Hello. Thank you for inviting me to speak before this committee today and for the opportunity to present alongside these esteemed colleagues, including members of the affected Uighur community.
It is now widely known that the People's Republic of China is conducting a program of repression in the Uighur region unlike anything we have ever seen in our lifetimes. The PRC's deliberate, iron-fisted governance strategy in the region operates through at least three intersecting mechanisms of control. These are internment, surveillance and forced labour.
Together, these three mechanisms are tools designed to suppress not only dissent, but also culture, religion and population demographics of the Uighur people. They function to control everyday behaviours and seek even to control the very thoughts of Uighurs and other minoritized peoples.
Internment and surveillance serve as a form of coercion that ensures that Uighurs become a docile and compliant workforce in factories across the region and, indeed, across China.
Sheffield Hallam's research, which I'm the lead author on, has been presented in six in-depth studies that have found that companies are complicit in the PRC's system of repression in that they participate in the recruitment, forced migration, indoctrination, confinement, surveillance and disciplining of Uighur people both inside and outside the factories and farms the companies operate. They are an integral, active and, even, enthusiastic part of the ongoing genocide in the Uighur region.
Recent research we conducted to identify whether companies known to be complicit in this system were being listed by index funds found that the MSCI, one of the leading index funds in the world and an index that is used as a benchmark for most others, includes at least 13 companies that have been identified in credible media and other research reports as being involved in the internment, surveillance and forced labour in the Uighur region. Some of these companies have even been sanctioned by the U.S. government, and still they remain on these lists that determine much about where our retirement and investment dollars go.
For instance, one of those companies, China Railway Group Limited, is on several MSCI indexes and is the literal architect of the Tumxuk prison in the Uighur region. It's a place that was transformed from an ordinary prison into a de facto internment camp where people are detained simply for practising their religion, without due process or a fair trial.
ZTE, a partially state-owned telecom company is also on the MSCI indexes. It has advertised that its products have been used to “monitor the political opposition, activists and journalists” of China.
Hoshine Silicon Industry Co., a privately owned but heavily state-subsidized company that makes products for the solar and automotive industries, among others, has been involved in the transfers of hundreds of Uighur people against their will to factories and mines deep in the desert of the Uighur region. It has admittedly taken them away from their families and farms to be “transformed” into ideal worker-citizens.
These findings were the result of a simple review of index funds based on publicly available knowledge that has been widely exposed by the media. Actively invested funds also invest in stocks of a vast array of complicit companies, including the ones I just named. Asset managers would only need to do a simple Internet search for some of these companies to know the extent of their participation in these rights violations.
Many people have no idea that their pensions and investments are being used for the benefit of companies that profit from the oppression of the Uighur people. Governments should ensure that their citizens aren't unwittingly reaping the dividends of this human rights crisis.
Thank you.