A Chinese search engine is believed to be hosting advertisements for Uyghur slave labor of up to a hundred workers per ad.
In a horrific turn of events following the reports of Uyghur genocide in Xinjiang, China, the Chinese online giant Baidu has been found to host several anonymous advertisements selling Uyghur slave labor. Baidu is a multinational technology company that provides Internet-related services, including the communist state's Baidu, the equivalent of the west's Google.
According to Breitbart, the anonymous posts and advertisements on Baidu promoted Uyghur laborers who were under tight political and social controls" and that the "security of workers will be guaranteed by the [Chinese] government." The ads did not indicate how the Uyghur workers will be compensated.
Over 10 million Uyghurs reside in the vast Xinjiang province located in China's westernmost territory bordering countries such as Mongolia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have demonstrated their control over the region for its vast supply of oil and cotton, detaining one to three million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in concentration camps since at least 2017.
CCP officials have repeatedly denied that the concentration camps were designed to erase the Uyghur culture and realign their beliefs with the communist state's. Instead, the CCP claims they operate "vocational training" and Marxist "political education" centers designed to "steer the Sunni Muslim group away from alleged 'extremist' behavior and ideology and into the Chinese labor force."
However, witness accounts tell of slave labor conditions at such facilities.
According to Sky News, the anonymous posts selling Uyghur slave labor is in line with the Xinjiang government's official "labor transfer program," which aims to "provide more employment opportunities for the surplus rural labour force." There are an estimated 80,000 workers who were taken from the Xinjiang province between 2017 to 2019, but it is believed that more workers were produced from this program.
The Chinese websites have featured dozens of posts advertising Uyghur slave labor "in batches of 50 to 100 workers." Such advertisements suggest that there are "tight political and social controls" over these projects.
"The truth is that the Chinese authorities are engaged in-absolutely no question now, in my mind-in genocide," U.K's former Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith said, as per The Independent. "They're trying to eradicate an ethnic group."
A report from the Washington DC-based Newlines Institute for Strategy revealed that China "bears responsibility for committing genocide" and has in fact has violated all of the provisions of the United Nation's Genocide Convention. The House of Commons will begin a debate this week to tackle the human rights abuses against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang and will facilitate a non-binding vote on whether China will be declared as responsible for genocide.
"The evidence of widespread human rights violations in Xinjiang cannot be ignored-including mass detention and invasive surveillance and reports of torture and forced labor," a Foreign Office spokesperson told The Independent. "The international community will not look the other way and will hold the Chinese authorities to account for their actions."