A four-year investigation by the Outlaw Ocean Project has exposed the massive use of forced labor in the Chinese government-backed fishing industry. In a commentary published by the Guardian, Kenneth Roth, a visiting professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs, says that much of the study focused on people coercively kept on China’s distant-water fishing fleet, which holds workers at sea for months at a time in appalling conditions, often with lethal neglect. But the study also showed that seafood-processing facilities inside China are deploying Uyghur forced labor on a large scale.

Most of the focus on Uyghur forced labor has so far been on three big Xinjiang-based industries – cotton (20% of the world’s supply is grown there), tomatoes and polysilicon (used in solar panels). There is also evidence of the use of forced labor in the automobile and aluminum industries. 

The Outlaw Ocean Project shows that the seafood processing industry is a major destination. While the U.S. government has taken some steps to block such imports, including the Uyghur Forced Labor Protection Act, adopted in December 2021, neither the British government nor the European Union has followed Washington’s lead. 

In the meantime, while exports from Xinjiang to the US plummeted, exports to the European Union increased by a third in 2022.