Forced labour
Forced labour, or unfree labour, is any work relation, especially in modern or early modern history, in which people are employed against their will with the threat of destitution, detention, or violence, including death or other forms of extreme hardship to either themselves or members of their families.
Unfree labour includes all forms of slavery, penal labour, and the corresponding institutions, such as debt slavery, serfdom, corvée and labour camps.
Quotes
[edit]- For years, Beijing’s defenders insisted that testimonies from Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Tibetan survivors were fabrications, that satellite images were misinterpretations, and that leaked documents were forgeries. They mocked the evidence as “Western propaganda.” But now the United Nations—an institution they once claimed as the ultimate neutral party—has confirmed the core truth: China’s labor transfer system is coercion on a massive scale.
The experts detail how State-mandated “poverty alleviation through labor transfer” programs force minorities into jobs they cannot refuse, under such close surveillance that rejecting an assignment becomes unthinkable. Xinjiang’s own five-year plan projects “13.75 million instances of labor transfers,” a number that highlights the absurdity of claiming voluntariness. When millions are “transferred,” choice becomes statistically impossible.- Lopsang Gurung (pseudonym), "The Denial Has Collapsed: UN Confirms Forced Labor in Tibet and Xinjiang", Bitter Winter (January 27, 2026)
- Money is a new and terrible form of slavery, and like the old form of personal slavery it demoralizes both slave and slave-owner, only much more, for it frees the slave and the slave-owner from personal, human relations with one another.
- Leo Tolstoy, What Must We Do? (1886)
