researchers examined only the largest companies producing these commodities worldwide and in the XUAR. Researching the companies required translation of company names into Mandarin. Google Translate can often identify or approximate the Mandarin version of Chinese companies’ English names, and Chinese financial reporting websites Sina Finance (finance.sina.com.cn) and SSE (sse.info) provide heightened clarity on company names, subsidiaries, and, often, corporate websites.

Next, the company and subsidiary names can be word-searched in Mandarin alongside the characters for XUAR (新疆). This extremely basic search continues to be effective for many companies with links to the region. Additional useful search terms include ‘surplus labour’ (剩余劳动力), ‘labour transfer’ (劳动力转移), and ‘poverty alleviation’ (扶贫).

These word searches typed into Google can also be run on corporate websites, market reporting websites where corporate financial documents are posted (e.g., Sina Finance), state media sites and environmental agency websites where environmental monitoring reports are listed. State media and corporate reports are the dominant sources linking companies to harms committed against Uyghurs, because for years government authorities and companies proudly touted their roles in ‘poverty alleviation’ and ‘deradicalization’ of Muslims in the XUAR. They often show images, videos and other depictions that, with interpretive support from ethnic minorities who have fled China, can reveal many human rights violations.Footnote ³¹ Satellite imagery can confirm proximity of satellite factories to prison and detention facilities, indicating a likelihood of forced labour usage.

Verifying linkages to western brands may involve additional steps. First, cross-checking shipping records for suppliers and buyers, accessible through Panjiva Market Intelligence or other shipping log subscription services, can reveal links. Often suppliers will give specific descriptions of their products that directly match the descriptions on purchasing companies’ procurement logs. Additionally, suppliers frequently name their largest buyers in financial filings for publicly traded companies on US, Chinese (including Hong Kong) and other stock exchanges. Supplier and buyer marketing materials can also often confirm the links. Joinworld, for example, names Minth (mentioned above) as a direct buyer in its online advertising.Footnote ³² Minth, on its website,Footnote ³³ confirms Joinworld is one of its largest suppliers.Footnote ³⁴

IV. What Needs to Change

Current approaches to supply chain due diligence in the automotive sector are deficient. Companies currently use software to track supplier questionnaires across their Tier 1 suppliers. They sometimes supplement this with desk-based screening processes, focusing again on direct purchases without generally capturing the full supply chains. The effort is predominantly undertaken in the language of the parent company or English. The business community has often expressed scepticism that more serious supply chain due diligence is possible or desirable.Footnote ³⁵

For car companies (and companies in general) to meet their human rights responsibilities in supply chain due diligence, new approaches are needed.Footnote ³⁶ Procurement departments that source from China need Mandarin language support in their supply chain due diligence efforts; they need resources to visit high-risk suppliers and validate the claims in supplier questionnaires. Supply chain due diligence needs to cover the full production chain of inputs, including processing and mining. When those chains have links to XUAR, the links need to be eliminated. There is no ability to undertake adequate supply chain due diligence in XUAR, and the risks are too great to rely on the promises and attestations made to procurement officers. This level of seriousness necessitates mandates from the C-Suite to prioritize human rights risks in selecting trusted suppliers. Procurement has historically been a department focused on efficiency and cost-cutting; the Uyghur genocide mandates that this corporate function (as all other corporate functions) become embedded in the business and human rights agenda.