Xinjiang workers enjoy full freedom and benefits working in Guangdong, academics find through 9-month-long field study

Nilufer Gheyret (fourth from left) talks with ethnic minority workers from Xinjiang during her research in Guangdong factories. [Photo/Courtesy of Nilufer Gheyret]

A research report compiled through an in-depth investigation on ethnic minority workers from Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region working in Guangdong Province was released by the Jinan University on Tuesday, which experts pointed out is the best representation to quash the "forced labor" allegations spread by the infamous anti-China pseudo-scholar Adrian Zenz.

Zenz alleged, in his latest report titled "Coercive Labor and Forced Displacement in Xinjiang's Cross-Regional Labor Transfer Program," that "labor transfers of ethnic minorities" in Xinjiang to other regions and provinces are to "forcibly uproot them, assimilate them and reduce their population density."

Zenz also claimed in his report that a working report released by the China Institute of Wealth and Economics of Nankai University (CIWE) in Tianjin in December 2019 "gives strong and authoritative evidence for large-scale, coercive stated-driven recruitments into labor transfers, and for the securitized nature of such transfers to other provinces."

On Monday, the CIWE released a solemn statement, denouncing Zenz, who, under the banner of so-called "academic research," reversed black and white and made a deliberate misinterpretation of the context of CIWE's research achievements. Zenz's so-called "conclusions" are full of mistakes and far from the truth.

The latest research report, "'Forced Labor' or 'Pursuit of Better Life' - Conditions of Xinjiang Workers Working in Other Regions" released by the Institute for Communication and Borderland Governance of Jinan University, fully exposed Zenz's fabrications. Nilufer Gheyret, a research fellow of the Institute for Communication and Borderland Governance of Jinan University and co-author of the approximately 18,000-word report, told the Global Times that in order to communicate with the interviewees comprehensively and obtain clearer and more detailed materials, the entirety of the interviews was conducted in their quotidian language.

Chen Ning, a research fellow of the same institute and co-author of the report, noted that the anti-China foreign forces' so-called "caring for Xinjiang's human rights" rhetoric is incredibly hypocritical. In the eyes of those Western "chess players," the ordinary citizens in Xinjiang are only pawns. "The chess players only want to win. Which chess player really cares about the pawns?"