By Erik English
Since 2014, the Chinese Communist Party has perpetuated human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region under the guise of anti-terrorism and anti-extremism—subjecting them to forced labor, mass detention, and land transfers.
Now, a new report reveals that some Chinese pharmaceutical products made using forced labor in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region have reached the global marketplace. The report identifies three connections of international government agencies to Xinjiang-linked pharmaceuticals—the US Food and Drug Administration, the US Agency for International Development (through its contractor Chemonics International), and Japan’s Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Agency.
According to the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, which produced the report, Uyghurs detained in camps have been forced to undergo drug testing and medical procedures. Pharmaceutical companies are also relying on forced labor for manufacturing, and blood has been forcibly collected and sourced to companies using “healthy human plasma for drug production that particularly relates to autoimmune diseases and viruses.”
China is the largest producer of pharmaceutical ingredients in the world, and while Xinjiang is not a major contributor to the pharmaceutical sector, its share is increasing; the biomedical industry in Xinjiang has been growing at 20 percent per year and operations are expected to expand.
Several laws exist to prevent goods produced using forced labor from entering the United States or being purchased using US funds, but they rely on data transparency within supply chains to verify where and how goods are produced. The new report is an alarming reminder of the difficulty of avoiding human rights abuses in a globalized economy that relies on complex and increasingly opaque supply chains to deliver goods to people around the world. It is particularly worrying that key commodities for addressing existential risks—including climate change and disease treatment and prevention—are being produced via human rights abuses against vulnerable populations….
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Book review: The State as Faction: Mao’s Cultural Revolution
A tragedy pushed to the shadows: the truth about China’s Cultural Revolution
Nationalism = Enforced patriotism
N.S. Lyons: The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning
‘Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962’ – by Yang Jisheng
To the ten thousand years / Aux dix mille années
The Cultural Revolution in Tibet: A Photographic Record. By LUO SILING
‘We just want to live in a normal world’: China’s young protesters speak out, and disappear
Vanessa Hua on Writing About the Forgotten Women in Mao’s Inner Circle
After the truth-shower 