Forced Labour From Kashgar, the Cotton, the Factory Transfers and the Firms on the US Entity List
Kashgar's farmland is cotton country. Xinjiang grows more than a fifth of the world's cotton, and the southern oases around Kashgar, Aksu and Hotan grow a lot of it. For years the picking was the job that brought migrant Han workers west each autumn. After 2017 the state found a cheaper and more obedient workforce closer to hand.
The government calls it labour transfer and poverty relief. Rural Uyghurs are counted as "surplus labour", trained, and placed in jobs, in the fields, in new factories in Xinjiang and in factories across China. Officials say every worker volunteers. The documents say something else.
Photo: Azonesa, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
From the camp gate to the factory floor
In 2018 Kashgar prefecture drew up a plan to put 100,000 camp "graduates" into factory jobs. That's in the prefecture's own paperwork, found and translated by Adrian Zenz. People leaving the camps weren't going home to their farms. They were going to work where they were sent.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute traced some of them. Its 2020 report "Uyghurs for Sale" found more than 80,000 Uyghurs moved out of Xinjiang to factories in other provinces between 2017 and 2019, supplying 83 global brands. At a factory in Qingdao making shoes for Nike, most of the 600 or so Uyghur women came from Hotan and Kashgar. In February 2018 a county vocational school in Peyzawat, near Kashgar, which ASPI believes was operating as a camp, sent 63 workers to a garment factory in Anhui. Factories got a subsidy for every Uyghur worker they took. Local organisers got paid per head.
In 2018 alone, Zenz found from government records, at least 570,000 people from three Uyghur regions were sent to pick cotton through these state programmes. They went in organised teams, under party supervision.
Could a farmer in Peyzawat say no? Not when refusal could be read as an "extremist" attitude and the camp was the penalty. That's why researchers and the UN human rights office treat the system as coercive even where nobody is chained to a machine.
Kashgar companies on the American blacklist
Since 21 June 2022 the United States has presumed that anything made wholly or partly in Xinjiang was made with forced labour. Under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, importers have to prove otherwise or the goods stay at the port. CBP has stopped thousands of shipments worth nearly $4 billion.
The law also keeps a list of named companies. After the biggest single addition so far, 43 firms on 31 July 2026, it stands at 187. At least four of them are from Kashgar prefecture: Kashgar Construction Engineering, listed in 2024 for recruiting minorities through Peyzawat county labour programmes; a cotton company in Peyzawat, listed in January 2025; and two more added in July 2026, a Kashgar sugar producer and a Kashgar agricultural technology firm.
Europe is slower. Its Forced Labour Regulation was adopted in 2024 but only applies from December 2027, and it has no Xinjiang presumption. Each case has to be investigated and proved.
Laundered through the supply chain
Cotton from Kashgar's fields doesn't travel with a label. A 2021 Sheffield Hallam University report, "Laundering Cotton", followed Xinjiang cotton through yarn and fabric mills in Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, Pakistan and elsewhere into clothes sold by more than 100 brands. Once spun abroad, it looks like anything else.
Beijing's pressure follows the research too. In 2025 Sheffield Hallam barred the professor who led that work, Laura Murphy, from continuing it after Chinese state security blocked the university's website and email in China. The university reversed the ban after her lawyers stepped in.
China's answer to all of this is that transfers lift Uyghurs out of poverty and that Western governments want to strangle Xinjiang's industry. Poverty relief doesn't need a camp at one end, a quota in the middle and police supervision on the bus.
Check the label. Then check the mill.